
Disney almost bought Twitter in 2016 - edavis
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/12/disney-twitter-bob-iger
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pjc50
A decision more guaranteed to nuke both brands is hard to think of. As the
article says, the hate speech problem is extremely difficult to solve, but
Twitter _also_ has all sorts of NSFW, queer, and activist communities that are
the exact opposite of Disneyfication.

~~~
mc32
Yeah there was no way that that union would have worked.

They might as well have contemplated buying Reddit.

Imagine if it became a sanitized family friendly microblogging platform where
it was all pure, clean, fun conversation, anything not sparkly clean got
knocked off. That would have ensured its death and would have shrunk to maybe
10MM users total.

~~~
vl
Disney owns extremely diversified portfolio of companies, including, for
example UFC and ESPN. They would manage Twitter just fine.

~~~
vl
(To clarify, Disney owns ESPN, which has exclusive distribution deal with
UFC.)

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preommr
TIL Jack Dorsey is on the board of directors at Disney.

This on top of being the founder/ceo of both twitter and square.

I wonder what his secret is.

~~~
NelsonMinar
Arrogance.

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gameofcode
Jack Dorsey's been pretty active on the podcast scene recently, and I feel
it's harder to fake your personality in multiple long form conversations. I
never got a hint of arrogance from him.

On a side note, why do people love to paint being the CEO of two companies in
such a bad light? How is it different to a CEO of a conglomerate having
responsibility for multiple divisions?

~~~
dan-robertson
Generally shareholders would prefer a ceo whose incentives are aligned with
those of the company. On the one hand maybe it’s good that Dorsey could fuck
off from twitter if things went bad and not suffer too much from it: it allows
him to take risks and ceos not wanting to take reasonable risks as much as
shareholders would like (because they have a undiversified interest in their
company doing well but more importantly not doing badly whereas shareholders
are typically more diversified and so can accept a bigger loss) is a known
issue with many public companies. On the other hand, if he can fuck off and do
ok if things go bad, maybe he is less motivated to stop them going bad.

A second issue is that people may feel that he will not be able to do the job
properly if he is splitting his time between companies, and twitter have to
care about the opinions of their shareholders and their users and their
advertisers and their employees. Any of those groups may feel this. A main
part of the job of the CEO will be deciding what the companies values are and
making sure they are reflected by the firm’s actions. For Twitter at the
moment this seems like a harder job than for many companies so possibly it
would be even harder than usual to be a part-time CEO.

~~~
aspenmayer
He’s uniquely qualified to run the company:

1) he founded it;

2) he doesn’t depend on it for his own livelihood;

3) he has enough time and space; physically, mentally, financially, and
computationally to have proper distance from the company; and

4) Twitter is essentially feature-complete.

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BitwiseFool
If Disney had bought Twitter it would have gone away just like Tumblr.

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missedthecue
what if salesforce bought it?

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xnx
It's easy how Disney and Twitter would be a bad fit, but don't forget that
Hasbro (toy company) owns Death Row Records home to a group N.W.A. where the
"N" stands for the "n-word". [https://nypost.com/2019/08/25/hasbro-acquires-
gangster-rap-l...](https://nypost.com/2019/08/25/hasbro-acquires-gangster-rap-
label-death-row-records-as-part-of-4b-deal/)

~~~
dragonwriter
Hasbro owns Death Row because it bought another entertainment conglomerate
with lots of natural-fit-for-Hasbro properties that happened to also own Death
Row.

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markdown
> But: maybe? Presumably a Twitter under Disney would be a very different
> Twitter today.

We might have had to sign over to Disney copyright of all our tweets for 999
years?

~~~
pphysch
Disney would relentlessly astroturf shill their latest productions on Twitter?
Oh wait

I wonder if part of the calculus was that Disney could get a lot of marketing
value out of the platform by participating in it as Millions of Totally Real
Human Users without actually owning it. Ergo these PR liabilities gain
relative weight in the decision. Perhaps owning it would be a liability in
itself. Curious that Dorsey is on their board too.

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janeshmane
It's hard to imagine why the board thought that was a good idea. They
should've bought Twitch or something Twitch-like that could be more easily
molded to be "on brand".

~~~
numpad0
I understand why they saw fit, if you don’t look at their media tab, a lot of
influential content creators on Twitter are also Disney fans.

If you do look at their media tab, the story changes completely, but if you
don’t, the statistics solo should look beautiful.

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mandeepj
Google also almost bought Twitter. I guess the year was 2009.

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tonyedgecombe
I expect they planned to shut it down in 2011.

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efreak
Not quite. More likely they'd rebrand it, make some minor cosmetic changes,
then neglect it until only a hardcore group of fans remained. Then they'd
forget it exists.

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villgax
Ahhh hence that bullshit #Hastag based ownership of tweet thing

