Comment by jfengel
11 hours ago
ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.
11 hours ago
ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.
It's not that a shareholder won't care, but that the modern US company is such a large basket of businesses, it's impossible to put any pressure on a random business unit throwing money away. So, in practice, there's very little pressure to do things right, and a lot of pressure to do what your boss prefers, whether it actually helps the company's profitability or not. There can be negatives if you are doing massive damage to the company's image, but even then, ABC has done more than a little bit of that over the last couple of years to no ill effects. Just ask Kimmel.
>impossible to put any pressure on a random business unit throwing money away ... very little pressure to do things right ... pressure to do what your boss prefers, whether it [helps] profitability
This is frustrating as a consumer. Any further insight, on the solution side?
Hence my point of “if they’re doing this, they are likely making other emotional, anti-shareholder decisions”
Disney's 2025 profit was $12B:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...
Accuracy is important. Thank you for the correction.
$12B profit is obscenely large.
So what amount of profits insulates you from lack of fiduciary responsibility?
"It's okay set millions of dollars on fire because we have billions in this pile over here!"
The concept of fiduciary duty is an economic professors fantasy. When the shareholders of WB voted against David Zaslovs extraordinary 800m pay package the board ignored it. That's the "owners" voting to not give a crazy gift to the guy who was CEO for like 3 years and incredibly well paid.
No, what insulates them from fiduciary responsibility is the fact that there is no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. I’ll say that again: members and/or managers of an LLC, and officers and directors of a corporation owe no fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to make them money. The fiduciary duties owed under US law are as follows: 1) the duty to be informed; 2) the duty not to usurp corporate opportunities.
As far as I can tell the fiduciary duty to make money for the shareholders is something that Jack Welsh of GE said enough times that people remembered it. However, I’m always interested in additional details concerning the history of this meme, and happy to learn more.
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> shareholders are Disney
Who's shareholders are the public.
> The shareholders aren't going to care
This is not a valid defense in court. You can't let "attitude of investors" override "sound financial decisionmaking."
I'm not defending them or this behaviour but it sounds to me like they may think the message/threat this sends to silence future criticism from other people, outweighs the immediate sum.
(Internally I'm sure they could probably phrase it some other less negative way such as chance of people confusing the brand as still owned by them, etc) association