The Chair and CEO of the Walt Disney Company’s 2015 compensation package was revealed in an SEC filing yesterday. He collected $44.9 million, which is actually down 3.4% from 2014. According to the document, Iger’s base salary is $2.5 million with the rest coming in bonuses in the form of stock, incentives, pension and other compensation (such as use of corporate jet and personal security).
Disney COO Tom Staggs, and reportedly Iger’s successor, earned the second most compensation at TWDC with a total package worth $20 million.
The Walt Disney Company has been doing very well in the stock market under Iger. However, investors are clearly worried about how cord-cutting will impact the revenue from ESPN. Now that Star Wars and Shanghai Disneyland appears to be on the right track, that’s probably the next thing Iger will tackle.
Disney also announced that the 2016 annual meeting will be held in Chicago on March 3rd. Any shareholder can secure tickets to attend.
I wonder what Walt would have thought about these kind of Salarys today?
I wonder what Walt Disney would think about these types of salaries?
I can’t find a salary figure for Walt himself, but at the time of his death, Walt Disney was worth an estimated 5 billion dollars. Adjusted for inflation since 1965, Walter Elias Disney had over 37 billion dollars in today’s dollars. Bob Iger doesn’t even begin to approach that.
What does a CEO do? Did Bob Iger earn that money?
Disney’s after-tax, net income under his tenure has bloomed to almost $10bn USD in 2015, showing steady growth, up from $3.3bn since the first full year after he took over from Michael Eisner in 2006. Now, how much of that can be directly attributable to the CEO? After all, they don’t make the movies or the parks. They don’t even ultimately decide what gets made, right?
Well, this is true, but they do hire the people that do those things. But there’s a couple things Bob Eiger is directly responsible for. Marvel Entertainment was purchased in 2009 for about $4bn. Apart from its still profitable original business of making comics (and all the merchandising that comes from that), Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has made over $8bn at the Box Office alone in the last 6 years. That doesn’t include television shows (and not just the spectacular MCU on TV/Netflix, but also cartoons), or merchandising. Disney’s already made massive profits on their investment, and that was 100% Bob Eiger.
Two years later, Disney bought Lucasfilm and all its subsidiaries, also for about $4bn. Now, Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic are ubiquitously used throughout the film industry, so right away Disney started making profits on EVERYONE ELSE’S movies, but it didn’t stop there. Merchandising, new TV series, books…they all immediately started refunding some of the purchase price of Lucasfilm. Then they released their first new Star Wars film under the Buena Vista distribution this week. 10 days of box office receipts, and $1.1bn later, I think we can safely say this purchase will have paid for itself by March.
Bob Eiger isn’t the guy who makes us feel like a kid again whenever we see Cinderella Castle, but he’s certainly the guy that makes sure any profit from that feeling ends up in Disney’s shareholder’s pockets, and that’s what he’s being paid for.
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