Good morning, Broadsheet readers! A new court ruling on mifepristone is here, we get a peek at SpaceX's financials, and Abigail Disney blames rapid societal change for Bob Iger's SAG strike missteps. Have a restful weekend.
- Striking commentary. Abigail Disney has become a forceful critic of the company that bears her name over the past several years. The Disney heiress has advocated against inflated CEO compensation and the ever-growing gulf between average worker pay and chief executive pay.
The ongoing Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild strikes have put even more attention than usual on Disney and its CEO Bob Iger. Thanks to some ill-timed comments calling striking workers' demands "not realistic" and the strikes "disturbing," Iger has become a face of the industry's well-paid, powerful executives now fighting against their workforces.
In a new interview with Fortune's Trey Williams, Abigail Disney talks about the strike and Disney's role in it. She believes that Iger—and many other executives—underestimate how much the world changed during the pandemic. When Iger retired from Disney in 2021 before his return last year, he was largely seen as one of the most successful CEOs in corporate history. Iger is still admired by many, but the pressures of the past three years—runaway inflation, stagnated salaries, and widespread layoffs alongside a for-a-time soaring stock market—mean that CEOs are no longer insulated from criticism.
"I think some of the things he said might not have been considered remarkable in 2020 or 2019. I think he was just talking the way a CEO normally talks," Disney says. "But we’ve reached a saturation point and so all of a sudden he stepped into it, and just didn’t appreciate it at all. He’s normally so careful and so thoughtful, and he doesn’t have things like this. He’s not that CEO, right?" (Disney didn't respond to a request for comment in Trey's story.)
The "emotional climate" of the country has changed, and what may have been accepted as normal ways of doing business in the past don't fly anymore.
While Disney is the company that bears the brunt of Abigail Disney's attention, her analysis applies to CEOs across industries.
"With so many people at the very top of systems, they can’t see outside of the system they’re in," she says. "We need people who are able to say, 'Okay, well, I see the system I’m part of, but what if the system looked different?'"
Read Trey's full story here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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