Credit: Inside the MagicFormer Disney Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo is fully going on the attack when it comes to the upcoming proxy battle for control of the company’s board of directors.
Jay Rasulo has teamed up with Trian Partners founder and billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz in an attempt to get voted into two seats on the Walt Disney Company board of directors, which would give them significant control over the direction of the Mouse in the future.
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The pair, who are further supported by Ike Perlmutter, former Marvel Chairman and one of the largest single shareholders of the company, are campaigning under the name Restore the Magic and explicitly stating that the plan is to oust Disney CEO Bob Iger, shelve his plans to partner with Epic Games and pump billions into Park expansion. Nelson Peltz and Jay Rasulo have a lot of shares and money behind them, but the current board of directors (which includes Iger) is responding with the same kind of irritable snippiness.
Jay Rasulo recently appeared on the CNBC business show Money Movers and made his case for why he should receive a seat on the Disney board of directors, citing his years of experience with the company and his work on other boards since.
The hosts of the show read the former CFO part of a statement that Disney has released in which it stated he had left the company eight years ago and that, “in our view, his analog perspective is not relevant to the challenges of today’s digital media landscape.”
Rasulo did not seem especially pleased with the company (which he described as the place where he had spent most of his life), tacitly dismissing him in this way, stating, “I haven’t been in a cave” and defending his work on the board of iHeartMedia. Disney’s statement also claimed that “Rasulo has a track record of value destruction – during his tenure on the Board of Directors of iHeartMedia, the stock price declined by 87%.”
In response, the former CFO went on the attack, calling Disney’s recent history “horrible” and that it included “ten years of bungled succession planning,” a clear reference to the debacle of Bob Chapek replacing Bob Iger, only to be replaced by him once again in turn. Rasulo continued, saying that there was a “very obvious root cause” for Disney’s problem: “poor oversight by a complacent board.”
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It is not often that you have representatives of powerful and influential companies openly lobbing insults at each other on television, but that is where we are currently at with the Walt Disney Company. It will likely just get more heated in the coming weeks.
Do you think that the battle between Nelson Peltz, Jay Rasulo, and Disney is getting ugly? Let us know in the comments below!