President-elect Donald Trump praised former Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter for exiting Disney and dumping his hefty entire stake in the “woke” Mouse House.
During a Monday event at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump said of Perlmutter in front of his supporters: “The guy went from stone-cold broke to owning Disney.”
“Then he got out of Disney because they went woke,” he continued, speaking about the former exec, who was in attendance. “He didn’t want woke Donald Duck, right?”
Disney CEO Bob Iger ousted the then 80-year-old Perlmutter in 2023, after his division — which was separate from Marvel Studios — was absorbed into other units of the company due to cost-cutting measures.
The billionaire who sold Marvel Entertainment to Disney in 2009 and who has long been known for his clashes with Iger, sold all of his stock — about 25.6 million shares — for almost $3 billion, earlier this year.
In the last three years, critics like conservative nonprofit American First Legal have slammed Disney for its “woke agenda,” which they claim has financially harmed the company and taken family-friendly programming and pushed an “anti-police and anti-White content.”
Perlmutter — an Israeli-born toy entrepreneur known to carry a gun in a leg holster, and who claimed to have kicked off his business career in the US with $250 in his pocket, had pushed for friend and activist investor Nelson Peltz to join the Disney board at the time.
When he had no luck, Peltz launched a proxy battle to install himself on the board, vowing he would cut costs and revamp Disney’s money-losing streaming business, as well as fix the company’s failed succession planning.
Peltz withdrew in February 2023 when Iger returned to the helm of Disney with a plan to restructure, cut costs and likely restore Disney’s dividend.
The move had put Perlmutter’s future into question ahead of the cuts, which included slashing 7,000 jobs at the time.
Perlmutter’s career at Disney had been waning in recent years.
In 2015, the Marvel chair famously clashed with Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, whom he wanted to fire, according to Iger, who spoke about the incident in an interview with CNBC in 2023.
The Disney chief stopped that from happening, which reportedly outraged Perlmutter.
Shortly after, Feige reorganized the Marvel Studios, centralizing the film division under himself with Perlmutter overseeing the TV division.
Perlmutter later lost oversight of Marvel TV shows in 2019, and found himself limited to smaller businesses like comics publishing and certain consumer products until recently.
Although Perlmutter had not been involved in any Marvel flicks since 2015, he helped the company greatly expanded its merchandising business by licensing properties like “X-Men” and “Spider-Man” to movie studios.
