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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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Another step back. A U.S. Appeals Court blocked both mail shipments of the abortion pill mifepristone and prescriptions for it written without an in-person doctor's visit. The order did not go as far as banning the pill altogether, and the decision will not take effect until it is reviewed by the Supreme Court. The Biden Administration has announced plans to appeal the ruling. Reuters
- Drama debrief. Outdoor Voices founder Ty Haney led the athleisure brand to mainstream mania before abruptly exiting as CEO in 2020. Now with two new ventures under her belt, Haney's talking about the drama surrounding her departure and what she sees as a “sickening” deterioration of the company since. The Cut
- Safety check. Tinder and Hinge owner Match Group hired a digital safety nonprofit to install background check features after sex offenders were found using its apps. Garbo, the nonprofit run by Kathryn Kosmides, says that later disagreements have caused the service to shut down. Wall Street Journal
- Back in style. Clare Waight Keller, the first female artistic director of LVMH and the designer of Meghan Markle’s wedding dress, took a step back from the limelight during the pandemic. She's now back with a new mainstream venture, a collection of 30 pieces in partnership with Japanese brand Uniqlo. Vogue Business
- Blast off. SpaceX, led by Gwynne Shotwell alongside Elon Musk, eked out a profit of $55 million on $1.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year after two years of losses, according to financial documents for the secretive, privately held company. Wall Street Journal
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Novartis has named Michelle Weese its new head of corporate affairs. Nectar Life Sciences hired Dr. Tania Elliott as chief medical officer.
ON MY RADAR
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Meet Romilly Newman: the Gen Z Martha Stewart taking the food world by storm Town and Country
PARTING WORDS
"I don’t know what I did with my life, but what I did was sit in a room and write."
—Author Zadie Smith on The Fraud, her new historical fiction novel
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