For weeks, we’ve been watching the lead-up to Disney’s annual shareholders meeting.
Cinderella Castle
The Walt Disney Company has been in a proxy battle with activist investor Nelson Peltz and his company Trian Partners. Trian had put forth nominations for Peltz and former Disney finance chief Jay Rasulo to take two seats on Disney’s board of directors. Disney CEO Bob Iger has publicly spoken against these nominations, but now that we’re getting closer to the big meeting, we’re starting to see how the shareholders are voting!
As of Tuesday, April 2nd, more than half of Disney’s shareholders have voted, according to the Wall Street Journal. With those votes in, Disney has started to pull ahead in the poll, with their preferred list of board members currently earning more votes than Trian’s two nominees.
The Walt Disney Company headquarters in California
Disney had previously put forth a list of 12 nominees for the board seats, encouraging shareholders to vote for those picks. Iger spoke out against Peltz and Rasulo as nominees, noting that adding them to the Disney board would be “disruptive.” Several big-time investors publicly supported Disney’s nominees, including Lucasfilm founder George Lucas and the grandchildren of Walt Disney himself.
©Disney
The Wall Street Journal reports that BlackRock, Disney’s second-largest shareholder, is among the investors supporting Disney. The company owns around 78 million Disney shares, giving it a 4.2% stake worth around $9.5 billion. There are no guarantees that Disney will remain ahead in the votes, however, as shareholders can continue casting their votes through the annual meeting on Wednesday.
©Disney
We’ll continue to keep an eye on the votes and see how things are progressing through the meeting. We’re expecting some big news to come from the shareholder meeting as well, so stay tuned to DFB for the latest.
Disney Board Member Comments on Iger’s Successor — Click Here!
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Everytime one of these type people gets seats on board. The companies have gone down in flame because the worry about money only and not the brand of the family. Does not take a rocket sciencetist to see through the problems if given a chance on the board this will create.
Is it no inappropriate to leak the voting count before it is finalized? Just another way of “Rigging” the vote.
Unfortunately, the current board has placed politics as its core and has forgotten about Disney magic.