Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yep. Yeah. I mean, the market cap of this company is only like $2 billion despite $1.5 billion in top-line revenue and call it $100 million in net income. But this would be super easy to break up Disney, sell off the theme parks, sell off the IP to other movie studios. You could come in and make a killing doing this. And that's what Saul Steinberg tries to do. Come in, raid the company, break it up for parts. But, David, I think you're getting ahead of yourself. I'm pretty sure this should be how we start Part 2. Hmm. Ah, yes, this is the story for next time. But just know for now, as a little teaser, that this period of the company ends improbably not with Disney being broken up, but with three complete outsiders coming in to run the company, none of whom have any history in animation, any familiarity with the flywheel business model, or any experience or demonstrated ability to operate anything outside film and television. So like running parks? Nope. Doing merch? Nope. Nothing. None of that. And those three men—Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg—would pull off probably the greatest media company comeback in history.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.