They also fired all their park workers during covid and gave themselves 10 million bonuses while their workers were surviving on food stamps. Some workers had even signed non compete clauses so they literally could not use their talents elsewhere to feed themselves.

There are plenty of things to hate Disney for, especially as they approach super-monopoly status, ruin nearly every franchise they touch, and have trouble telling what’s good or not. As a company, Disney’s morals and decisions grow more concerning every month. Disney is basically a disaster in progress.

However, this specific complaint seems bad: it’s the wrong scale. Many companies were in the wrong during COVID, but it’s hard to look at these numbers and say the layoffs here were bad decisions based on $10M in bonuses. The scales are just too different.

Disney laid off 32,000 park workers At a measly 40 hours per week at their “minimum wage” (formerly $15/hr, now $24/hr): that’s $83.2 million PER MONTH: $998M a year. A $10M “bonus” is 1% of that, and even smaller compared to the $6.4B of park revenue they had loss.

The former CEO “gave up” their salary ($3M) and “bonus” ($45M in 2019), had 20-30% pay cuts to the executive staff, and a few other items. The CEO did get “$10M” in stock awards, but stock awards don’t get you off food stamps. Those stocks become nothing if the company posts bad financials, which would hurt more than just the execs.

The $1.5B dividend payout in April 2020 looks much worse. Abigail Disney ranted about it on Twitter (now X). His rant is at the appropriate scale: Disney paid out billions before they chose to save millions. The execs got quite a bit of that dividend payout. That’s the greed.