SOTS 10AM: Exclusive: Disney CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on new deal 12/11/25

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Sara Eisen (1:01)

Good Thursday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber. We are live, as always, from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Big interview coming your way in just a few minutes. Disney CEO Bob Iger, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman join us exclusively to talk about the breaking news this morning around a content and investment deal between those two companies.

Plus, the latest on this big pullback for Oracle that's weighing on the whole tech space today. Stocks down 15 percent. Media investor Mario Gabelli will be with us to talk about the drama surrounding Warner Bros. and this flood of news in the media world. He can talk about all of it, owns Oracle too. But David, let's start with Disney. OpenAI News, you broke this morning. Just bring us up to speed.

David Faber (1:42)

Yeah. Listen, obviously the news is out. It's a three-year deal between the two companies. It's going to make more than 200 characters, Disney characters, and of course, we're talking about a wide variety of those people, not just the cartoons that many of us remember from our youth, but the Star Wars characters, Marvel characters, the Simpsons. You go on and on from there. And you can imagine, of course, there's always been an IP issue here in terms of the use of those characters on short form video players such as Sora, where Disney's not getting anything from it. And in fact, concurrently with this news today, they are also issuing a cease and desist letter to Google for that very practice, the use of many of those Disney characters in a fashion in which they're not getting compensated. And they say, hey, you've got to stop your users from using these different characters. What does it all mean? Well, on Sora, you're going to be able to use not the voice, but certainly the image of so many of these characters. And in fact, there is an opportunity now for Disney Plus to use some of what is created on its own platform. The deal also will involve an exchange of a billion dollars from Disney in an investment into OpenAI at the current valuation, which we all assume is right around a half a trillion dollars. That's where employees recently sold stock, at least at that valuation. And it also does include warrants, don't have any specifics in terms of where they're priced for Disney to increase its equity investment over time. So certainly plenty of questions around this, guys, that we will be able to put to both Mr. Iger and Mr. Altman a little less than a half hour from now. Not to mention, of course, so many other things conceivably that we might at least get to a little bit.

Carl Quintanilla (3:22)

Oh, yeah, there's going to be a ton to get to in both media and tech. Meantime, a busy morning, let's get some wholesale inventories data with Rick Santelli. Hey, Rick.

Rick Santelli (3:30)

Hi, Carl and Dee. We're looking at our final read on wholesale inventories, and it jumps to up half a 1%. That equals ties where we were in February this year. To find a higher number, you go to January this year, which means it's tied for the second biggest inventory pop of 2025 But here's the fly in the ointment. While inventories are going up, sales are going down. We were expecting up 4 tenths to up half a 1% on the sales side. Comes in down 2 tenths. Down 2 tenths will be the weakest since May of this year, and it really does underscore that both of those are moving in directions we'd rather not see. You'd rather see inventories closer to zero, and the sales basically cleaning up the shelves. This morning we saw a 100,000 drop on continuing claims. And if you recall, last week we had a kind of questionable drop on initial claims, which reversed this week. The culprit, most likely seasonal adjustments for the Thanksgiving holiday off. Remember that continuing claims is a week in arrears to initial claims. Back to you.