Plenty of people who have worked at Disney and ABC will head right to the index of “Ride of a Lifetime” to see if they made the cut for a mention. “He was an amiable, funny guy his energy and optimism were infectious and crucially, he knew what he didn’t know,” Iger writes. In short order, Iger came to like working for Swanson. But as Iger tried to give his notice, Swanson said he was planning to promote Iger to senior VP of programming. At first, Iger didn’t care for his new boss, who happened to be the respected broadcaster Dennis Swanson, so Iger worked out a deal to join Spence at ICM. Iger’s then-boss, Jim Spence, left to start a sports division at ICM. After Capital Cities acquired ABC in 1986, there was a management transition at ABC Sports, where Iger worked at the time. In the mid-1980s, Iger almost joined ICM as a sports agent.

“I wished Jack luck, and I hung up feeling very relieved,” Iger writes.Ĥ. The Disney board gave Iger the OK to finalize a deal, but he soon got cold feet after considering the problems that Disney would inherit in addressing hate speech, fake accounts and “the general rage and lack of civility that was sometimes evident on the platform.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who is a member of Disney’s board of directors, “was stunned, but very polite” when Iger gave him the bad news. Iger saw it as a distribution platform with global reach. In the summer of 2016, Disney came close to buying Twitter. “Instead of toasting what had been a momentous day in my early days as CEO, we cried together over the news,” Iger writes.ģ. Iger didn’t waver on the deal, but the news hit Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, hard on a personal level.

Jobs took him on a walk to confide in Iger that his pancreatic cancer had returned and because of that, Jobs wanted to give Iger an eleventh-hour chance to back out of the deal, which made Jobs the single-largest individual shareholder in Disney. After getting over the board’s squeamishness, Iger got another surprise just 30 minutes before he and Apple and Pixar chief Steve Jobs were to announce the Pixar acquisition from the company’s Emeryville, Calif.

Iger the ride of a lifetime