I know we like to say "go woke, go broke" around here, but holy cow this is a pretty literal example of that:
Disney said Wednesday it is planning to reorganize into three segments, while also cutting thousands of jobs and slashing costs.
Those "three sections" are namely:
- Disney Entertainment, which includes most of its streaming and media operations
- An ESPN division that includes the TV network and the ESPN+ streaming service
- A Parks, Experiences and Products unit.
It wouldn't be unreasonable to interpret this as a simple redeployment of company resources. But the grim news from the rest of the company indicates it might be something more than that:
On Wednesday, during its quarterly earnings call with investors, Disney also announced it would be cutting $5.5 billion in costs, which will be made up of $3 billion from content, excluding sports, and the remaining $2.5 billion from non-content cuts. Disney executives said about $1 billion in cost cutting was already underway since last quarter.
Disney also said it would be eliminating 7,000 jobs from its workforce. That would be about 3% of the roughly 220,000 people it employed as of Oct. 1, according to an SEC filing, with roughly 166,000 in the U.S. and about 54,000 internationally.
Those are some big numbers.
There's more than a little bit of economic turmoil out there, of course, so it's not surprising that many companies are having to downsize and/or make themselves leaner and meaner to weather what looks to be a coming storm.
Still, is it wrong to blame the hit this company is taking on the fact that it's an insufferably woke corporation that is ruining its own valuable brand by taking a hard-left turn on every conceivable cultural issue? Would that be an unfair assessment?
