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On Tuesday, the Walt Disney Company’s board of directors finally declared a victor in the showdown to succeed CEO Bob Iger: Josh D’Amaro, chair of Disney Experiences and chief of theme parks, cruises, publishing, and consumer products. The other contender for the gig, Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden, will become president and chief creative officer instead. The decision makes clear the deciding factor for Iger and his investors: the brutal fact that their in-person offerings and merchandise make up the bulk of the megacorporation’s revenue and business, far outstripping TV and streaming. D’Amaro and Walden will assume their respective positions on March 18, while Iger plans to step back entirely by the end of the year.
For those who don’t follow industry shenanigans too closely, this result seemed to land as a bit of an anticlimactic “Who?” Even among close House of Mouse observers, the low-key D’Amaro is known primarily as “the parks guy.” So for many pop culture obsessives following this changeover, the most obvious analog was a different “parks guy” who also ended up winning control of a media empire, albeit a fictional one: Tom Wambsgans, the wimpy failson-in-law of Succession’s Roy family, who improbably goes from overseeing Waystar Royco’s scandal-ridden “live experiences” to lording over the entire media/cruise/tech conglomerate at the end of it all.
For Succession fans who dearly miss the show, any opportunity to invoke Matthew Macfadyen’s pathetic-yet-devious character is a welcome one. His and D’Amaro’s career paths aren’t exactly identical: Tom Wambsgans gets into Waystar Royco headquarters by dating the CEO’s daughter, and he enjoys a stint as head of the company’s Fox News–style TV division before ascending to chief executive. Nevertheless, for the majority of the public who has no clue how to perceive D’Amaro, a look at the soon-to-be CEO’s biography reveals some startling similarities between him and Wambsgans—and perhaps some clues as to what that means for Disney’s future.
For one, the overlap in personality traits is notable. Neither D’Amaro nor Wambsgans appear to fit in well to the glamorous media universes with which their respective enterprises are associated. You won’t find D’Amaro in too many red-carpet photos, and while he’s collaborated with creatives like James Cameron for IP-branded experiences, he has relatively little experience in the film and TV world. Nevertheless, the two do register within their corporate universes, thanks to their penchant for sloganeering: D’Amaro’s visage is reportedly ever-present at Disney World, where the hotel TVs play a video of him greeting visitors with a monotone “Hello, I’m Josh”; Wambsgans, meanwhile, brainstorms and attaches his face to a cheesy “We Hear for You” mission statement. They may not be actors, but they gotta put on a show.
Both men’s tenures have also exposed them to scandals, some far worse than others. It’s just minutes after he gets the job when Tom is informed of a large-scale cover-up at Waystar’s cruise lines, involving multiple sexual assaults and deaths; he hastens the document-shredding efforts, eventually landing him in front of Congress when the story breaks big. D’Amaro, to be very clear, has nothing remotely equivalent on his record—but he’s hardly been scandal-free. In 2024, months after a doctor died at a Disney resort from an allergic reaction to food from an on-site pub, the company’s lawyers attempted to have the matter dismissed from court by mentioning that the woman’s widower had voided his right to sue by signing up for Disney+. D’Amaro then backtracked when the incident gained wider outrage, writing in a mightily corporatese statement that “this situation warrants a sensitive approach to expedite a resolution.”
Until recently, D’Amaro had mastered another Wambsgansian trait: the ability to play softy while the CEO fielded the outrage from visitors and investors that ensued thanks to these incidents. (Not that this stops either of them from attempting to be more like those brutish chief execs: The New York Times notes that D’Amaro even dresses like Iger, earning employee mockery behind his back.)
D’Amaro made nice with Hong Kong officials angered over Disney’s production of Martin Scorsese’s pro-Tibet film Kundun so he could get a Disneyland built there. He later took charge of the Animal Kingdom, which earned notoriety for mistreating some of its elephants. That lack of care reportedly also extended to human employees, as D’Amaro’s division was forced by the federal Department of Labor to pay back wages to park workers who protested underpayment. After that, he took strolls through Disneyland while announcing sweeping job cuts in 2020 and 2023, content to hoard much of his multimillion-dollar salary while blaming California leaders for lagging revenue during the COVID recovery. (Remember Tom’s contempt for politicians and enthusiasm for “skulls”?) More recently, he restricted the ability of disabled parkgoers to skip long lines, earning a class-action lawsuit. And as for all the consumer-product controversies from the past few years—that would require a whole other article.
When he becomes more exposed to the public as CEO, D’Amaro will have to take the blame more often than he might find convenient, having earned an internal reputation for Wambsgans-like indecisiveness and political wishy-washiness. Disney’s chairman recently revealed that D’Amaro was involved with December’s controversial OpenAI character-licensing deal, a grim portent for his future as entertainment boss. Succession concluded before generative A.I. overcame the creative commons, but it’s likely the budget-slashing Tom would have readily embraced the tech much as D’Amaro has. And you can expect more such details to surface as we finally get the Succession epilogue its fans have pined for, with a Tom Wambsgans type in charge.
