Josh D’Amaro is two months into the Disney top job and already he’s sent the memo every new CEO sends: we’re cutting 1,000 jobs. Studio, TV, ESPN, Product & Tech. The castmembers who kept the magic running while the C-suite argued about streaming margins are cleaning out their desks so D’Amaro can prove to Wall Street he means business.
Nothing says “happiest place on earth” like watching your boss announce your layoff in the third paragraph of a company-wide email. Disney is sitting on a $180 billion market cap. The first real move of the new regime is to squeeze a thousand salaries off the payroll — a rounding error for the balance sheet, a mortgage panic for every family that got the call this morning.
This is the playbook. Snap did it last week. Oracle cleared 30,000 in October with a 6am email. Every new CEO takes the stage, says “a more focused company,” and the stock ticks up while another thousand people who actually built something get told they’re inefficient. Nobody in the Disney boardroom is losing sleep over the magic. They’re losing it over the quarterly report.