On his first official day as chief executive of The Walt Disney Company, Josh D’Amaro did something that told you everything about the kind of leader he intends to be. He didn’t hold a press conference. He didn’t ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. He wrote a memo.
It was March 31, 2026, a Monday, and D’Amaro addressed Disney’s roughly 225,000 employees with a letter that was equal parts mission statement, love letter to the company’s legacy, and declaration of intent. “Today is about all of you,” he wrote, according to a copy obtained by Business Insider. The memo thanked outgoing CEO Bob Iger, praised the company’s creative engine, and laid out a vision rooted in what D’Amaro called “relentless optimism.”
That phrase — relentless optimism — is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because the company D’Amaro now leads is simultaneously one of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates on Earth and one facing a thicket of challenges that would make even the most seasoned Fortune 500 executive pause. Cord-cutting continues to erode linear television revenues. The streaming wars have entered a brutal phase of consolidation and margin discipline. Theme park capital expenditure plans are ballooning to $60 billion over the next decade. And the political environment around Disney, particularly in Florida, remains charged despite a détente with Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration.
D’Amaro knows all of this. He’s been preparing for this moment for years.
The 55-year-old executive rose through Disney’s parks and experiences division, a unit he transformed from a steady cash generator into the company’s most profitable segment. Under his leadership as chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, the division posted record revenues exceeding $34 billion in fiscal 2024. He oversaw the rollout of dynamic pricing, the controversial but lucrative Genie+ system, and ambitious expansion plans including new lands at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. He was, by virtually every internal and external measure, the obvious successor to Iger — a CEO who himself had returned from retirement in 2022 to stabilize a company that had drifted under his handpicked replacement, Bob Chapek.
The succession this time was anything but chaotic. Iger announced in late 2025 that D’Amaro would take over, and the transition was methodical. Dana Walden, who had been co-leading Disney’s entertainment division, was named to a newly created role as president and chief creative officer — a position designed to ensure the company’s content pipeline remains strong while D’Amaro focuses on strategy, operations, and the massive capital allocation decisions ahead. In his memo, D’Amaro specifically praised Walden. “Dana is one of the most talented executives in our industry,” he wrote, as reported by Business Insider. “I’m grateful she’ll be by my side.”
That gratitude is strategic as much as it is personal. Walden’s deep relationships with showrunners, filmmakers, and talent agencies give D’Amaro coverage on the creative side of the house — an area where his experience is thinner. His background is operational. He understands supply chains, guest flow optimization, construction timelines, and labor negotiations. He can read a P&L the way a conductor reads a score. But Disney is, at its core, a storytelling company, and the CEO must credibly champion that identity even if the daily work is about margins and capital deployment.
The memo made that case explicitly. D’Amaro invoked Walt Disney’s original vision, writing that the company’s purpose remains “to create happiness” and that every business decision must be filtered through the question of whether it serves the audience. It’s a familiar Disney refrain. But coming from a parks executive rather than a studio or network veteran, it carried a different weight. D’Amaro was essentially telling the creative ranks: I’m one of you, even if my résumé says otherwise.
Will they believe him? That’s the central question of his tenure.
Disney’s creative community has been through a rough stretch. The company laid off approximately 7,000 employees in 2023 during Iger’s restructuring. Several high-profile film releases underperformed, including “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “Wish.” Marvel Studios, once the most reliable hit factory in Hollywood, saw audience fatigue set in after a string of middling sequels and Disney+ series. Pixar experienced its own wobble, with “Elemental” initially disappointing before finding legs on streaming and eventually turning a modest profit. And the broader entertainment industry has been convulsed by labor disputes, with the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes reshaping how talent thinks about compensation in the streaming era.
D’Amaro inherits all of it.
He also inherits a balance sheet that is healthier than it was two years ago but still carries significant debt — roughly $42 billion as of the most recent filings. The $60 billion parks expansion plan, which includes a new themed land based on “Encanto” at Animal Kingdom, a major overhaul of Disneyland’s footprint, and continued investment in Disney Cruise Line with new ships, will require sustained free cash flow generation. Analysts have generally been supportive, noting that Disney’s parks business generates returns on invested capital that exceed the company’s cost of capital by a comfortable margin. But the sheer scale of the spending creates execution risk.
“The parks business is the crown jewel, but $60 billion is $60 billion,” one media analyst at a major Wall Street bank said in a recent investor note. “D’Amaro has to deliver on these projects without letting costs spiral, and he has to do it while simultaneously fixing the content engine.”
Fixing the content engine means different things depending on whom you ask. For some analysts, it means returning Marvel and Star Wars to their former box office dominance. For others, it means achieving sustained profitability at Disney+, which only recently began generating positive operating income after years of massive losses. For talent and agents, it means paying competitively enough to attract A-list filmmakers and showrunners who now have offers from Apple, Amazon, and Netflix.
D’Amaro’s memo didn’t address these specifics. It was, by design, a tone-setting document rather than a strategic blueprint. But the tone it set was deliberate: optimistic, employee-focused, and reverential toward Disney’s history. He referenced the company’s founding values. He talked about the importance of cast members — Disney’s term for employees — and said they are “the real magic” behind every guest experience. And he closed with a line that felt like it was written for the history books: “Let’s build something together that Walt himself would be proud of.”
It’s a high bar. And D’Amaro set it for himself on Day One.
The timing of this leadership transition is notable for another reason. Disney is entering a period where its competitive position in streaming will be tested more severely than ever. Netflix continues to dominate global subscriber counts and has built an advertising business that is growing rapidly. Amazon’s integration of Prime Video with its broader retail and logistics empire gives it structural advantages that pure entertainment companies can’t match. Apple TV+ continues to spend lavishly despite modest viewership, using content as a loss leader for hardware and services. Warner Bros. Discovery, now rebranded under new leadership, is pursuing its own consolidation strategy. And Comcast has signaled willingness to explore partnerships or transactions involving NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform.
Disney+ had approximately 150 million subscribers as of its most recent earnings report, a figure that represents both remarkable growth since its 2019 launch and a plateau that has made Wall Street nervous. The addition of an ad-supported tier helped, as did bundling with Hulu and ESPN+. But subscriber growth in North America has flatlined, and international expansion — while promising — comes with lower average revenue per user and higher content localization costs.
D’Amaro will need to make hard calls about how much to invest in streaming versus theatrical releases, how aggressively to pursue sports rights for the planned ESPN streaming service, and whether Disney should consider strategic partnerships or even asset sales to strengthen its position. These are the kinds of decisions that define a CEO’s legacy, and they’re coming at him fast.
His relationship with Iger will also be closely watched. Iger is expected to remain involved in an advisory capacity for a period, and his influence on the company’s board — where several directors are his longtime allies — remains significant. Previous Disney CEO transitions have been fraught. Michael Eisner’s departure in 2005 was acrimonious. Iger’s own first retirement in 2020, which elevated Chapek, ended in disaster when Iger returned just two years later to clean up what he publicly described as a mess. D’Amaro has the advantage of being genuinely chosen by Iger after a deliberate search process, rather than being elevated by default. But every new CEO must eventually establish independence from their predecessor, and that process can be uncomfortable even when it’s amicable.
Inside Disney’s Burbank headquarters, the mood on D’Amaro’s first day was cautiously optimistic, according to several employees who spoke on condition of anonymity. Many described him as approachable, energetic, and unusually visible for a senior executive — someone who walks the parks regularly and remembers the names of frontline workers. “He’s a parks guy through and through,” one longtime Disney employee told Business Insider. “He knows how this place actually works, not just how it looks from the C-suite.”
That operational credibility is D’Amaro’s greatest asset. It may also be his greatest limitation. Running Disney requires the ability to toggle between wildly different domains — negotiating theme park construction contracts in the morning, reviewing rough cuts of animated features in the afternoon, and discussing geopolitical risk in China over dinner. Iger was, whatever his critics say, extraordinarily skilled at this kind of range. D’Amaro will need to develop it quickly if he hasn’t already.
The memo he sent on March 31 was just the beginning. A first act. The real test comes when the quarterly earnings calls start, when the box office results roll in, when the construction cranes either stay on schedule or don’t. D’Amaro has spent his career building things — attractions, experiences, businesses. Now he has to build something harder. A vision for Disney’s next chapter that satisfies Wall Street, inspires employees, and keeps audiences coming back.
No pressure.
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