Walt Disney

“That SRI is the research firm that Walt hires to go identify what ultimately becomes Anaheim.”

“It just doesn't make sense to me, and it may have protected his legacy that he didn't live another 10 or 20 years to see this through.”

“So the legend that's out there that everybody believes is that this was a napkin sketch that Walt himself drew. No, it was actually created Buy a Disney Studio artist as an illustration for this Wall Street Journal piece.”

“And worth knowing, the ownership of Walt Disney Studios that would become Walt Disney Productions, that would become the Walt Disney Company, was at this .60% owned by Walt and his wife, and 40% owned by Roy and his wife.”

“We've got this, like, joint venture called Disneyland Inc. It's got 500,000 dollars from Walt Disney Productions. It's got 500,000 dollars from ABC. It's got 200,000 dollars from Western Publishing, who distributed their books. And then Walt himself put in 250…”

“He sold his vacation house in Palm Springs. He borrowed a 100,000 dollars against his life insurance, and he took on a personal loan to fund that obligation.”

“This whole thing ultimately becomes so contentious that three board directors actually resign from the public company.”

“There is a real case to be made that besides Walt and Roy and I works too, but at least on the business side, besides Walt and Roy, Kay Kamen was the third most important person in the first, you know, half century of Disney.”

“This gives you a sense of Walt's leadership style. He would take a talented creative person and he'd be perfectly willing to assign them to things that they've never done before and say, yeah, you'll figure it out.”

“In 1953 in April, Walt Disney Productions board of directors, this is a public company, agreed to a personal services contract with Walt and contracts with WED to design and build the Disneyland park attractions. This is done as a cost plus contract.”

“So Wed, which Walt is the 100% shareholder of, actually owned the railroad outright.”

“He is the Walt Disney who Has come up with a crazy new idea based on his obsessive hobby with model trains that the board of Disney Studios has basically rejected. And so he has gone full crackpot like Colonel Kurtz style and started his own separate company o…”

“Three of the four. The Ford one does not. The part of the deal is that Walt says, you have to pay a million dollars to use my name as a part of your attraction, of course, in addition to footing the bill for building it, but I'll forgive that million dollars i…”

“And if you look at the company's market cap today compared to where it was in 1966, 99.95% of the value was created after Walt Disney died.”

“There's a great business model lesson in this, which is with the first two Mickeys flopping, if you just do the same thing as an existing competitor who already has distribution, brand, customers, It's not enough. You need to go do something leveraging a new p…”

“I turned over every stone I possibly could on this company, and we spent, I don't know, the better part of the year so far researching this, and I found zero evidence of that.”

“In a very not man of the people style thing, he ends up sinking 50,000 dollars, which is like a giant amount of money at the time, and a huge amount of his personal liquidity in 1950, into building a train in his backyard.”

“I sort of think of Ub as the Steve Wozniak of Disney.”

“Disney animation during this decade goes from a staff of roughly 500 at the time of Walt's death All the way down to just a 125 by the early eighties.”

“I mean, Roy tried to persuade him not to do it. He argues that it's going to bankrupt the studio.”

“ABC, though, Ben, as you were saying, they're the newest of the networks, and they're struggling to catch on. They need something like Disney and Disneyland to break out. So they say, yes, Walt's line on this was that ABC needed the show so badly that they bou…”

“So in order to go get the bulk of the financing for the park, Walt comes back fully into the fold at the Disney studio and does something that no other movie executive is willing to do. At this point in time, he embraces television. He goes to the TV networks …”

“Walt personally would go on to win more Academy Awards than anyone in history. Walt has 26 Academy Awards. The next highest is 13.”

“Ticket prices at the Disney parks have basically been flat since Walt died.”

“That was why Walt created CalArts. He wanted it to be this institution that would keep the pipeline of new animation talent flowing into Disney long after he was gone, and Walt left like half of his estate To fund this institution.”

“Pixar films have accounted for as much as half of the studio, Walt Disney's, operating income in recent years.”