Wow. I have a low opinion of ABC as I said in another post, but this level of pettiness is still surprising to me.

It’s basically a fuck you to the shareholders. Hey we’ve got this dead asset someone will pay for but we won’t sell because they were mean to us.

Any exec who operates that way should be shown the door ASAP as they are likely doing similar emotional management of other aspects of the business.

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SoftTalker an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If they feel it's damaging to have it public, then it could be argued that selling it would be irresponsible. I'm not arguing it is or it isn't, but reputation has value and management of it is part of what shareholders expect.

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jfengel an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.

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hibikir an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's not that a shareholder won't care, but that the modern US company is such a large basket of businesses, it's impossible to put any pressure on a random business unit throwing money away. So, in practice, there's very little pressure to do things right, and a lot of pressure to do what your boss prefers, whether it actually helps the company's profitability or not. There can be negatives if you are doing massive damage to the company's image, but even then, ABC has done more than a little bit of that over the last couple of years to no ill effects. Just ask Kimmel.

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themafia 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> shareholders are Disney

Who's shareholders are the public.

> The shareholders aren't going to care

This is not a valid defense in court. You can't let "attitude of investors" override "sound financial decisionmaking."

	▲	slipheen 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not defending them or this behaviour but it sounds to me like they may think the message/threat this sends to silence future criticism from other people, outweighs the immediate sum. (Internally I'm sure they could probably phrase it some other less negative way such as chance of people confusing the brand as still owned by them, etc) association

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lotsofpulp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Disney's 2025 profit was $12B:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...

	▲	themafia 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		So what amount of profits insulates you from lack of fiduciary responsibility? "It's okay set millions of dollars on fire because we have billions in this pile over here!"