Bob Iger

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Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger says that he is focused on not repeating the same succession mistake he made last time.

“I’ve tried hard to conduct my own postmortem, just so that we as a company don’t do it again,” Iger said Wednesday. “What did we do wrong? And we discovered certain things that we could do better.”

The board’s current succession process “is robust right now,” Iger added, committing that he would be stepping aside in two and a half years when his contract is up.

Iger discussed the matter during an interview at The New York Times Dealbook Summit in New York on Wednesday afternoon. Iger was interviewed on stage by Andrew Ross Sorkin, directly following Vice President Kamala Harris.

Iger was spotted sitting in the front row during Harris’ interview, and Harris walked over to greet him after her conversation ended. During the conversation, balloons spelling out the phrase “cease fire” floated outside the window behind Iger and Sorkin on stage.

Sorkin did not shy away from hot-button topics, grilling Iger about the company’s feud with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and about Disney’s decision to pull its advertising from Elon Musk’s X.

“I have a lot of respect for Elon and what he has accomplished,” Iger said. “We know that Elon is larger than life in many respects, and that his name is very much connected to the companies he founded or owns. By him taking the position he took in a public manner, we felt that the association was not necessarily a positive one for us.”

Musk, as it happens, is set to be interviewed at the summit later in the day.

But Iger also said that it is “perfectly reasonable” for CEOs to weigh in on geopolitical events, and that in some ways CEOs, as public leaders, is something they “get paid to do.”

Iger also discussed the activist investor Nelson Peltz, who is seeking board seats at the company.

“The board has an obligation to listen to investors. I am certain that the board will hear them out as to what their plans are,” Iger said of Peltz, adding that he told the board that “we have to obviously contend with them in some form, but don’t force me to take my eye off the ball [in managing the company].”

“It’s not like we have a number of empty [board] seats,” Iger quipped.

Elsewhere, Iger also discussed the company’s film output, responding to a 1966 letter from Walt Disney complaining about the push to create sequels.

“I don’t want to apologize for making sequels,” Iger responded, adding that “there has to be an artistic reason” to make them.

“We have made too many… but we will only greenlight a sequel if we think the story that the creators want to tell is worth telling,” he added.

As for Disney’s linear assets, Iger confirmed that in his now-infamous CNBC interview back in July, he was floating some possibilities to see how the market would react, but he added that ABC as it stands now is “not for sale.”

“That was a means of me saying to Wall Street that my head was not in the sand,” Iger said. “I did not want to get accused of being kind of an old media executive.”