Former Disney CEO Bob Iger opened up on a handful of deals that never were in a new Financial Times feature.
The story, which included a series of interviews leading up to Iger’s exit from Disney earlier this year (he remains on the board for now), also touched on Iger’s uneasy relationship with Bob Chapek, among other topics.
Perhaps the most newsworthy comment from Iger was confirmation that Disney held acquisition talks with the tech giant Apple, though it sounds like those talks didn’t go very far: “We talked about it internally, and we had some conversations with Apple about it, but it never went anywhere. Well, Apple didn’t show that much interest.”
Iger, of course, used to sit on Apple’s board of directors, and was close friends with Apple founder Steve Jobs. In his 2019 memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, Iger wrote extensively about his friendship with Jobs, who financed and help create Pixar and sold it to Disney in 2006.
“I believe that if Steve were still alive, we would have combined our companies, or at least discussed the possibility very seriously,” he wrote in the book.
