This Disney Heiress Has a Message for CEO Bob Iger (and Taylor Swift)

“I woke up one day and realized that, just by virtue of being born lucky, I had so much more than everyone else,” says Abigail Disney. “And I don’t think I’ve slept well since I figured that out.”

Disney, the granddaughter of The Walt Disney Company co-founder Roy O. Disney, has used her considerable means to make the world a better place since the ‘90s, backing a string of non-profits and producing documentaries that shine a light on societal injustices. These have included Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the work of famed Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee; The Invisible War, which tackled the epidemic of sexual assault in the U.S. military; and On the Record, exploring the rape allegations against hip-hop legend Russell Simmons. She’s also served as executive producer on a number of women-directed features, such as Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, Jennifer Fox’s The Tale, and Kitty Green’s The Assistant.

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In 2019, she set her sights on Disney and its CEO, Bob Iger, criticizing the exec’s $65 million salary over a series of tweets and speaking with Disneyland park employees, discovering that many of them are food insecure and some even live in their cars. This resulted in her directorial debut, the 2022 documentary The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, shining a light on the dire condition of Disney’s amusement park workers. Now, with Iger back controlling Disney amid the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes, and calling the strikers “not realistic” and “disturbing” for wanting pay equity and better working conditions — comments that former Disney staffers have called “evil” and “inhumane” — Disney is refusing to keep quiet.

“I have a theory that Bob Iger retired on one planet in 2020 and came back on a new planet, and he doesn’t realize he’s on a new planet now,” Disney tells Rolling Stone. “And on this new planet, all CEOs are not magic people who are always right about everything. And sometimes, on this planet, Twitter will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you misspeak. I think he’s been very surprised by the way people reacted to him.”

Indeed, Iger’s comments drew a giant wave of backlash from the media and entertainment industries. It didn’t help that they were made at the Sun Valley Conference, an annual summit for the financial sector that’s earned the nickname the “summer camp for billionaires.”

“You can only call your partners — and they are your partners, the creatives who make these products with you, as well as the janitors who clean your parks at night — “unrealistic” in their asks if you can’t think outside of the teeny, tiny little business model that you’ve been working with. But he said it himself that it’s a broken model. And the entire model for the way they’ve been conducting business for the last fifty years is broken,” adds Disney.

The 63-year-old was also arrested at the East Hampton Airport this month protesting the use of private jets and their environmental impact. Rolling Stone spoke with Disney about this, Bob Iger and Disney, the Hollywood strikes, and much more.

To start, I wanted to ask about your recent arrest at the East Hampton Airport protesting private jet use in the name of climate change. What compelled you to take this action? You channeled your inner Jane Fonda.
Well, there are definitely far worse people to emulate than Jane Fonda. And actually, I went on a Fire Drill Fridays protest with her right before the pandemic, and one of the things she said was that she started Fire Drill Fridays because she had been watching Greta Thunberg on TV and thought, “Where are the old people? Why do we always leave it on the young people to get conked on the head when we’re the ones who can handle the criminal record and have less to lose?” That stayed with me. I had been reading things, had had my own experience with private planes, and gave them up years ago because it just felt so wrong. I tweeted something out a bunch of months ago about chaining myself to an airplane — I’m prone to hyperbole, what can I say — and then the folks at the New York Communities for Change reached out and said, “Are you serious about this? Well, if you’re serious about it, we should do something together. One thing led to another, and there I was last weekend. And I was so happy to be there. I was the oldest person there by a long way. It was thrilling for me because I really feel like I haven’t done enough. We all have to get off the sidelines.

There were some interesting facts in the op-ed you wrote for The Guardian, such as “billionaires emit a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person,” and that “a four-hour flight on a private jet will burn as much carbon as the average person does in a year.”
That should really stop anyone in their tracks before they get on the next private plane. It’s only common sense. One percent of the population accounts for fifty percent of all aviation emissions. What that means is that it’s not just private planes; it’s the top one percent of frequent flyers.

Celebs are obviously quite guilty of frequent private jet use. Kylie Jenner got a lot of flak last year for taking a 17-minute private jet flight.
And she should!

And it’s Taylor Swift who tops the list of celebrities when it comes to private jet use by a wide margin. They did a study last year that concluded her private jet flew 170 times between January and July of last year alone.
Whoa! That’s incredible. I understand why a celebrity would lean toward the private jets: it is hard to get through an airport when everyone wants to talk to you, and you don’t want to be sitting in first class and have everyone ask you for selfies and autographs. But that is a completely solvable problem. Let’s work with the airlines to make some small changes. You have people like Bill Gates who say they don’t have to fly commercial because they give a lot of money to carbon capture technologies, and I’m sorry — yeah, you fly a lot and do a lot of great work, but how about you pay for the carbon capture and don’t pollute?

When you mention Bill Gates and private jets, my mind immediately goes to him and Jeffrey Epstein…
Yeah…

There are also climate activists like Leonardo DiCaprio who will star in movies like Don’t Look Up and preach about how we have to protect the environment against climate change and then fly everywhere on private jets.
Exactly who I was going to say. Leonardo. Leo, come on, man! Was he really pulling his electric car up next to a private plane to get somewhere? Surely the irony of that had to have hit him!

And I don’t think celebrities have the airport excuse anymore. I fly Delta and they have a VIP service for celebs where they will take you in a private car right up to the plane.
Exactly. So, it’s a real bullshit excuse.

You’re a movie producer and this is a historic time in Hollywood. Both the actors guild and writers guild are striking simultaneously for the first time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was president of SAG.
I’m in the writers guild. This is a very big moment. We’re now trying to restructure the relationship between the people who pull the revenues in and the people who generate the revenues. First came Spotify and then streaming followed, and they reduced the number of monetization events in the life of a piece of media. So, you don’t have the DVD market, foreign sales, and syndication. At this point, what Netflix does — and I know this — is that they pay you once for worldwide rights, and then they don’t tell you anything about who’s seeing your film or how many people are seeing your film, and they get to take it off the platform when they’re done with it and that’s the end of it. Obviously, for a small, independent filmmaker like myself, it’s disastrous. But it’s also disastrous for Warners, Universal, and everybody else. The corporations are really in trouble. I think they’ve been too slow to react to what was bound to happen, which was that cable networks were going to collapse.

As a documentary filmmaker, I can tell you that we are in such turmoil right now. We were always subject to the whims of the platform, and now the platforms don’t know which way is up — and all they’re buying is true crime. And when I saw “the model is broken,” I’m not just talking about media but American business in general. Revenues pay for your business concerns, reimburse people, pay your taxes, and whatever’s left from that belongs to management and shareholders. That model is broken. You can’t continue to push downward on employee salaries, and treat people the way we’ve been treating them, and expect any kind of business or society to thrive.

I wanted to discuss Disney CEO Bob Iger’s recent comments. He called the strikers’ asks not “realistic” and even invoked the Covid pandemic to say that strikers were adding to the industry “disruption” caused by Covid. And to do it from the Sun Valley Conference, or the “summer camp for billionaires,” just seemed next-level out of touch.
Oh my god. You know, if you spend too much time at the “summer camp for billionaires,” you’re going to forget that there are other kinds of people in the world who aren’t necessarily billionaires. And I think he forgot where he was and what the world is really like — which is easy to do, especially when you’re on a private plane.

Do you feel Bob Iger is the right person to lead Disney right now?
Oh, that’s such a hard thing to say. And obviously, if I say “no” to that question, that will haunt me on Google for the rest of my life. It’s really hard to say. I’ll say that what we need now isn’t what we’ve been needing for the last forty years because it’s just a very different climate. We need a lot of creativity, and someone thinking about busting open all the logjams of where we are. But what I want isn’t the kind of stuff you’re going to hear in The Wall Street Journal. I really think it’s time for businesses to reimagine what the point of a corporation is, and why a corporation exists, and if we’re going to think of ourselves as a bunch of businesses creating livelihood for people, we need to rethink how we create those livelihoods. We need to question this notion that capital only belongs to owners when we can’t achieve anything without workers. We’re doing capitalism wrong, and we’re going to kill ourselves in the process unless we rethink it.

One thing that seemed to really get under your skin was CEO pay — specifically, when you discovered that Bob Iger was paid $65 million in 2018, or 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney employee. And if you look at David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, he pulled in nearly $500 million between 2018 and 2022 alone.
My grandfather became a very wealthy man as a result of Disney, but also my grandmother told me stories about how, when she brought my father home from the hospital, they didn’t know where their next meal was going to come from. It was 1930, and Disney was already a pretty successful company, but every success they had they reinvested it into the company. I think that risk should in fact be rewarded, but where was the risk that Bob Iger took, as somebody who rose up the ladder as an employee to management, and then rose to the top of management? I don’t think he knows what it’s like to not know where his next meal is coming from. And I don’t either. But I know what my grandparents’ experience was, and how much they put on the line for that business. A CEO should be like a ship captain. You want that job and the shiny uniform, but you need to agree to the terms. And if you have $65 million in your pocket, and there are people in your company who are struggling to put food on the table, that should not feel good to you. You shouldn’t be able to sleep well at night. I woke up one day and realized that, just by virtue of being born lucky, I had so much more than everyone else. And I don’t think I’ve slept well since I figured that out.

One of the first big movie premieres to be held following the actors’ strike was for Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, and it was a bizarre scene. Since actors couldn’t walk the red carpet, Disney made their non-union park walk the carpet as their amusement park characters. And if people think SAG-AFTRA actors are exploited, these park actors are on a whole other level. It reminded me of your recent documentary on park workers, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.
And I have screened my film for the park workers, who are non-union, and who have been contemplating unionizing. Do you think they were thinking about those thoughts when they were in those outfits? You bet. Disney can keep this up as long as they want, but they’re going to have a lot of labor problems if they don’t change their ways.

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