Walt Disney Co. is going to maintain its connections to Silicon Valley by adding Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey to its board. The entertainment company reported compensation for its chief executive, Robert Iger, fell 15 percent to $34.4 million in its last fiscal hear according to The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Dorsey will be joining Disney's board as a replacement for Judith Estrin, a former Cisco Systems Inc. executive. She has been a Disney director since 1998 and is stepping down as a result of a company policy that limits tenure to 15 years. Disney's board consists of ten people, however, it will be temporarily expanded to 11 until the annual meeting on March 18, where Ms. Estrin won't be standing for re-election - bringing the count back down to ten.
Iger's compensation for being on the board has recently been detailed showing that the executive has seen his cash bonus reduced to $13.57 million from $16.5 million in fiscal 2012. As the board's compensation committee concluded, he didn't outperform targets as much as in the prior fiscal year. Mr. Iger's bonus was still higher than his target of $12 million. His compensation has been a topic of contention for some of Disney's shareholders, something the board acknowledged in its filing, according to the WSJ.
In the filing, the company said the board's compensation committee "has been regularly updated on conversations with investors and understands that shareholders remain very focused on the alignment of pay and performance as well as the absolute level of executive compensation, particularly for the Chief Executive Officer."
It later added that the committee "remains committed to pay-for-performance and believes that fiscal 2013 compensation demonstrates this alignment and that compensation is appropriately responsive to changes in performance and not excessive relative to compensation paid in the media industry. "
Iger was meant to step down at the same tiem as Estrin but his tenure was recently extended from March 2014 to June 2016. The extra 15 months will allow him to remain CEO during the debut of the first "Star Wars" film produced by Disney in December 2015 as well as a planned opening of a park in Shanghai.
