Michael Eisner, every mention

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired Aug 10, 2026 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 8:50 David Rosenthal I'm not talking about Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
• ▶ 12:20 David Rosenthal Arguably the greatest two-person management team in media company history, Michael Eisner and Frank Wells.
• ▶ 12:29 David Rosenthal And then, uh, Michael quickly brings in his number two from Paramount, Jeffrey Katzenberg to run the film studios.
• ▶ 13:11 David Rosenthal You got to call Michael Eisner.
• ▶ 13:13 David Rosenthal So Michael, until recently, the timing is just crazy on this, had been probably the hottest Hollywood movie studio executive in town.
• ▶ 13:35 David Rosenthal The two of them, Barry Diller and Michael, within a span of seven years, they made Indiana Jones,
• ▶ 14:29 David Rosenthal So Michael writes a famous memo in Hollywood history that gets leaked and spread around the rest of Hollywood describing the strategy.
• ▶ 14:47 David Rosenthal So, Michael writes, we have no obligation to make art.
• ▶ 15:12 Ben Gilbert And there was another memo leaked later by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who, you know, speaking of the lieutenants, you got Barry Diller's lieutenant is Michael Eisner, Michael Eisner's lieutenant is Jeffrey Katzenberg.
• ▶ 16:00 Ben Gilbert Michael from Paramount has not seen Disney movies.
• ▶ 16:19 David Rosenthal But when you think about it, though, Michael's philosophy actually is pretty simpatico with the Disney philosophy.
• ▶ 16:37 David Rosenthal And Michael is like, produce things cheap, singles and doubles.
• ▶ 16:51 David Rosenthal Michael gets forced out of Paramount at the peak of his success.
• ▶ 17:11 Ben Gilbert Michael is supposed to get
• ▶ 17:25 Ben Gilbert And Michael basically, his contract says that he's owed a check if he does not get the job when Barry leaves.
• ▶ 17:32 Ben Gilbert So Michael decides, you know what?
• ▶ 17:42 David Rosenthal So all of a sudden, Michael's available, right as all this drama is going on at Disney.
• ▶ 17:54 Ben Gilbert So, Frank is offered the top job, and Michael's offered number two.
• ▶ 18:00 Ben Gilbert Then there's a second iteration where they're sort of offered co-CEOs, and Michael basically tells Frank, hey, look, if I'm gonna do this, I'm CEO, or I'm, I'm chairman, I think is even what he says, and you're number two, because we need…
• ▶ 18:54 Ben Gilbert Michael says works for me.
• ▶ 19:00 David Rosenthal Michael Eisner and Frank Wells are introduced as the new CEO and president of the Walt Disney Company.
• ▶ 19:37 David Rosenthal They turn around quickly and bring in Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount as well to come in and run the studios under Michael at Disney.
• ▶ 20:31 David Rosenthal And then Eisner and Wells turn their attention to the parks.
• ▶ 20:39 David Rosenthal One of the first things they do that ends up, I think, really setting up all the following success that Eisner and Wells and Katzenberg have is they raise the ticket prices at Disneyland and Disney World.
• ▶ 21:11 David Rosenthal So parking at Disney World and Disneyland when Eisner and Wells come in to run the company is still only a buck.
• ▶ 22:03 David Rosenthal Eisner and Wells turn around and they take all these quick profits from the parks and they start investing them into building the live action studios and running the paramount playbook.
• ▶ 22:30 David Rosenthal So Michael's singles and doubles strategy worked at Paramount.
• ▶ 24:31 David Rosenthal So as part of the deal, when they brought Eisner and Wells in,
• ▶ 24:46 Ben Gilbert Okay, so flashback to the day that Michael and Frank take over.
• ▶ 25:21 Ben Gilbert I was having breakfast with Jeffrey to prep for this episode, and he told me this story where Michael calls Jeffrey into his office on his first day.
• ▶ 25:30 Ben Gilbert And this is before animation had been moved out to Glendale, so he's still pointing down at the original animation building, and he points to the ink and paint door, and Michael says to Jeffrey, do you know what they do down there?
• ▶ 25:42 Ben Gilbert And Jeffrey goes, no, because, you know, Jeffrey's background is live action, Paramount stuff with Michael.
• ▶ 25:48 Ben Gilbert And Michael says, neither do I.
• ▶ 25:56 Ben Gilbert And so Jeffrey, like Michael,
• ▶ 26:27 David Rosenthal But at some point, and I don't know, was it, was it Katzenberg, or was it Eisner and Wells who realized, like, hey, there actually is an opportunity here?
• ▶ 33:38 Ben Gilbert Michael Eisner actually announces then they are going to build a new animation building and bring
• ▶ 37:51 David Rosenthal It's inspiring new generations of children, their parents, and Eisner and Wells not only embrace all of it, they extend the flywheel even further.
• ▶ 38:45 David Rosenthal So, Eisner and Wells and Katzberg, they're like, well, we can do the same thing with home video.
• ▶ 39:03 David Rosenthal Michael has to convene the whole Disney family and get their approval to release Pinocchio as the first of the classics that they're gonna put on VHS here in 1985.
• ▶ 40:29 Ben Gilbert Hurt anything, not dampen any demand, because Michael Eisner would sort of later famously point out, people buy these tapes, but they break, they lose them.
• ▶ 43:17 David Rosenthal With Eisner's philosophy, because even though they were signing stars to be voice actors, like Robin Williams is the genie, et cetera, et cetera, they weren't getting paid much.
• ▶ 44:45 Ben Gilbert Since they were sort of grown-ups by the time the Eisner era hit.
• ▶ 45:08 David Rosenthal yeah, we'll put a thing about The Lion King, the musical in there, and Broadway, they do that, you know, great, it's a thing that Eisner and team do in the nineties.
• ▶ 47:47 Ben Gilbert So Eisner in this era really did crack the extensions of the brand thing, and he also kind of dipped his foot back into traditional marketing more.
• ▶ 48:14 David Rosenthal So this is the other big, big thing that Michael Eisner does, is he transforms the parks.
• ▶ 48:29 David Rosenthal They're just theme parks when Michael takes over.
• ▶ 50:11 David Rosenthal Now, it's not all sunshine and rainbows on the Parkside during the Eisner era.
• ▶ 50:56 David Rosenthal But that aside, I mean, man, by the time we're in the mid-nineties here, Disney and the Eisner-Wells-Katzenberg dream team is just
• ▶ 51:48 David Rosenthal So by 1994, Disney's market cap hits twenty two billion dollars, up 10 X from when the Eisner crew took over, and it becomes the highest valued
• ▶ 55:08 David Rosenthal For the company and the management team, for all that Michael Eisner was, Ben, as you said, like, the creative executive, and had to be the public face of the Walt Disney Company and the Disney Renaissance, Frank was, like, the guy behind…
• ▶ 55:25 David Rosenthal He absolutely was the yin to Michael's yang, and all of a sudden, he's gone.
• ▶ 55:37 Ben Gilbert Michael's a big personality.
• ▶ 55:48 David Rosenthal I mean, he was the guy who, when Michael said, I need to be number one, he said, okay, no problem.
• ▶ 56:04 David Rosenthal While Michael is at the annual Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, he starts experiencing chest pains and has to be rushed back to L.A. into emergency quadruple bypass open heart surgery.
• ▶ 56:31 Ben Gilbert In the hospital while they're feeling the loss of Frank Wells, there's a lot of decisions that need to get made, and there's a lot of, like, personnel clashes that needed to get sort of through, but what can Michael do?
• ▶ 57:13 David Rosenthal That was certainly Jeffrey's understanding that Michael had promised him that.
• ▶ 1:00:44 David Rosenthal So, yeah, in the vacuum left by all of this, Michael decides that, uh, the person he's gonna promote to number two president and chief operating officer of the Walt Disney Company is himself.
• ▶ 1:00:58 Ben Gilbert Yeah, it's the Michael Eisner Company now, through and through.
• ▶ 1:03:00 David Rosenthal Michael is sniffing around.
• ▶ 1:03:07 David Rosenthal He talks to ABC, does a typical Michael kind of lowball offer.
• ▶ 1:03:13 David Rosenthal But Michael had actually started his career at ABC.
• ▶ 1:03:17 David Rosenthal So Barry Diller and Michael, they were TV guys at ABC before they went to Paramount.
• ▶ 1:03:32 David Rosenthal Michael strikes a deal for the Walt Disney Company to acquire ABC Capital Cities for nineteen billion dollars, which was the second largest acquisition in history to that point.
• ▶ 1:03:57 Ben Gilbert And I think there's, there's so much great lore around this, but I think this was like a parking lot conversation, where Michael had been hoping to run into Warren Buffett, and he finally did, and Warren calls over Tom Murphy, who was…
• ▶ 1:05:12 David Rosenthal The person that Eisner is pitching is, is Buffett.
• ▶ 1:10:49 David Rosenthal So, back to the Disney Cap City's ABC deal here in 1995, I don't think,
• ▶ 1:14:18 David Rosenthal Competing for Michael Eisner's attention among all the other existing management items at the Walt Disney Company.
• ▶ 1:14:25 Ben Gilbert And Eisner's thought going in was, it is important to have the Disney brand and our products and our content distributed on television.
• ▶ 1:17:15 David Rosenthal So back here to the late nineties into the early 2000, Michael's just overloaded managing all this.
• ▶ 1:18:05 David Rosenthal Give, give Eisner a pass because everybody's doing .com
• ▶ 1:18:20 David Rosenthal And to Michael's eternal credit, maybe the best thing he did as CEO of the Walt Disney Company among many, many great things.
• ▶ 1:18:48 Ben Gilbert And that could have happened to Disney too, but amidst all these very high valuations of the dot com era, and I watched a bunch of interviews of Michael at this time, he was skeptical and very careful about not
• ▶ 1:19:06 David Rosenthal While we're on bad decisions during this era, Michael does finally...
• ▶ 1:19:17 David Rosenthal His close friend and Hollywood super agent Michael Ovitz comes in as, um, Disney president to be Eisner's number two and help him operate the company in, uh, 1995.
• ▶ 1:19:59 David Rosenthal Eisner had built and assembled at Disney, especially after Cap Cities.
• ▶ 1:20:13 David Rosenthal Eisner was an executive.
• ▶ 1:21:12 Ben Gilbert Cuz neither Ovitz nor Eisner thought there was any chance this was gonna fall apart, and so the Walt Disney Company was willing to put in a contract and say, if you don't make it
• ▶ 1:25:16 David Rosenthal The worst part of all of this, for Michael Eisner at least, is that the Bass family, which to this point are still Disney's largest shareholders and Michael's strongest supporters among the shareholder base,
• ▶ 1:25:50 David Rosenthal They sell the majority of their Disney holdings in a block transaction, and overnight, Eisner's
• ▶ 1:27:21 David Rosenthal With the stated goal of mounting a proxy vote to oust Michael Eisner as the CEO of the Walt Disney company.
• ▶ 1:31:17 David Rosenthal Which he sent copies to Eisner, the board, and then the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the LA Times.
• ▶ 1:31:24 Ben Gilbert He went on a blistering three-page critique of Michael's stewardship of the company.
• ▶ 1:32:02 Ben Gilbert Michael sort of famously had an eye for making the theme parks great, the sort of second only since Walt.
• ▶ 1:32:09 David Rosenthal Nobody invested in the parks like Michael Eisner.
• ▶ 1:32:23 Ben Gilbert By this point, distributing Pixar's early films, but Eisner and Pixar had a, uh, very contentious relationship.
• ▶ 1:32:49 David Rosenthal Yeah, and then Roy ends the letter with, Michael, it is my sincere belief that it is you who should be leaving and not me.
• ▶ 1:35:06 David Rosenthal Where the vote is gonna happen to, hopefully in their minds, oust Michael Eisner as CEO of Disney.
• ▶ 1:35:12 David Rosenthal Disney, in response, schedules an analyst day, an investor day for the company in Orlando in February of 2004, ahead of the meeting to sort of shore up support for Michael and shore up support for the stock.
• ▶ 1:35:46 David Rosenthal Gonna save Michael Eisner's job.
• ▶ 1:35:52 David Rosenthal Eisner's there.
• ▶ 1:38:48 David Rosenthal So, on the back of this narrative of, you know, how low the Disney company has sunk under leadership of Michael Eisner, which gets ridiculous, but it's the narrative out there.
• ▶ 1:39:10 David Rosenthal To vote to withhold their support of Michael Eisner as CEO at the March shareholder meeting.
• ▶ 1:39:16 David Rosenthal CalPERS, the big California pension funds, they announced that they're going to vote their Disney shares against Eisner and vote for him to resign.
• ▶ 1:39:41 David Rosenthal At the end of the day, 43% of the shareholder base votes to withhold support for Eisner as CEO, which is a huge number.
• ▶ 1:39:56 David Rosenthal So the Disney board meets in an emergency executive session without management present, during which they decide to remove Michael as chairman
• ▶ 1:40:28 David Rosenthal Eisner is still CEO.
• ▶ 1:40:30 David Rosenthal A few months after that, Michael announces that he will leave the company when his contract expires at the end of 2006.
• ▶ 1:40:47 David Rosenthal The board announces that it's going to initiate a public, high-stakes CEO search, and they intend to name Michael's successor by June of 2005.
• ▶ 1:40:57 David Rosenthal Everyone, everyone believes it's gotta be an external candidate that is gonna come in and take over Disney, just like Wells and Eisner came in 20 years ago.
• ▶ 1:41:17 Ben Gilbert Initially, it actually said internal and external candidates, and Bob Iger was reviewing the press release, because he's COO, and he goes to the board and says, wait, Michael's gonna be CEO for another year?