Ousted Disney CEO Bob Chapek says he still gave Bob Iger a gold coin for a $45 million sailboat mast, even after feeling abused, disrespected, and erased from company history.
Bob Chapek described the gesture while promoting his memoir on the Power Players podcast, saying he obtained a gold coin for an old sailing custom after Bob Iger showed him the vessel under construction.
The moment sits inside a larger fight over Disney’s leadership record. Chapek ran the company for less than three years, won a full board extension, then lost the job when directors brought Iger back. He is now reclaiming his side of that story in public.
Chapek told host Brian Sozzi the coin was meant for mast stepping, a tradition in which a coin is placed at the bottom of the mast before it is set and “never gets released.” Iger had walked him through the process in Northern Europe, Chapek said, “when times were a little better.”
In remarks carried by Yahoo Finance, Chapek framed the gift as a deliberate choice after a brutal exit.
"This was his going-away present. He actually brought me up to Northern Europe to see his boat being built. And I learned about the mast stepping process, where, before you put that big old mast in a sailboat at the bottom, you put a coin that never gets released. And I just thought that because he had shared that with me back when times were a little better [I would get him the coin],"
He added that he acted despite how he had been treated.
"I just thought it was right, even though I was being abused, you know, disrespected. I'm like you know what? Let's do the right thing. I have no idea if he actually used it or not."
Chapek succeeded Iger as Disney CEO in February 2020 after nearly three decades at the company, including runs in home video, consumer products, and parks and experiences.
COVID-19 soon slammed theme parks, movie theaters, and other Disney businesses. Chapek pushed a reorganization and a faster move into streaming while Iger remained executive chair. The arrangement grew contentious, with friction over talent relations and with Iger himself.
In June 2022, the Disney board unanimously extended Chapek’s contract for three years. On Nov. 20, 2022, just five months later, the same board removed him and returned Iger to the CEO job.
That whiplash fits a longer pattern of uneasy handoffs at the company, including Bob Iger’s earlier written warnings about succession when power changed hands again.
Chapek has said the public account of his tenure was shaped against him. He wrote the memoir “Behind the Castle Walls” to regain control of a narrative he believes Iger tarnished after the boardroom reversal.
Beyond the title fight, Chapek claims the company treated his years as if they never happened. He said he was removed from company history books and park references.
"It's like I didn't exist," he said of that erasure.
He has also described staying clear of the parks after an exit that felt like a wipeout, a theme he has revisited while arguing that his departure left no honest trace of his work.
Iger’s sailboat has since been delivered. Chapek does not know whether the gold coin ever went under the mast. The gift, in his telling, was never about leverage. It was about doing what he thought was right after Iger had shared the tradition in better days.
Shareholders watched the same board bless Chapek, then reverse course before the extension had time to matter. The streaming bets and cost fights that defined those years are still reshaping the company under later leadership, from fresh streaming hires tied to a tech-first push to new rounds of job cuts.
Chapek’s podcast account also tracks with his earlier claim that he spent his final stretch warning directors about Iger, a dispute detailed when he said he flagged the conflict to the board week after week.
Corporate boards love clean storylines. Disney’s recent CEO carousel has offered anything but. One executive got a gold coin for a luxury mast. The other got the company back. Investors got the bill for the confusion in between.