On Thursday, activist investment firm Trian Partners—helmed by billionaire Nelson Peltz—announced that Peltz’s Trian Fund Management is moving ahead with a proxy fight against Disney (DIS) for more board seats.
Joining Peltz in this battle is Ike Perlmutter, who was removed from his position as Chairman of the Disney subsidiary Marvel Entertainment in the spring.
The real target of this proxy fight is Bob Iger, whose performance as CEO has recently come under fire.
Earlier this week, Iger and other advertisers pulled their advertising from X amidst charges of antisemitism. After hearing of this news, Musk fired back at Iger directly, telling him, “Go fuck yourself.”
While Musk’s abrasive comments captured much of the media’s attention, they are not nearly as threatening to Iger as Peltz and Perlmutter’s actions.
Executives from Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, and DuPont suffered tremendously when Trian felt that they were underperforming, leading many to believe that Iger now has serious trouble on his hands.
On Thursday, Trian issued the following statement: “Since we gave Disney the opportunity to prove it could ‘right the ship’ last February, up to our re-engagement weeks ago, shareholders lost ~$70 billion of value. Disney’s share price has underperformed proxy peers and the broader market over every relevant period during the last decade and over the tenure of each incumbent director.”
In light of the attacks on Iger, Disney had announced in an SEC filing that Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman and former Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch will join its board early next year. In its statement, Trian admitted that this sudden move represented “an improvement from the status quo,” but nonetheless, this change does not appear to be enough to ward off their criticism of Disney’s poor performance in the market.
Thursday morning, Disney released a statement of their own which insisted that they have significantly restructured their business over the last year to “significantly reduce costs and drive efficiencies,” adding that as a result, they are now “on track to achieve about $7.5 billion in cost savings—$2 billion more than [their] original target.”
Moreover, their statement took a heavy-handed approach to Perlmutter’s involvement and painted him as a disgruntled ex-employee with an ax to grind when it claimed that “Mr. Perlmutter was terminated from his employment by Disney earlier this year and has voiced his long-standing personal agenda against Disney’s CEO, Robert A. Iger, which may be different than that of all other shareholders.”
Earlier this year, Peltz’s daughter launched a proxy war against Disney, a battle that eventually resulted in both sides accepting a truce. However, Peltz remained unsatisfied and doubled down on his opposition to Iger’s poor performance this week, placing Iger in a very difficult position once again.
