DisneyWar Highlight

Though overshadowed by the bid from Comcast, Disney executives faced a potential revolt by institutional shareholders. Roy and Gold—taking as their model Howard Dean’s grassroots, Internet-based campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination—had launched a website, SaveDisney.com, as the centerpiece of their effort to unseat Eisner. They became the first dissident shareholders to attempt to use the Internet to democratize the notoriously unresponsive system of corporate governance. “Shareholder democracy,” while lauded as the centerpiece of democratic capitalism, had in fact become an oxymoron, with the vast majority of corporations firmly in the grip of their chief executives and acquiescent boards.