The Walt Disney Company

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Have I ever shown you my Mickey Mouse impression?

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
You've done your Mario impression for me in the past.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:08)
They're a little similar.

**David Rosenthal** (0:10)
All right, give me Mickey, give me Mickey. Oh boy, will you look at that.
That is really good. You sound like Walt himself doing Mickey.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:20)
Right, didn't he do Mickey for like 20 years?

**David Rosenthal** (0:23)
Yep, yep, yep. He didn't at the very first, and then one of the animators convinced him to do it, and then, yeah, he did it for 20 years.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
Have I ever given you my Donald Duck impression? Oh, wow.

**David Rosenthal** (0:33)
Okay, well, now, do I need to sit down for this one?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
You might need to. All right, here we go.

**David Rosenthal** (0:42)
Oh, that's about right. That's about right. I have a great Donald Duck trivia for you coming up, but I'm going to save it.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:47)
All right, save it. Save it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:49)
You're going to be blown away. I'm pretty sure you didn't find it.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:51)
Great. All right, on to the episode.

**David Rosenthal** (0:53)
Let's do it.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:10)
Welcome to the spring 2026 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (1:19)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:20)
And we are your hosts. Today, listeners, we finally tell the story of the Walt Disney Company.
Unbelievably, in 11 years of doing Acquired, we have never told Walt's story. And it's been a glaring omission. It is the entertainment company, different than all the rest. It's over 100 years old. And it has played a prominent role in almost all of your childhoods. And if you're a parent, likely your parenting journey too.

**David Rosenthal** (1:49)
Oh, yes.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:50)
I'm looking at you, David Rosenthal.

**David Rosenthal** (1:51)
Oh, yes. And it has played a prominent role in Acquired history too. Our very first episode, Pixar, done Lucasfilm, we've done Marvel, done ESPN.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:02)
Although those are a whole different version of Acquired, we may need to decanonize those and redo them the proper way.

**David Rosenthal** (2:09)
As part of this.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:10)
Listeners, since there are tons of biographies and documentaries and places analyzing Walt's psyche, we're going to focus today on Acquired's sweet spot. Which is the business.
What is it that Walt's merry band did from the 1920s onward that made them succeed uniquely well in Hollywood? And when you look at Disney's profits today, it isn't a whole different league than Paramount or Universal or Warner Brothers or any of the other sort of classic Hollywood studios. The business of feature film production is a mediocre one, especially by the standards of what we study on this show here with Acquired, except for Disney.

**David Rosenthal** (2:48)
Yes, exactly.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:49)
And I will say, I am a huge Disney fan. I grew up on Aladdin and The Lion King. My first movie in theaters was Beauty and the Beast. I'm a huge Star Wars nerd, and my wall was plastered with Toy Story posters growing up. But somehow, I knew nothing about the company's early history before starting this research.

**David Rosenthal** (3:08)
Nor did I.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:09)
For example, it started in Kansas City.
There was a character that was supposed to be Mickey Mouse before Mickey Mouse, but was lost in a contract dispute. Or that many of the movies I watched in my childhood are actually from 50 years before I was even born. Snow White was produced before World War II, Pinocchio, Bambi. These films are from the 30s and 40s. They even predate the existence of televisions in people's homes.

**David Rosenthal** (3:39)
Yep.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:40)
And importantly for acquired roots, this really is a technology story. Giant innovations that often bet the whole company on things like synchronized sound, or the crazy idea of a feature-length animated movie at all. Or the multi-plane camera to photograph the whole thing and turn it into a movie. And of course, building a giant theme park in Anaheim when nothing else like it existed. And they really did invent the entire concept of the flywheel business model that so many entrepreneurs are trying to copy.

**David Rosenthal** (4:12)
Oh yes.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:12)
So today, listeners, is the Walt Disney Company, Part 1, Walt's Era.

**David Rosenthal** (4:19)
Woo.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:19)
Well, big news from here at Acquired HQ.
This episode has a companion PDF with visuals, charts, tables, and illustrations of key concepts, including Acquired's version of the Disney Flywheel. We did a pilot of the idea after our Vanguard episode, and we got such overwhelming positive response that we are doing it again. So you can get access and follow along by clicking the link in the show notes.