A new report from Fortune is sharing the details about the Walt Disney Company’s rejected attempt to buyout BuzzFeed.
What’s Happening:
- Disney CEO Bob Iger may be known for a lot of things, one of them being his streak of high-profile acquisitions for The Walt Disney Company.
- Now, 10 years later, details are coming out about a reported buyout deal from Disney to add BuzzFeed to the giant media mogul.
- BuzzFeed president John Steinberg reportedly got on his knees to beg BuzzFeed Founder, Jonah Peretti, to accept the deal, which was valued at $650 million.
- At the time, Disney CEO Bob Iger said the up-and-coming media company would “never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”
- This is turning out to be true as BuzzFeed has announced that it will be closing its award-winning news division, and laying off 15% of their workforce.
- Disney’s attempt at buying BuzzFeed occurred while they were trying to break into the up-and-coming media landscape that was angled more towards social media engagement.
- Former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, tells more about the potential buyout in his upcoming book, Traffic. There, he details how Peretti began negotiations with Disney by setting out a list of requests that he would want for the deal to go through, as well as an asking price of $600 million.
- He writes, “Learning from the “master” Iger was what attracted Peretti to the deal…To Peretti, this was Disney’s most compelling aspect…to be one of 13 people reporting directly to the most successful CEO in modern media.”
- After an official offer letter came through, Perretti had been invited to speak at a Disney retreat in front of 250 members of staff, which according to Smith, wasn’t well received. To a point where an attending HR executive reportedly considered him “a problem” based on comments about the Mormon and Jewish faiths.
- Smith also explains that Peretti come offstage to tell Iger he couldn’t take the deal, adding this Peretti wanted his own Zuckerberg moment, calling back to when the Facebook Founder turned down Yahoo’s deal to buy Facebook in 2006.
- Even then, Iger wasn’t convinced BuzzFeed would ever be as big as Facebook, reportedly sharing an expletive with another executive before adding “He loses. That company will never be worth what it would have been with us.”
- Smith writes in his book, “In the cold terms of venture capital, Peretti’s—our—decision not to sell to Disney will go down as one of the dumbest in the history of digital media.”