Abigail Disney: “There is such a thing as too much money”

**Reema Grace** (0:02)
I remember as a kid watching my parents pull out a calculator and going over their budget. They were immigrants, new to North Carolina, and each month they made sure they had enough, not just to cover the bills, but to also send money back to our relatives in Gaza and in Egypt. I'd always overhear them talking about how much to give and who needed help that month. They approached it as a kind of responsibility, an important way for them to show their care.
I kept thinking about that memory while working on this week's episode because it was one of the first ways I understood that giving money away can be an expression of love but also of duty. It can reveal what we believe we owe other people and the kind of person we want to be.
I am Reema Grace and welcome to This Is Uncomfortable, the weekly podcast for Marketplace about life and how money messes with it. This week, we're bringing you a special episode made in partnership with LAist Studios and Creative Fundraising Advisors. I'm talking with Abigail Disney. Abigail is the grand niece of Walt Disney. Her grandfather was Roy Disney, Walt's brother and business partner. She's inherited substantial wealth from her family. And in another version of her life, she could have stayed quiet and kept all the money she'd inherited. But instead, she spent decades giving it away, more than $80 million, and using her name to challenge the systems that made her wealthy in the first place. She's written op-eds urging lawmakers to tax rich people like her.

**Abigail Disney** (1:27)
If I'm paying a lower effective rate than my assistant is, something seems to be fundamentally not right.

**Reema Grace** (1:33)
She made a documentary that takes on Disney for how it treats its workers.

**Abigail Disney** (1:37)
By show of hands, how many of you have someone you know that works at Disney that's on food stamps?

**Reema Grace** (1:44)
And she's gotten arrested at climate protests.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:46)
I'm sick and tired of watching people take off in private planes to Aspen to talk about the freaking environment.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:53)
I'm hoping to get arrested.

**Reema Grace** (1:57)
Abigail's financial circumstances are extraordinary. But the tensions she spent her life navigating feel pretty familiar. Like, what do we owe other people? How do we know when the values we inherited no longer fit? And what happens when those values put us at odds with the people and institutions we were taught to protect?
I met up with Abigail in New York in the spring of 2025 When we sat down to talk, I wanted to understand how she went from feeling deeply uncomfortable with her wealth to publicly questioning the company that created it and why even after giving away millions, she's still trying to make sense of what she owes.
So I want to start at the beginning for you, or at least a pivotal beginning. When you turned 21, you inherited a lot of money.

**Abigail Disney** (2:44)
Yes, I did.

**Reema Grace** (2:46)
Can you take me to that moment? Like, what does it actually look like? Are you at a table with financial advisors and your family, and there's like a formal handover?

**Abigail Disney** (2:53)
No, it wasn't anything like, although I will say I was at tables with advisors from the time I was about 18, you know, kind of getting me ready. And then at 21, what I actually inherited was income out of a trust. And it was just, you know, enough to buy a car, enough to fly around and be on vacation a lot.

**Reema Grace** (3:14)
Yeah, you were good.

**Abigail Disney** (3:15)
Yeah, exactly. I was set. Way more set than any of my friends were. And then when I was 25, 30 and 35, I would inherit the corpus of the trust in thirds. And what I inherited was mostly Disney shares, which were actually worth all that much in the 1980s. They became worth more as we got into the 90s and the 2000s. So I remember sitting at a meeting with a bunch of financial advisors saying to me, you have $10 million. Isn't that great? And that was great. I remember thinking, and they all be there in their suits and ties. And I'd be in my ratty torn-up t-shirt or whatever else.
I was like, I just wasn't comfortable with anything about it. And I thought, no one should have $10 million.
Only a bad person would accept this. And I need to give it all away.

**Reema Grace** (4:03)
Oh, you felt like that.

**Abigail Disney** (4:04)
Oh yeah, right away. But the truth is, that I have to cop to, is I never did. Because I was too scared. And as I got older, I met other women who had experiences like mine.