A Zaz Wellness Check & The Crocodile’s Iger Fib

Trian founder partner Nelson Peltz has commenced a proxy battle against Disney to get the board seat Iger denied him.
It’s still not clear whether Nelson Peltz is going to continue to lobby privately for the Disney board seats he wants or whether he’ll go the public route again. Photo: Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
November 19, 2023

The Smiling Crocodile, Nelson Peltz, wants you to think he owns 30 million Disney shares, now worth $2.8 billion. That’s what he leaked to The Wall Street Journal on October 8—the day after Hamas attacked Israel. Then, on October 14, the Journal reported that Peltz, who controls the activist hedge fund Trian Fund Management, had upped his shares in Disney to 32.9 million shares, worth nearly $3.1 billion. If it were true, that would make Peltz and Trian one of Disney’s largest shareholders, with the power to exert substantial pressure on Bob Iger and the Disney board. (Though he would still own far fewer shares than the company’s two largest shareholders, State Street and BlackRock, which each owned more than 100 million shares, according to Disney’s 2023 proxy statement.)