Kevin: Early October 2016. Brentwood, California. Bob Iger is sitting in his home study with a laptop open, a phone on the desk, and a deal that's about to close. He's 65 years old, 11 years into running the Walt Disney Company, and he spent the last several weeks negotiating the acquisition of Twitter. Both boards have already approved. The lawyers are drafting, and Goldman Sachs is working the weekend. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder and CEO, has actually been a member of Disney's board of directors since 2013. He considers Iger a mentor. The purchase price is somewhere around $15 billion, which Iger himself will later call pretty cheap. On Saturday night, Iger goes through the user data one more time. He looks at the bots, he looks at the troll farms, he reads his own Twitter notifications and asks himself why he's on this platform at all. This triggers the nightmare scenarios. He thinks about phone calls from parents whose children are being harassed on a service that now has a Mickey Mouse logo on it. He thinks about foreign governments accusing Disney of censorship. He thinks about hate speech complaints addressed to the company that built Cinderella's castle. He's shaken. He doesn't sleep that night. Sunday morning, he opens his laptop. Types an email to Disney's board of directors. The subject line reads, Cold Feet. He lays out his reasoning, hits send, and picks up the phone. He calls Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is, in Iger's own words, stunned but very polite. Iger wishes him luck, hangs up, and feels a wave of relief. The news breaks within days. Twitter's stock drops precipitously. Other bidders fall away. Twitter is alone again by the end of October. And then on November 8th, Donald Trump wins the presidency. Fourteen months after that, Disney announces the acquisition of 21st Century Fox for about $52 billion. In 2019, Disney Plus launches. In 2022, after a tirade about cancel culture and a misguided understanding of the First Amendment, Elon Musk buys Twitter. For $44 billion and renames it X. But what if Iger doesn't get cold feet? What if he decides to go through with the bargain basement price purchase of one of the most popular destinations on the internet? Let's hit Ctrl Z and rewrite history. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask: what happens if they go the other way? Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls. With real alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision, we hit Control Z, we try it the other way, and we see what changes. In 2016, Disney had a Netflix problem. Disney owned the content. Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, the animated vault, even ESPN and ABC. But consumers were watching all of it through Netflix's storefront on the Netflix app with the Netflix logo in the corner. Disney was the supplier, but Netflix was the relationship. And in media, Whoever owns the relationship with the customer eventually owns everything else. Iger knew this. For years, he had been having internal conversations where he pushed the idea that Disney needed its own direct line to consumers, some kind of digital platform with global reach that could carry Disney content straight to the audience without a middleman. The problem is that the company didn't know how to build one from scratch. So buying was the only realistic path. Twitter in the fall of 2016 was available. The numbers told a brutal story. Twitter had 317 million monthly active users, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to Facebook's billion and a half. The stock had opened at $26 in its November 2013 IPO and climbed past $73 within weeks, but by May of 2016, It had fallen to an all-time low of $13. Revenue for 2015 was $2.2 billion with a net loss of $521 million. The company had never turned an annual profit. After a short leave, Jack Dorsey had returned as CEO in 2015, but the turnaround wasn't materializing. In September 2016, Twitter hired Goldman Sachs to find a buyer. The stock jumped 20% on those rumors. And five major suitors circled: Salesforce, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Disney. Disney became the front runner immediately. Not only was Dorsey on the board, he had a close relationship with Bob Iger. Iger pitched it internally as a distribution play, a way to get Disney content in front of millions of users worldwide without building an app from zero. The price was only $15 billion, which was significantly less than Twitter's peak valuation. And as Iger would later acknowledge, cheap for what you were getting. Both boards approved. Lawyers started drafting up the materials, and Iger went home for the weekend. What changed his mind was the product itself. In his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, Iger wrote that he started by looking at his own Twitter feed and finding it useful. A good way to follow 15 or 20 subjects that he cared about. Then he switched to his notifications from Iger. And you're immediately saying, Why am I doing this? Why do I endure this pain? Anyone who's ever been on Twitter absolutely feels his pain. With Twitter's help, Disney had looked closely at the user base and discovered that a substantial portion of accounts, not a majority, but a significant share, were not real. The robots, There were automated accounts, troll farms, and then Iger started imagining the headlines. Hate speech on a Disney platform. Accusations of political censorship directed at the company that ran Disneyland. The nastiness is extraordinary, he later told an interviewer. So he wrote the cold fee email. He made the call, and the deal died. By October 14th, Salesforce had dropped out too, and for the same reasons. Mark Benioff said it wasn't the right fit. Twitter was alone. The company laid off 9% of its entire workforce on October 27th. Disney was back to square one, so Iger went looking for a different acquisition. In December of 2017, Disney announced it was buying the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox for $52 billion in stock. The deal brought in the 20th Century Fox Film Studio, FX Networks, National Geographic, a controlling stake in Hulu, Star India with its 720 million monthly viewers, and the technical infrastructure that actually became the backbone of Disney Plus. The final price after Comcast stepped in and forced a bidding war landed at $71 billion. Disney Plus launched on November 12, 2019, the same day The Mandalorian premiered. Baby Yoda became one of those rare things that crosses from fandom into the culture at large, the kind of moment that makes a streaming service feel like an event. Within months, Disney Plus had more than 28 million subscribers, and by the end of 2022, it had passed 160 million. All of that exists because Iger got cold feet on a Sunday morning in October. The other timeline starts with a man who doesn't. Iger looks at the same data, feels the same nausea, and thinks about Pixar. Now, he'd bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.5 billion, and his board had been terrified. He'd bought Marvel in 2009 for $4 billion, and Wall Street called him crazy. He'd bought Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4 billion as well, and half the industry thought he was overpaying for a franchise that had peaked in 1983. As a Star Wars fan, I am willing to fight anybody who says that, but I understand the thought. For Iger, every time his gut had been right, the doubters had been wrong. He decides Twitter is the same kind of bet. So he doesn't write the email. Instead, he calls his general counsel and tells him to finish the paperwork. On Monday, October 10th, 2016, Disney announces the acquisition of Twitter for approximately $15 billion. Jack Dorsey takes a new role overseeing Disney's digital platform strategy. Twenty eight days later, Donald Trump wins the presidency. On election night 2016, Donald Trump has about 13 million Twitter followers. By inauguration in January, that number passes 20 million. But by the middle of 2017, it's 30 million and climbing. Every tweet, every insult, every 3 a.m. rant about the failing New York Times, every attack on a federal judge or a union leader or an 18 year old college student who asked a tough question at a town hall. All of it is now hosted on a Disney property. Iger's own politics aren't a mystery in 2016. He's a Hillary Clinton donor. He'd actually even considered running for president himself as a Democrat. After the election, he joins Trump's Presidential Business Advisory Council because he thinks being in the room is better than being shut out. He justified this to Disney shareholders in March of 2017, saying I think there's an opportunity when you're in the room where it happens to express opinions I believe would be in the best interest of the company and its shareholders. On June 1st, 2017, Trump announces that the US is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. In the real timeline, Iger resigned from the council that same day via an announcement on Twitter. But in the Ctrl Z timeline, Iger can't post a public protest. On a platform his company owns while simultaneously moderating the account of the president he's protesting. The CEO of Disney can't criticize a sitting president on a Disney product that hosts the president's most powerful communications channel. So he resigns from the council quietly through a press release, and the moment passes without the viral force that it carried in real life. That's a small thing. The big thing is what I's team is learning every single day. About what it means to be the editorial authority behind the most consequential social media account on the planet. Trump attacks a federal judge on Twitter. That's a Disney platform. Trump retweets a white nationalist account. That's a Disney platform. Trump calls the press the enemy of the people. Disney is the company that employs ABC News journalists, reporters who now work for the same corporation that provides the megaphone for attacks. on their profession. Every moderation decision, every content policy call, every algorithmic choice about what gets amplified and what gets suppressed is a decision made by the same company that runs It's a Small World. Real-world Twitter executives spent four years wrestling with this exact problem. They developed policies, they applied labels, they debated internally, they got attacked from both sides and ultimately, They punted on the hardest calls by carving out a public interest exception for world leaders. Those executives worked at a tech company that everyone knew, but nobody loved. Twitter was famous, but it wasn't a brand that lived in your kid's bedroom, or at least it shouldn't. Iger runs the company that does. When Twitter's head of trust and safety made a moderation call in 2018, nobody picketed a theme park over it. When Disney's head of trust and safety makes the same call, parents are writing letters. August 12th, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia. A white nationalist rally called Unite the Right turns violent. A car drives into a crowd of counter-protesters and kills a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer. On August 15th, Trump holds a press conference at Trump Tower in New York City and says there were very fine people on both sides. Corporate CEOs resign from Trump's advisory councils in waves. Kenneth Frazier of Merck goes first, then the head of Under Armour, then the CEO of Intel. Iger is already off the council, but that doesn't shield him from the question every journalist in America wants to ask. Is Disney going to do anything about Trump's account? Iger gives the same answer that real-world Twitter did. The platform won't unilaterally act against the account of a sitting president. The answer costs Disney on both sides. Conservatives are angry about content moderation. Progressives are angry about the lack of it. Theme park attendance softens during the worst news cycles, not catastrophically, but for the first time in two decades, there are weeks where the headlines about Disney have nothing to do with movies or theme parks and everything to do with what the president just posted. And behind all of it, the bigger problem is forming. That same year, Rupert Murdoch is looking to sell the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox. In the real timeline, he chose Disney for two specific reasons. Disney stock was the strongest currency in media, and regulators would clear a Disney deal more easily than a Comcast deal. But both of those depend on Disney being a politically uncontroversial company. In the Control Z timeline, Disney is the most politically radioactive media company in America. Murdoch, who understands media politics as well as anyone alive, takes one look at the Disney brand with Twitter attached and sells to Comcast instead. That one act rewrites the streaming wars. The Fox deal brought Disney a controlling stake in Hulu, the X-Men and Fantastic Four film rights, the FX cable networks. And the production infrastructure that became the spine of Disney Plus. In the Control Z timeline, all of that goes to Comcast. In turn, Comcast launches a streaming service in 2019 built on NBC Fox, Hulu, and the technical platform it had already had from its earlier acquisition of NBC Universal. It's essentially Peacock on steroids. Disney has nothing comparable. Disney's streaming product launches late. Sometime in 2020 during the pandemic. Built from scratch without the Fox Library, without Hulu, without Hot Stars footprint in India, the Mandalorian still premieres on the same day, but overall, it's a smaller library, a weaker infrastructure, and a fraction of the audience. Baby Yoda becomes a reference that Star Wars fans recognize, but it's not a cultural event that your 60-year-old aunt can text you about. By the end of 2020, Netflix has nearly 200 million global subscribers. The Comcast service is around 50 million. Disney's late entry struggles to crack 10 million. And then comes January 6th, 2021. In the real timeline, here's what happened. On January 8th, two days after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Twitter's trust and safety team permanently suspended Donald Trump's account. The ban was signed off by Jack Dorsey and announced in a corporate blog post. The stated reason was two specific tweets that violated Twitter's glorification of violence policy. Trump had 88 million followers at the time of the suspension. That decision was made by a tech company's content moderation team. It was a company built for this kind of call, or at least a company that had spent years preparing for that possibility. In the Control Z timeline, the same decision lands on the desk of the Walt Disney Company. It's morning, January 6th, 2021. Iger is in Burbank watching cable news. Suddenly, the breaking news coverage hits. The Capitol has been overrun by Donald Trump supporters at his behest. Rioters carrying Confederate flags walk through the rotunda. Trump is tweeting from the White House. ABC News, which is Disney, is broadcasting the assault live. Every minute that passes, the company that made Bambi is hosting the account of the man whose supporters are smashing windows in the Senate chamber. By this time, Iger has spent four years deferring this decision. Every time the question came up, whether it was Charlottesville or the Enemy of the People tweets, or the retweets of conspiracy accounts, or the false claims about mail-in ballots in the months before the 2020 election, there was always a reason to wait. There was a policy to point to, a precedent about world leaders, or even a legal team counseling patients. But none of those reasons are working anymore, because the footage on his own network. Is showing what happens when the deferral runs out of road. He calls Dorsey, who is still running the platform under Disney's umbrella. Within hours, Disney announces the suspension. The announcement doesn't come from an anonymous trust and safety team in San Francisco. It comes from a Disney corporate communications email signed by IGR, framed as a terms of service violation and a public safety decision. The CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Is putting his name on the decision to cut off the President of the United States. The reaction is instantaneous. Republican boycott calls start within 12 hours. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announces a tax status investigation into Disney's operations in Florida, where Disney World generates $40 billion a year in economic activity for the state. Texas Senator Ted Cruz introduces legislation stripping certain Disney trademark protections. Fox News runs days of wall-to-wall coverage framing the suspension as a Mickey Mouse Glove silencing a president. The hashtag boycott Disney trends on the platform Disney owns. Trump holds a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, attacks Iger by name, and announces a lawsuit. Now, the lawsuit is legally weak because the First Amendment applies to government restrictions on speech, not the content policies of private companies. Every constitutional scholar who looks at it can say that. But Discovery generates two years of headlines, anyways. Everything surfaces publicly. Internal Disney communications that no executive ever wanted to see in a courtroom, strategy memos about Trump's account, emails debating whether to apply warning labels, internal slack threads about specific tweets, all of this enters the public record. Hardest part, nobody is satisfied. Conservatives are furious about the ban. Progressives are furious that it took four years. The middle of America is fractured over whether the company that created Mickey Mouse should have the power to cut off a president's microphone. And while all of this plays out, Disney's streaming service is quietly dying in the background. The Mandalorian is really the only draw, and one show can't carry a platform. Iger steps down for the second time in late 2023, leaving the company in worse shape than when he came back. Pull back from one company and look at what the culture lost. The streaming wars settle into a two-horse race. Netflix owns International. Comcast, armed with the Fox Library in Hulu, owns the American Living Room. Disney's late entry limps along on a thin catalog of originals and the animated vault, pulling single-digit millions of subscribers while its competitors count in the hundreds of millions. The Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2024 is still the biggest franchise in Hollywood. The movies still open to $200 million weekends, but the spaces between them stretch longer, and the universe feels quieter in the gaps. Marvel Studios releases two or three movies a year instead of juggling movies and streaming series simultaneously. Characters like Wanda Maximoff, Kate Bishop, and Miss Marvel. Stay as supporting players in ensemble films instead of getting their own TV series. Kevin Fige is forced to run a tighter operation with a smaller canvas. The X-Men, Fantastic Four, and most importantly, Deadpool never come home to Marvel Studios. They stay at 20th Century Fox under Comcast. And Comcast keeps making X-Men movies the way Fox always did. Mid-budget, solid opening weekend, but pissing off all the hardcore fans. Ryan Reynolds makes a Deadpool 3 for Comcast that does well, but the crossover with the Avengers that fans spent a decade begging for stays a fantasy, because the characters live at two different companies. Lucasfilm in the Ctrl-Z timeline is stuck. Disney's streaming service exists, but with fewer than 10 million subscribers, it can't justify the budgets that ambitious television requires. The Last Jedi divided the fan base in 2017, solo underperformed in 2018, and every big Star Wars project is still a $200 million theatrical bet. Dave Falloni has spent almost two decades building a character named Ahsoka Tano from a teenage cartoon sidekick into one of the most beloved figures in the franchise. And in our world, Disney Plus gave him the budget and the platform to tell her story in live action. In the Control Z timeline, he has to pitch it as a feature film. Lucasfilm says no because the audience is too niche. Tony Gilroy, the writer behind The Born films, is available to do something ambitious with Star Wars, but without a streaming platform big enough to take a risk on a slow burn espionage drama called Andor, nobody greenlights it. Star Wars in the mid-2020s is a franchise that announces movies, delays them. And then sells merchandise from the original trilogy to parents who watched it as kids. But the political damage is where the real weight falls. In our world, the content moderation fights of 2020 and 2021 were arguments about Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, three tech companies that Americans had opinions about, but no emotional attachment to. Nobody grew up watching Twitter or Facebook. But in the Control Z timeline, the same arguments are about. Disney, the most recognizable family brand in America, is at the center of every fight about who gets silenced and whether private companies should have that power at all. Congressional hearings now feature Bob Iger in the witness chair, explaining content moderation policy to senators who are also asking him about when the next Pixar movie comes out because their grandkids are big fans. But the absurdity of it doesn't make the political consequences any less real. The DeSantis vs. Disney conflict over Florida's Parental Rights and Education Act lasted 18 months in our world. But now, DeSantis isn't fighting Disney over a press statement about a Florida education law. He's fighting the company that banned the president of the United States from its platform. So the political support behind him is broader, the war lasts longer, but it still ends the same way. Disney loses its Reedy Creek Special Tax District and tens of Billions of dollars in market cap. The cultural meaning of Disney itself changes. In the real world, Disney is the brand nobody wants to fight with because everyone secretly likes it. Parents who disagree about everything else agree that their kids should be able to watch Pixar movies. In the Control Z timeline, Disney is the brand that half the country boycotts and half thinks didn't act fast enough. We're going to Disney World carries political weight it hasn't carried in a hundred years of American childhood. Streaming in the Control Z timeline becomes a partisan act. People subscribe to the service that matches their politics. The shared space Disney occupied for a century, that last piece of American culture that genuinely belonged to everyone, gets paved over. The strange thing about the decision Iger actually made on that Sunday in October is that he didn't make it for noble reasons. He wasn't thinking about American democracy. He wasn't thinking about the safety of children online, or at least not in the abstract civic sense. He wasn't even thinking about the moral hazard of one corporation owning a major political communication platform. He was thinking about Disney's brand, about phone calls he didn't want to take. And about headlines he could already see writing themselves. And he especially decided he didn't want to see them next to Mickey Mouse. It was a corporate decision made on the basis of corporate self-interest. But it was the right call. What saved Disney wasn't foresight about Trump or January 6th or the fracture of American public life along the fault lines of social media. Iger didn't know any of that was coming, nobody did. What saved Disney is that the man at the top had spent his career operating on a single principle. The brand is the only real asset, and you don't put the brand somewhere you can't control. Twitter was somewhere he couldn't control. He recognized that on a Sunday morning, and he sent the email. A month later, Trump won the presidency. Real world Twitter spent Four years wrestling with the problem Disney would have inherited entirely. On January 8th, 2021, Twitter made the call that in the Control Z timeline would have fallen to Iger and the Disney brand. In October 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and turned it into a project nobody still fully understands to this day. If Disney had owned it, Iger would have been left holding something he couldn't sell and couldn't explain. Platform that had become too politically volatile to keep, but too embedded in American political life to simply shut down. Iger's own framing of that Sunday morning is two words. Cold feet. That's a better description than he probably realizes. Cold feet aren't strategy. Cold feet are the body refusing to do something the brain has already approved. Iger's brain and the Disney board. Had approved this deal, the bankers were already on the clock. The band who almost ended Disney as we know it was the same man who looked at his Twitter notifications on a Sunday morning and felt his stomach turn. The history we ended up getting: Disney owning Marvel, Star Wars and Hulu, Disney Plus, The Mandalorian as a cultural event, Hamilton turning Disney Plus into appointment streaming during the pandemic, all exists. Because Bob Iger trusted his stomach over his brain. The history we didn't get, where Disney becomes a politically toxic liability and Walt begins rolling over in his grave, is the one where he overruled it. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find the show and allows me to understand whether people actually enjoy it. Until next time. I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Control-Z with.