Credit: Inside the MagicBlackwells Capital, a significant investor in the Walt Disney Company, is calling out the Mouse for its wavering leadership and demanding that it take more action toward utilizing artificial intelligence.
2024 sees the Walt Disney Company in a strange place. While Disney CEO Bob Iger recently pushed the notion that the company has turned a financial corner, several years of disastrous box office flops and public controversies have put it in a tricky financial situation. Unsurprisingly, a lot of shareholders are not too happy with the way things have been going under Iger’s leadership.
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That is how we got to where we are now, with a number of different investors engaging in a fierce proxy battle for control over the Disney board of directors and, essentially, the future of the Mouse House. In addition to Blackwells, billionaire activist Nelson Peltz (who is supported by Ike Perlmutter, one of the company’s single largest shareholders) is vying for seats on the board.
Nelson Peltz, who is nominated alongside former Disney CFO Jay Rasulo, has been running a very loud board campaign since last month, and now Blackwells Capital is getting in on the action with a new operation titled The Future of Disney. The investment company has nominated Jessica Schell, Craig Hatkoff, and Leah Solivan, and just released a five-point strategic plan breaking down exactly how it thinks Disney is going wrong and how it needs to embrace AI.
Blackwells Chief Investment Officer Jason Aintabi said, “Disney should be dominating in the fields of spatial computing and AI. Few companies have the potential of Disney to synthesize these revolutionizing technologies, and relate them to consumers with the impact, and ROI, that Disney can. Spatial Computing has far more relevance to Disney than it does to either Apple or Meta.”
The Blackwells video broke down some of the problems it identified with Disney, listing them as “Fragmentation,” “Unhurried Innovation,” “Missing Native Technology Stack,” and “Spatial Computing and AI Mediocrity.” While Disney might be actively looking into (and investing) in expanding its AI technology, it does not seem to be fast enough for Blackwells.
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Aintabi continued, saying, “Electing Leah Solivan to the board of Disney will add considerable technological and entrepreneurial expertise and drive greater management accountability around Disney’s adoption of transformative technologies.”
In April, Disney investors will vote on the new board of directors and potentially change the entire direction of the most iconic media company in the world. We’ll just have to see which investor has been the most persuasive.
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