Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
32 published records
01 / belief
“I’ m trying to even remember what kind of computer I had in 1995, if I even had a computer. I think my family had a computer but I did not have my own computer.”
02 / uncertainty
“” Bob just recently, two years before, become president of ABC, says, “I don’t know that I’m ready to come in and run Capital Cities with you,” and Tom says, “Nope.”
03 / belief
“I think in Disneyland you used to be able to and they took a hard pivot and got rid of it all.”
04 / belief
“I got to imagine, they've already introduced the Disney bundle of all three of those services for I think $18-$19 a month.”
05 / belief
“I think the F is that Fox becomes an albatross, starts losing a ton of money, the studios don't pan out, can't maintain and produce new IP.”
06 / belief
“I think Iger did a little bit more of that than than Eisner did, but Ovitz certainly had no notion of that.”
07 / observation
“The way to think about what Bob’s doing here is he knows that he’s put in there for a reason.”
08 / belief
“Now, we can only issue here what we think an A+ would be and how that could happen or why that would happen, and here's what an F looked like.”
09 / belief
“Best I can tell right now I think ESPN cable affiliate fees are responsible from somewhere around 25% of Disney's revenue.”
10 / belief
“Was he really just trying to play into Bob's vision for the future just like off-load Fox for a boat-load of money? I think both things actually may be true here.”
11 / uncertainty
“How are the next set of carriage agreements for ESPN going to go with the pay TV providers when now they know they're going to be like, “$9? Yeah, I don't know about that but I'm not going to pay you that anymore.”
12 / belief
“Oh, nice. I think my next step is I haven’t been to Disney world since I was six.”
13 / commitment
“We’ve covered most of these on their own episodes on Acquired, which we will link to on the show notes, but just as a quick recap, first, Disney acquired Capital Cities, which included ABC and ESPN (most importantly) in 1995 for $19 billion.”
14 / belief
“Disney-Twitter, I think, there's a really good chance that could've been AOL-Time Warner.”
15 / observation
“Human beings absorb information best through story.” It’s a multi billion dollar realization that Roone had, that would play out over the next several years, that this the way to build enduring fanhood.”
16 / belief
“Creative houses are very different than this low-margin predictable distribution businesses. I think Disney actually has the chance to do this right.”
17 / belief
“I think Bob and Disney appreciate UGC and they appreciate all the technology companies and innovation, everything that’s happened over the ensuing 15 years.”
18 / commitment
“There’s, “We’re going to use technology both for creating better content and enabling better distribution,” but the whole industry, for a while, thought that meant when things like Netflix emerge, we will be okay putting our stuff there.”
19 / belief
“I think the scary thing, though, is this Bob and Disney falling victim to some of the things that brought down Michael of Empire Building.”
20 / belief
“I believe when he was five, they move to a working class town on Long Island called Oceanside.”
21 / belief
“In 2017, they complete a majority purchase of BAMTech. They own 75% of BAMTech, I believe the other 25% is probably employee equity and Major League Baseball.”
22 / belief
“There's another excerpt from the book here, I just have to say that, it's amazing how much people anchor on price, so the $7 billion thing for Pixar, when they're negotiating with George Lucas and he says, “I want the Pixar deal,” you have Iger having to come back to him and say, “No, here's actually how it's very different, you made these great movies a long time ago that have a really and during universe, that we think we can do something about, but there's not any of the infrastructure, any of the current development that Pixar has.”
23 / evaluation
“Obviously Disney Plus is a different strategy because they are coming from a very different place, but in order to finance the type of shows that Netflix is financing or to pay to acquire the rights of any given show, it's a pretty simple model of how many paying customers can we amortize across?”
24 / evaluation
“I think we live in this world where people are going to get more and more ruthless about, "Am I really willing to give you money on an ongoing basis and are you really providing new value to me every single month to be able to do that?”
25 / recommendation
“David, we could probably save ourselves a lot of time if we had done this episode 3½ years ago because I feel like it took us 3 years to figure out the reason people like Acquired is not, “Let’s do an audio-discounted cash flow and figure out if that acquisition makes sense financially five years from now,” it’s the stories behind the deals.”
26 / recommendation
“I think, rather than acquisition category because there's so many of them, what if we do bull and bear narratives here?”
27 / prediction
“Obviously, Fox started in Australia with Rupert Murdoch, but especially in India where Fox owns Hotstar which is the largest streaming service in India. I believe both for entertainment content and for sports.”
28 / evaluation
“When Steve at the Apple keynote that summer, I believe, in 2006 announces the video iPod, Bob Iger walks out on stage and says, “All of our Disney and ABC content, you’re going to be able to purchase it, you will be able to download it, you’re going to be able to watch it on the go on Apple products.”
29 / evaluation
“In a great New York Times interview (that we will link to in our sources) with Maureen Dowd, Bob says, “I never viewed myself as exceptional, so whenever I got a job, I was relying on hard work more than anything and a level of enthusiasm and optimism,” and Bob is nothing if not an optimist.”
30 / prediction
“Innovate or die,” but there is one more thing and that one more thing I think is actually both a huge piece of this and opportunity, but also it’s pretty scary and that is Fox.”
31 / evaluation
“He intended to time this with his retirement from Disney, but obviously as we will see, things did not go quite according to plan. But the story that we’re going to tell here is Bob Iger’s story because the story of all of these deals, the culmination of it all in Disney Plus and going direct to consumer, this is Bob’s vision.”
32 / recommendation
“I go to IMDb, I read all the trivia, I read all the Wikipedia page. If there's a fandom thing, like Star Wars, Wikipedia, any of those. It's interesting, actually. There's this whole content universe that exist outside of the creators of the IP that now serves some of this need.”