Iger reveals Disney's failed bids for Twitter, Apple and James Bond
Bob Iger said Disney nearly bought Twitter, held talks with Apple and even put James Bond on its wish list, a snapshot of its boldest dealmaking era.
Bob Iger said Disney came close to buying Twitter in 2016, held merger talks with Apple and even put James Bond on a wishlist that already included Marvel and Star Wars. The disclosures, made after Iger stepped down from his second stint as chief executive in March 2026, lay out how aggressively The Walt Disney Company once chased scale and how much of that ambition stopped short of a deal.
Iger said Disney walked away from Twitter at the last minute because the platform looked like a distraction and raised concerns about social-media nastiness and the burden of carrying that kind of business under the Disney brand. He had used even blunter language in 2019, saying the nastiness was extraordinary and that the troubles were greater than he wanted to take on.
The Apple talks never advanced into a transaction, but even the fact that they happened shows the breadth of Disney’s ambitions during Iger’s tenure. He said James Bond also belonged on the company’s acquisition wishlist, alongside Marvel and Star Wars, two franchises Disney later folded into its own empire through major deals.
That wider buying spree defined the era. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion, then bought Marvel in 2009 and Lucasfilm in 2012. It announced the 21st Century Fox deal in 2017 and completed it in 2019, building a portfolio that reshaped the company’s reach in film and television. Iger said Pixar was the priority acquisition that made Disney feel unstoppable, a line that captures how one successful bet fed the logic for the next.
The missed Twitter and Apple deals, together with the Bond overture, also show the limits of consolidation. Disney ended up with Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox, but not a social network, not Apple and not Bond. If even one of those bids had landed, the company that emerged from Iger’s second run might have looked very different, with a far broader footprint and a different balance between creative franchises and platform power.
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