Disney chairman James Gorman said the board’s decision to name Josh D’Amaro sole chief executive and Dana Walden President and Chief Creative Officer was a thorough process but one where consideration of co-CEOs was over rather quickly. The former Morgan Stanley chair known for overseeing a buttery smooth CEO transition at the giant investment bank, is not a fan of the structure.
“We considered everything because we felt this was the time we had to get this right and I was absolutely committed to being thorough, being open minded,” he told Deadline. “We considered co-CEOs. We considered different organizational structures. We considered internal candidates. We considered external candidates. I wouldn’t say we considered co-CEOs for very long at all, to be really blunt. I think that was probably the easiest thing to take off the table.”
Netflix has co-CEOs, so do Comcast and Oracle. But they are relatively rare. “If you look at the Fortune 500, there’s got to be less than 20. Generally, [it’s when] there’s a strong executive chairman who is the founder, who is still around. Sometimes it’s geographic. You have a European head and a U.S. head, for example. But they’re generally pretty fraught. Some have worked. You know the ones that worked. A lot haven’t really. So why would you go down that path unless you had to?”
Over his years in business “and when I did this at Morgan Stanley,” he said, “people always asked, when you’ve got strong candidates, why don’t you make them cos. There’s bad stuff that comes from that too. When you have a Jimmy Kimmel situation and one wants to move left and one wants to move right — I don’t mean politically, but you know what I mean.” Or if you’re “about to sign with the UAE, and one of them says, I think it’s a terrible idea. One loves them.”
Disney briefly suspended then reinstated ABC’s late light staple Jimmy Kimmel Live! last fall after local broadcasters preempted the show. MAGA had reacted badly to comments by the host after the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel credited co-Entertainment chief Walden for helping to work through the situation and backed her as CEO with the race still in play.
Disney is opening a new theme park in Abu Dhabi.
“I’m not judging other companies who’ve done this. They each have very different reasons, and some are obviously working … But you’ll do what’s right for your company,” said Gorman. “I think the board at least did what they had to do. They considered okay, people say this is an option, let’s talk it through. We talked it through and said, not for us, maybe for others.”
More to come
