Bob Iger Couldn’t Script His Disney Exit, So He Went After the Lakers

Bob Iger

Photo: hyku / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 10, 1951 Oceanside
Occupation	Business Executive
Awards	Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire · Trustees Award · Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Bob Iger spent his working life persuading people to sell him the thing they had built. Steve Jobs sold him Pixar, and George Lucas, after a long courtship, sold him Star Wars. The one negotiation the former Disney chief executive never closed cleanly was with himself: when to walk away from the company, and who would be left holding it. He has finally done it, at the second attempt, and within months he was shaking hands with Josh Kushner on a record price for the Los Angeles Lakers, a team whose owners are judged by championship banners rather than opening weekends.

That is a long way from where the story starts. Robert Alan Iger was born in New York City, grew up in Oceanside on Long Island and studied television and radio at Ithaca College. For a few months he read the weather on local television in Ithaca before moving behind the camera for good. His next stop was ABC in Manhattan, where he started as a studio supervisor, the bottom rung of a ladder that took him fifteen years to climb.

When Brandon Stoddard resigned as head of ABC Entertainment in March 1989, Iger, who had graduated from Ithaca in 1973 and joined ABC the following year, got the job at 38, and one of his first decisions was a bet on David Lynch and Mark Frost. The pilot of Twin Peaks had been ordered before he arrived; Iger pushed a sceptical New York office to commit to a series. A few years later he had to talk Capital Cities chief Dan Burke into airing Steven Bochco’s NYPD Blue, a police drama that tested what American network television would show at ten o’clock. Burke’s answer, as Bochco later recalled it, amounted to: you had better be right. Iger was named president and chief operating officer of Capital Cities/ABC in 1994, and when Disney bought the company in 1995 he came with it.

The next decade was an apprenticeship under Michael Eisner, first running Walt Disney International, then as president and chief operating officer from 2000. When the board named him Eisner’s successor in March 2005, the company’s animation division was losing ground to Pixar and its relationship with Jobs had soured. Iger took over on 1 October 2005 and within four months had announced a $7.4 billion all-stock deal for Pixar, which turned Jobs into Disney’s largest individual shareholder and put Pixar’s leadership in charge of Disney’s own animation studio.

The Pixar deal set the pattern. Marvel Entertainment followed in 2009 for about $4 billion, and Lucasfilm in 2012 for roughly the same sum. Iger became chairman in 2012, opened Shanghai Disney Resort in 2016, and in March 2019 closed the $71.3 billion purchase of most of 21st Century Fox’s film and television business. That November, Disney+ went live. That year Time named him Businessperson of the Year and Random House published his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, a management book disguised as a career story.

The weak point in that record is the chapter Iger wrote last. His departure date moved more than once during his first tenure, and Tom Staggs, the chief operating officer long treated as the heir, left the company in 2016 without getting the job. When he finally handed the chief executive role to Bob Chapek in February 2020, he stayed on as executive chairman, then left at the end of 2021. In November 2022 the board fired Chapek and called Iger back. The second term was a different job: about 7,000 job cuts, a streaming business that had to stop losing money, and a proxy fight with Nelson Peltz that Iger won in April 2024 when shareholders re-elected all twelve of the company’s board nominees. In July 2023, with writers and actors on strike, he called their demands “not realistic”. And the Fox purchase, the largest of all his deals, loaded Disney with debt just before the pandemic shut its parks.

Chapek has now put his version on paper. Behind the Castle Walls, his memoir written with Don Yaeger for Gallery Books, accuses Iger of a “relentless three-year campaign to push me out.” It is one man’s account, written by the executive the board removed, but it presses on the question Iger’s admirers least like to ask: how a chief executive who built a reliable pipeline for superheroes never built one for his own job.

The handover that stuck came at Disney’s annual meeting on 18 March 2026, when Josh D’Amaro, who had run the parks and experiences division, became chief executive and Dana Walden took the newly created post of president and chief creative officer. Iger remains a senior adviser and board member until he retires from the company on 31 December 2026. In April he rejoined Thrive Capital, Kushner’s venture firm, as an adviser. In August, at the D23 fan convention in Anaheim, Disney made him a Disney Legend, with D’Amaro introducing him on stage.

Four days earlier, ESPN had reported that Iger and Kushner had agreed to buy the Lakers from Mark Walter for $12.5 billion, a record for a professional sports team. “The deal came together in three days,” Iger said. It is not done. The sale needs the approval of at least 23 of the NBA’s 30 owners, the owners did not vote on it at their September meeting, and Jeanie Buss is contesting her siblings’ plan to sell the Buss family’s remaining 17.8 per cent stake to the new group. Iger is not new to team ownership: in 2024 he and his wife, the journalist Willow Bay, took control of the women’s soccer club Angel City FC.

Iger and Bay married in 1995 and have two sons; he has two daughters from his first marriage, to Susan Iger. Beyond the Disney titles, he holds an honorary knighthood from the British Crown, awarded in 2022, and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in October 2024.

What comes next depends on a vote of NBA owners, which ESPN has reported is expected in November, and on a Buss family dispute heading back to court in December. If both go his way, the man who spent half a century selling stories will start 2027 with a job measured by a scoreboard, and with Luka Dončić, rather than a studio slate, carrying his reputation.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, Bob Iger, Los Angeles Lakers, Bob Chapek, Josh D’Amaro, The Walt Disney Company, pixar