Abigail Disney has never been one to shy away from saying exactly what’s on her mind. She’s a longtime philanthropist and documentarian, using both as outlets for issues she strongly believes in, and in 2019, she turned her megaphone on wealth inequality and the company that bears her family name.
Disney, the granddaughter of cofounder Roy O. Disney, has previously criticized the company’s CEO Bob Iger for his $65 million paycheck. In a subsequent documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, she shed light on the pay and working conditions of Disney theme park employees earning $15 an hour. Last year, she was one of more than 150 millionaires who signed an open letter to Davos guests calling for higher taxes on the rich.
Much of the Disney heiress’s recent activism has challenged the gap between CEO pay and that of their employees, the increased use of private jets and their impact on climate change, and the role and responsibility of corporations and capitalism today.
Disney was arrested in July during a protest at East Hampton Airport, where she and a group of young activists chained themselves together to block the entrance to the airport, which sees a lot of private plane traffic.
Disney recently took some time to talk with Fortune about her arrest, the importance of combating climate change, Iger’s recent comments, and the future of corporate America.
The Walt Disney Company did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You were recently arrested at the Hamptons airport protesting the use of private planes in the name of climate change. In your Guardian article published a few days later, you talked about how it was a call to action for billionaires and the one percent to get on board. Do you think the arrest itself distracted from the overall message?
I was happy about [the protest] because it got a hell of a lot more attention than it otherwise would have gotten. In the U.S., we have such a strange culture of admiration for wealthy people where we don’t ask much of them. I think every American is under the very mistaken impression that someday they’re going to be a billionaire. And when they are a billionaire, they hope people won’t bother them about their private plane.
So I’m not sure if it distracted from the message; maybe it did. But the message got out more broadly, and for that I’m happy.
A lot of what’s at play in your comments about wealth and inequality gets to the idea of: At what point is enough, enough?
I prefer the word “plenty.” It is perhaps the most important word in the English language right now, and the one we really need to spend some time pondering. Because, yeah, I have plenty. I don’t live on every penny that I inherited, and I’m slowly giving most of it away.
I have plenty; why would I take the money that I inherited and use it to make more money? I just don’t understand that.
But structurally, culturally, emotionally, we are so invested in a version of capitalism, where people are told to do more with less and that someday they can also possibly have more.
That is how we keep people on the hamster wheel, isn’t it?
I’d be remiss not to bring up Bob Iger and his comments about the Hollywood strikes last month. He said that the expectations of writers and actors were “not realistic,” and he called the strikes “very disruptive and dangerous.” [Iger recently struck a more conciliatory tone.]
I think he underestimated how much we changed during the pandemic. He left the company and sat on his shares, which turned him into a billionaire just because of the rise in the share price over the pandemic. [Iger’s net worth was estimated to be $690 million in 2019. Disney did not return a request for comment.] And I don’t think he really appreciated how the climate, emotional climate, of this country changed in those years.
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. 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?
How do we even begin to think about or talk about how to rein in CEO pay?
Our laws were always written to favor capital, and that’s what they’re doing over and over again, but there was some balance at one point. In the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, after FDR, where the government said we have an important job here, which is to make sure that the business doesn’t run away with us, because if we give it its head, it will run off. And so the government would step in and manage business from time to time and stick up for labor. That hasn’t happened in a really long time.
We need to think about what a corporation is for. Say for example you make paper. Lots of people make paper, and paper is important. But there are all these human beings who come and go there and spend the majority of their waking hours with you, they form their lives around you. Surely you have another purpose, right? Surely the real point of the paper company is how people are living, not paper. Every company has a higher purpose, and nothing will get you kicked out of a boardroom more quickly than suggesting that to be true.
How do you even get to a point where that higher purpose isn’t just growth and capital?
Wall Street drives almost all of this, and that means business schools need to teach people differently. At this point, if every single company isn’t committed to climate change, not just in terms of bringing their own carbon footprint down, but looking around and seeing how they can participate in doing more than that, then I don’t know what we’re on this planet to do. It’s just going to shorten everyone’s life, and that’s the end of that.
I’m really hopeful because there are a lot of people thinking really interesting thoughts about what [change] could look like. The Delaware Supreme Court, over and over and over again, has given shareholders the right to sue a board of directors or a CEO because they don’t feel that they’re defending the interests of shareholders vigorously enough. Shareholder primacy is driving so much of what’s happening now. [But] Patagonia can go ahead and say our primacy isn’t the shareholders, it’s the planet. And they don’t get sued for saying that [because Patagonia is a B Corp]. That feels to me like a very promising movement. I’m pie-in-the-sky enough to think Disney could be the largest B Corp in the world. Why not?
My brother, Tim, just jumped up and down when I said that.
Succession at Disney has been a huge topic of conversation. When considering the future of the company, what would you want?
I think Bob is a basically decent person, but I think money and power have hijacked his sensibilities. As with so many people at the very top of systems, they can’t see outside of the system they’re in. They can’t imagine a different way of doing it, and that’s what we need. We need people who are more like science fiction thinkers than businessmen. 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?” All I’m saying is, can we not just press pause on this sprint to the bottom that we’re on right now and ask ourselves, what does a different way of doing it look like?
If CEOs aren’t going to change the way they operate, then the government really has no choice but to step in. We’ve got to hear from our government much more aggressively going forward on tethering CEO pay and limiting tax breaks and not allowing them to offshore money and not allowing them to treat workers as poorly as they do. I mean, if any worker at any full-time job at any company is on food stamps, there should be some kind of investigation. Because that’s inherently not okay.
