Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings!
It’s CEO replacement time. Both Walt Disney Co. and PayPal named new chief executives on Tuesday, with each appointment symbolizing major business shifts. Disney named parks chief Josh D’Amaro to succeed longtime CEO Bob Iger, who turns 75 next week (D’Amaro is Iger’s second successor, after the first one flopped so badly Iger had to return to save the day.) Disney’s announcement was long expected. PayPal, in contrast, made a more abrupt change, replacing relatively recent CEO appointee Alex Chriss with Enrique Lores, who until Monday was CEO of HP. For more on that, see below.
Disney’s appointment of D’Amaro reflects the fact that it is now primarily a parks business rather than an entertainment company. You might not realize that from the Hollywood-obsessed news coverage of Disney, but its financial performance proves it. In fiscal 2025, the experiences segment, comprising parks, cruise ships and consumer products, generated about $10 billion in operating income, while entertainment and sports together generated $7.6 billion. In Disney’s first fiscal quarter, which it reported this week, experiences brought in three times as much operating income as entertainment and sports. This is an enormous shift for Disney. Back in 2010, entertainment generated close to 75% of its operating income. Even in 2019, entertainment businesses including the film studio and sports channels made more money than parks and cruise ships, although not by as wide a margin as previously.
What’s happened? Disney’s experiences segment has grown steadily as it has opened new parks and expanded its cruise ship business around the world. More importantly, though, the entertainment business has shrunk. Fifteen years ago, Disney was making a boatload of money from cable channels, most obviously ESPN. But over the past decade, that business has declined, replaced by streaming. Disney is now making decent money in streaming but nowhere near enough to offset TV's lost billions. And while the old-fashioned TV networks continue to make some money, their contribution is declining fast. In the December quarter, for instance, profits from Disney’s entertainment networks appeared to fall 55%, judging from the company’s results on Monday, which were far more opaque than they had been in the past.
Disney's entertainment business may never regain its primacy. One reason is that consumers can much more easily switch off a streaming service than they could as cable subscribers. Disney has tried to make it harder for fickle consumers to cancel by selling bundles of streaming services at discounted prices, but they can’t force everyone to take their services, unlike in the old days of cable TV. Meanwhile, Disney is planning for a parks expansion: In early 2024, it outlined plans to invest $60 billion in its theme parks and cruise ships over the next decade, mostly to expand capacity. D’Amaro now has the controls. Let’s hope he doesn’t screw it up.
PayPal’s CEO Blunder
PayPal’s board must be wishing Dan Schulman had never left. The company’s revelation on Tuesday that HP CEO Enrique Lores would suddenly succeed Alex Chriss puts the spotlight on the latter’s hiring just over two years ago—and why it allowed Schulman, a longtime CEO, to leave in the first place.
Schulman announced his retirement as PayPal CEO in February 2023, saying that after eight and a half years as CEO, “I’m at a point in my life where I want to devote more time to my passions outside the workplace.” At the time, PayPal’s growth had suddenly slowed sharply: After expanding 15% to 20% annually since it was spun out of eBay in 2015, it grew just 8.5% in 2022 and about the same in 2023.
It’s no secret what’s ailing PayPal. The online payments innovator has become the AOL of the digital payments world, overtaken by faster-moving operations like Apple Pay. PayPal’s hiring of Chriss was an attempt to regain its mojo. When it named him to the job in September 2023, chair John Donahoe said he was “the perfect leader to take PayPal forward and accelerate the company’s growth opportunities.”
Instead, PayPal’s business slowed under Chriss. After growing 6.8% in 2024, revenue growth decelerated to 4.3% in 2025, the company reported Tuesday. In a statement, the board explained its replacement of Chriss by saying that after a “detailed evaluation” of PayPal’s position in the market, “the pace of change and execution was not in line with the board’s expectations.”
Meanwhile, Schulman appears to have grown tired of retirement. In October last year, telecom giant Verizon abruptly named him as CEO, succeeding Hans Vestberg. And last week, Verizon reported its highest number of subscriber additions since 2019.
In Other News
• French police raided the Paris office of Elon Musk’s X on Tuesday, as prosecutors summoned Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for questioning in a broadening investigation into the social media service, according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor.
• Shares of enterprise software stocks tumbled Tuesday as worries over new AI tools replacing traditional enterprise software subscriptions deepened following Anthropic’s release of its latest tool for automating legal tasks.
• The Department of Justice on Tuesday appealed a judge’s ruling on how Google’s search businesses should change in the wake of an earlier finding that it was an illegal monopoly. Their appeal came two weeks after Google also appealed the ruling.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out our latest episode of TITV in which we dig deep into the numbers behind SpaceX's orbital ambitions.
Recommended Newsletter
Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.
Join The Information for an intimate, two-day experience at Indian Wells, where tech leaders, investors, and innovators come together around a shared love of tennis. Request an invite today.
