The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland in California, built in the last year of Walt Disney’s life with the last of his visionary drive, is that rare example of a tourist attraction that feels ageless. One that has not only withstood the test of time but evolved along with its audience.

Sixty years on, the boats still float gently down the river and the crowds are still serenaded by the drunken pirate ballads. But there are also new elements. An animatronic Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow from the hugely successful movie franchise was installed in 2006, under the watchful eye of the man who has done more to build Disney’s legacy than any boss since Walt himself.

The ride is Bob Iger’s favourite. It feels to him like the encapsulation of modern-day Disney. “It has those roots with Walt. It has a purity about it. But it still works in today’s world,” he tells me, as we stroll through the theme park on a perfect southern Californian afternoon in April.

These days, Iger is often asked what Walt might think of the entertainment colossus he has shepherded, on and off, for the past two decades. It has been only a few weeks since he stood down as chief of the company, yet reports of his retirement do not seem to have deterred his fans. Every few yards people run up to get a moment with him: “We just happen to be behind you . . . Can we get a selfie?” they gasp. “Thank you so much . . . Can I take a picture with you? Oh my gosh, thank you very much. You are my favourite person in the world . . . You’re my man!”

Disneyland inspires extravagant displays of emotion. Iger stops for pictures, hugs and handshakes. We walk past a man proposing marriage on bended knee, watched by a crowd wearing mouse ears and other Disney merchandise. Another excited fan from the Midwest approaches to tell Iger he should run for president: “Every time we come here, we say, I hope we get to see Bob. This is the coolest thing ever!”

Iger smiles in the knowledge that this will all soon come to an end. “Every time I wake up in a bad mood I am going to come down here,” he jokes. But the Hollywood veteran, moving a little more stiffly at 75, still trim and tall, has a serious point to make. “If you don’t please [the real fans], then you can’t please anybody,” he says, stooping in the middle of the walk down Disneyland’s Main Street to pick up a discarded napkin and deposit it in a nearby bin. “Everyone has a sense of ownership. They feel I am a friend, protecting them and the brand that they love.”

He looks around and shakes his head slightly. “Nothing gives me a more emotional feeling than when I go down Main Street and I see these people coming in with a smile on their face, the sense of anticipation and excitement. I get the chills . . . Look at what we did.”

The two decades since Iger took over as chief executive in 2005 have indeed been crucial ones for Disney. Iger shaped a total overhaul of the company, making a series of aggressive deals in an audacious $90bn spending spree to bring some of the biggest Hollywood franchises, from Star Wars and Marvel to Toy Story and Avatar, into Disney’s stable. He committed close to $100bn in the theme parks business and went all in on Disney’s streaming service. Revenues tripled and, from 2005 to 2020, Disney’s share price increased fivefold, easily outpacing the S&P 500.

But that was not the end of the story. This is Iger’s second time stepping down as chief. In 2020, on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, and still with time left on his contract, he surprised Hollywood by announcing he would exit and naming the then parks boss, Bob Chapek, as his successor.

Chapek’s tenure was rocky and shortlived — tainted by the disastrous effects of the pandemic, political pressure and a series of internal battles. He was fired after less than three years, with Iger stepping back into the job in late 2022 for a difficult second stint of restructuring and job cuts. Round two, he admits somewhat gruffly, was much less fun.

This time, he promises, will be his final exit. But there are those in Hollywood who question whether he is really ready to hand over the reins. His new successor, Josh D’Amaro, another former parks boss, was named for the job earlier this year, and it feels like the page is already turning. As we move through the crowd, one guest mistakes Iger for D’Amaro. He shakes his head, smiling. “They think I am Josh! He is going to love that.”

It is rare for Disney to pull back the curtain on its internal culture and decision making. The time I spent with Iger this spring, over the course of several interviews in London and Los Angeles, and with other past and current senior Disney executives, marks an exception. As the former and future guardians of the Disney legacy line up to detail their visions of the future, it is clear that this is a nervous moment for both Iger and Disney.

As the Iger era comes to an end, the company faces new challenges. Tech-led platforms including Netflix and YouTube are dominating viewing. Rivals such as Paramount are reshaping Hollywood’s power base with megadeals of their own. AI is posing questions about making and delivering content that few in the town have the answers for. Analysts are once again asking whether a sprawling conglomerate of studios, linear and streaming TV, news, sports, theme parks and consumer products can compete effectively in an industry dominated by trillion-dollar tech companies.

Iger seems concerned with his legacy as we tour the park. He brings me to look at one physical expression of it: Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, one of the most technologically advanced and expensive rides ever built, part of the $1bn Star Wars expansion in the park he oversaw after buying the franchise in 2012. Since then, billions of dollars have flowed through the company from Star Wars box-office sales, branded lightsabres and pyjamas, and theme-park admissions as Disney milked the franchise for every dollar.

He grins as he takes it all in. “It’s great, huh?”

The role of chief executive at Disney is not like any other. The separation between CEO and company has not always been clear. “To a great extent, Bob was Disney,” the man who has the job of stepping into Iger’s shoes tells me.

Josh D’Amaro has invited me into his top-floor office at Disney headquarters in Burbank. It smells faintly of new paint. The office has only recently been vacated by Iger and the walls have been stripped of his old artwork.

But Iger’s desk still sits in pride of place — an old piece designed by Kem Weber for the Disney Studios in the 1930s, made of polished wood with “cubby” drawers for animators to use as they sat on all sides. Iger sees it as a symbol of the central importance of animation to Disney. When he vacated the office for Chapek — belatedly, in 2021 — it was removed.

D’Amaro is keeping the desk. “This is a story piece. I think it’s a beautiful piece,” he tells me. “I said, ‘Bob, I definitely want to keep that.’” In the desk is an important binder — the one D’Amaro took to Iger with his plans to invest aggressively in the parks business and build new cruise ships at the end of the pandemic. “He came down to my office and he had that binder with him, and he had torn one page out that basically was [me saying], ‘If you fund this, I can deliver results,’” remembers D’Amaro, sitting back on a sofa. “He said, ‘We’re going to do this.’”

D’Amaro is seen by many in Hollywood as a natural heir to Iger, not only for his shared fondness for a smart sweater, collared shirt and chino, but also because he is highly personable. He can match Iger’s intensity when talking about the company. “It’s bigger than running a P&L,” he says. “It’s bigger than just thinking about growth, it’s expressing your love for the brand — just like the fans feel.”

Iger has not spoken about his first departure and subsequent return to Disney in depth. He prefers not to even say Chapek’s name now — instead habitually referring to him as “my former successor”. But the saga has become the stuff of Hollywood legend.

In early 2020, Disney was on a roll following the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, the launch of Disney’s streaming platform and a 2019 global box office of $11bn. “We were humming,” says Iger. At Nike, a fellow Disney board member, Mark Parker, had just become executive chairman. “So I thought, that’s the model. I’ll be executive chairman. I’ll focus on creativity. We will avoid going through a public succession process . . . It was a construct which, I’ve not clarified this publicly, would have me basically managing the creative side of the company.”

After deliberations, the board agreed. Iger kept the role of executive chairman as well as creative oversight of the company’s vast output. He also kept the office, with the private shower he often used for the long days that bled into a swanky premiere. Chapek moved down the hall — a situation Iger is keen to defend. “He was keeping the trains running on time. Why should I leave the office? I’m not leaving the company. I’m staying as the senior executive.” Chapek did not respond to requests for comment.

Many regarded that management structure as inherently unstable. Iger says Chapek had accepted this structure as part of the job. “But that became the tension quite quickly after that,” he admits. “It quickly went bad. Covid made that a lot harder, in fairness to him and everyone.”

Chapek took the job at a particularly difficult time, just as Covid hit. The pandemic led to the forced closure of Disney’s theme parks and severe studio disruption, leaving Chapek trying to manage with staff at home and customers reining in their spending. By December 2021, after a year as executive chairman, Iger left the company. At this point, relations between the two Bobs had soured to the extent that the pair were barely talking. Chapek stamped his own authority on Disney with new hires and changes to strategy, reorganising its media business around streaming and changing pricing structures at its parks. He moved into the big office.

But financial results and morale suffered. D’Amaro remembers the period as exceptionally hard. “The world felt like it was falling apart,” he says. “Are we going to survive this? It was a very difficult time. Parks were closing around the world. We had politicians who weren’t happy with some of the decisions that had been made. And Bob was gone.”

Chapek was also seen to have made some errors, such as the company’s response to the “Don’t Say Gay” controversy in Florida, when Disney employees looked to their bosses to oppose a bill imposing rules on sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as the lawsuit by Scarlett Johansson after Black Widow was released on Disney+ and in cinemas on the same day.

These controversies were not helped by the relationship at the top, according to former Disney insiders. People close to Chapek’s thinking claim Iger and his team undermined Chapek. One argued that Iger thought he could “control” Chapek, who had previously been a “loyal soldier” and that Iger took to criticising him after the relationship broke down. “Did [Chapek] make a ton of mistakes? Yes. But was the deck stacked against him? Also yes,” the person says.

In November 2022, less than a year (“10 months and three weeks”, Iger specifies) after Iger’s departure, Chapek was kicked out in a boardroom coup. The story of what happened behind the scenes in those intervening months has become a source of fascination for Hollywood. One of the prevailing narratives among some of the town’s powerbrokers, and those close to Chapek, is that Iger was pulling strings from outside, whispering in the ears of the Disney board.

Iger clearly disagreed with Chapek’s strategy. “There was no urgent need to make drastic changes,” he says. “And yet he did, and he brought in bureaucracy and he brought in layers of management.” But he denies backroom plotting. “Another misperception is that when I was out of Disney, I was fomenting and trying to undermine him, which was completely untrue.”

When it came, Iger’s return happened swiftly. One Friday, he got a call from Susan Arnold, then Disney chair. Iger turned to his wife, Willow, and asked what to do if Arnold asked him to return. “She said: ‘You have to say yes.’ She said: ‘You know you love those people, and you love the company.’” Iger said yes. “It was nothing premeditated. I had no time to think about it,” he insists. By Monday he was back in his office. So was his desk. “The team had done their best to put the office back the way it was the last day I had been in it . . . It was off and running.”

Blair Effron, co-founder of Centerview Partners advisory firm, says he spent time with Iger during the interregnum: “He was not dying to return to Disney at all.” But Effron is certain about why he did. “In the shortest period it lost its culture. It required emergency room fixing.” Iger reversed Chapek’s changes and launched an aggressive $6bn cost-cutting plan that stripped out 7,000 jobs and simplified management. He brought new plans for streaming, ESPN, studios and the parks and cruise ships business.

On that first Monday morning, he called a town hall at Burbank. For the first time in a long time, says D’Amaro, there was no parking to be had on the lot. “I can remember him walking in to sit up on stage, and the place just lighting up. He didn’t come in and say, ‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ but reminded us of who we were.” Iger left to a standing ovation. “It was literally a 45-minute town hall [but] everything changed,” says D’Amaro.

Iger describes the crisis when he returned to Disney as “significantly” worse than the one he inherited back in 2005 when he first took up the job. That’s quite a claim.

At the beginning of his first tenure, Disney had hit one of its lowest points. “People forget that the company was a shambles,” says Effron. “It was basically irrelevant.”

Ructions on the board had led to the ousting of Michael Eisner, the long-serving CEO whose own success had been dented by a rocky few years of investor unrest. The company had just seen off a takeover attempt by rival Comcast. A crucial relationship with Steve Jobs at Disney partner Pixar had disintegrated, threatening its key animation business.

The director Steven Spielberg remembers Disney as a backwater — “a place you didn’t go unless you were making a G-rated film and wanted to cut in line at Disneyland”.

Iger had been brought in as the chief operating officer by Eisner five years before, and so his elevation was met with concern that he was a “suit” who couldn’t make movies, hardly the new broom the board wanted. But he brought a reputation for creativity too, having backed shows such as the original Twin Peaks as president of ABC Entertainment in the late 1980s. He started his career as a weatherman back in Ithaca in the early 1970s and with his movie-star looks and New York-inflected drawl, Iger could have remained on that side of the business. “Bob looks like the kind of guy that should be on the business side of my film camera, not behind the scenes,” says Spielberg, who is a friend. “You know, Bob takes an awfully good picture.”

There wasn’t much time to make an impression, says Iger. “There was a question at the time whether Disney could live on its own, that Comcast’s attempt at the hostile takeover was a sign that Disney was weak.” He settled on three priorities that became mantra throughout his tenure: quality content, technology and theme parks, and within weeks launched an aggressive M&A play.

One by one, he targeted Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel and Fox. Each deal ticked off his three central targets: adding reams of content, innovative technology and intellectual property for rides and merchandise. Each was also defined by Iger’s personal charm. As the broadcaster Diane Sawyer put it: “He has the most wonderful gift for dealing with people who just need a nudge.” He won over and worked with Jobs, George Lucas, Ike Perlmutter and Rupert Murdoch, four of the more forceful characters in the entertainment world.

For Iger, the one brand that stood out above all was Pixar, the animation studio with which Disney had a deal to make and distribute content. But that deal was on the rocks and Jobs had declared that the relationship was basically over. Iger took a gamble: “I knew if I don’t fix Disney Animation, I’m not going to be a CEO very long.” First he needed to mend the relationship with Jobs. His first call led to an almost immediate deal to put Disney content on the first video iPod. “All of a sudden, I’m now someone Steve likes and respects. The old Disney that he knew was lumbering in terms of bureaucracy. And so he thought, this is a new day.”

But Iger wanted more. He asked his board for a chance to buy Pixar. They were lukewarm on the idea, considering it unlikely, which Iger took as a “yellow light” to go ahead, he says. Initially it seemed the board would be right. At the first meeting at Pixar, Jobs wrote down on a vast whiteboard a long list of the reasons the deal would not work as Iger watched. Then Jobs paused: “You know,” Iger remembers him saying, “a few really great pros outweigh all the meaningless cons. Let’s see what we can do with this.”

For Disney, according to Iger, “It was like the clouds lifted and the sun started to shine again.” D’Amaro was a junior executive at the time: “We felt unstoppable.” Emboldened, Iger began to look for more deals. “We put together a list of acquisition targets. Marvel was one, Star Wars was another, James Bond was one. We had a list and I figured let’s just tick them off and buy them all.” Only James Bond — now controlled by Amazon — got away.

According to Spielberg, there were plenty of people in Hollywood who were sceptical about Iger spending $4bn on Marvel, a “comic book” company. But “Bob was fronting up for every decision he made. There has been no one in the history of the entertainment business who has had such back-to-back-to-back success as Bob Iger. All of a sudden, Disney had a leader that was going to begin to rival Walt himself.”

The first three deals proved hugely profitable. The fourth, the $71bn acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, attracted more questions. It was criticised as too expensive, leaving the company laden with debt. Iger maintains that was unfair given that the cost was mitigated by the tens of billions of dollars of disposals (including its stake in Sky) resulting in a final price of $54bn.

More importantly for Iger, the Fox deal gave Disney a future in streaming. With control of new content and the arrival of Fox’s Dana Walden, Iger thought they had enough TV and movies to compete with the other major streaming platforms. “It enabled us to be a number two to Netflix globally and, if my goal was to create longevity or endurance for the company, both as a brand and as a business, that’s what Disney now has,” he says.

There were also deals that never happened. Iger says he was close to acquiring Twitter from Jack Dorsey “at a very attractive price” to turn it into a global distribution platform for Disney. But he got cold feet on the morning of the deal, worrying that it would be “a horrible distraction”. The bigger deal would have come from nascent talks to merge Disney with Apple — a merger which, Iger thinks, would have been “truly transformational and equal”.

“We talked about it internally, and we had some conversations with Apple about it, but it never went anywhere.” Why not? Iger shrugs: “Well, Apple didn’t show that much interest.”

Iger claims Disney is now back on course. The group topped the 2025 global studio rankings with a $6.58bn global box office (albeit well below pre-Covid levels) and entered this year with a slate including The Devil Wears Prada 2, Toy Story 5 and Avengers: Doomsday. “It’s a good hand,” he says. But sceptics will point out that these are all sequels, illustrating a broader problem about a reliance on older franchises to make up for disappointing sales of original titles. Sequel fatigue is also a worry, with The Mandalorian and Grogu spin-offs having a tough time at the cinema, and critics brutal about the prospects of the wider franchise.

There are other pressing issues for D’Amaro. While Disney’s streaming business has finally achieved profitability, margins are still nowhere near those of rivals such as Netflix. There is also a reliance on profits from the parks business. Iger signed off on D’Amaro’s plans for a $60bn investment in theme parks in 2023 and the parks are once again money-making machines, despite grumbling over hefty prices. Four new cruise ships are being built — an increasingly important part of the business, D’Amaro says.

I sit down with D’Amaro as the backlash starts over a joke told about Donald Trump by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (Kimmel’s show is on the Disney-owned ABC network). It’s an early warning of the curveballs that come at you as CEO of Disney. D’Amaro looks unruffled. The media landscape has become more politically charged in recent years, with a president now prone to attack any media he perceives to be an enemy. Owning a news network has become more hazardous, and Disney has already been accused of going “woke” in an industry where other owners have sought closer ties with the political right.

Iger grimaces. “When I came back to Disney, I discovered that the company, the world, the industry had changed significantly. We were in a state of perpetual crisis.” His approach to the Trump administration was scrutinised when Kimmel was taken off the air following his comments about the shooting of the rightwing culture warrior Charlie Kirk. That decision came hours after the Federal Communications Commission had threatened to act against the company. Iger says people mistook the move as being politically motivated. “That was not the case . . . We thought it was in bad taste.” Kimmel was asked to apologise. “We just wanted him to acknowledge that it was an ill-timed and probably inappropriate comment.”

Now, Disney is once again in the crosshairs thanks to Kimmel, this time after a joke about “Lady Trump” looking like an “expectant widow”. Trump told ABC to fire Kimmel. But Disney has stood firm this time, despite the FCC ordering Disney into an early renewal process for its ABC station licences. Iger says he “wholeheartedly” endorsed the stance. “I’m thoroughly supportive. It’s what we anticipated needing to do if the government’s threats turned into action.”

Those who have worked closely with Iger say he can be ruthless. Some point to the departure of potential successors such as senior executives Tom Staggs and Kevin Mayer as the casualties of his rolling tenure in the top job. Even D’Amaro describes Iger as demanding — a “self-proclaimed perfectionist”, who would push his teams on details and results. “You understood he was striving for excellence. His ability to connect with people was never confused with his ability to call it when he saw it and be aggressive and ask for perfection.” He attracted heavy criticism for dismissing the demands of writers and actors unions as “not realistic” during the Hollywood strikes in 2023.

Iger’s most outspoken critic has been Nelson Peltz. The activist investor, whose Trian Partners disclosed a significant stake in Disney in 2023, had spoken to Chapek and Ike Perlmutter — a Disney shareholder since selling Marvel to Iger — about joining the board. Peltz attacked Disney for having “lost its way over the past decade”. He criticised the leadership for not pursuing “Netflix-like” profit margins in streaming. He also complained to the FT in 2024 that Disney had become “woke”. “Why do I have to have a Marvel that’s all women? . . . Why do I need an all-Black cast?”.

“It was a little ugly,” says Iger, still smarting two years after the attack. He scrambled into meetings with almost two dozen of Disney’s largest investors. Iger and the board defeated Peltz’s challenge following a shareholder vote in April 2024, but the activist has not halted his criticism. He recently told a conference that Iger had pushed for D’Amaro’s appointment as “a reason to stay on”, implying his continued influence behind the scenes.

The biggest worry for investors is now a share price that remains lower than a year ago despite good recent results. Effron says investors want a Netflix-type high margin on streaming. Iger takes a somewhat relaxed view of the share price, but admits: “One thing I am disappointed about in my years is that I was not more successful in selling [Disney] to the street.” Disney, he claims, can be a complicated business for investors to understand. Theme parks now make up about 60 per cent of the profits — it used to be that studios, TV and parks made up about a third each. He concedes Disney needs to bring up the profitability of the streaming business to provide “a bit more of a balance”.

Others have questioned why Iger has not spun off lucrative assets such as ESPN or the news networks to concentrate on entertainment. He says he concluded it was more valuable as part of the company. “Imagine if it ended up in Netflix? Is that a good way to make a quick buck and completely discount future value and importance to the company?” Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner who often watches Iger’s beloved Knicks with him, says: “There’s a reason why ESPN is referred to as the worldwide leader in sports. It’s a media property that, in my mind, has actual fans.”

Iger has a licence plate holder on his car that asks: “Is there life after Disney?” Unlike his protracted departure, his predecessors left the company abruptly. Eisner without celebration. Chapek without even time to send a goodbye email.

When it finally came, Iger’s last day as CEO was relatively muted too. Badges were printed for staff that said “Thank you Bob”. There were no parties, at his request he says. This time, he packed up his office early. “I said to Josh a week before my last day, ‘The office is yours.’”

Before we leave the park I ask Iger if we have time to visit Club 33, the exclusive members-only lounge hidden in New Orleans Square that was founded by Walt Disney in the 1960s. “Of course! I don’t have a job,” he smiles. We stroll past the rows of expensive wines and padded monogrammed jackets that line the corridor into a small but busy restaurant. Piped jazz and swing music play. The Disney board will often have an annual board retreat there, he says. “It’s a great night.”

Come December, Iger’s time on the board will also come to an end. He remains an employee until December 31, but without any title. D’Amaro clearly has a tough act to follow. His lack of media experience is a worry for some executives. Like Chapek, he came from the parks division, and Hollywood is still suspicious of people whose job is to sell merchandise and tickets, over the gentler art of talent whispering. “Bob can speak our language,” says Spielberg. “He can sit in a room with Ryan Coogler and Jon Favreau and JJ Abrams and myself, and it’s like Bob is just simply one of us.”

Before the final cut of Black Panther, Iger invited its director Coogler and a few friends and neighbours to his Brentwood house for a screening. Coogler remembers feeling “incredibly nervous because the film wasn’t finished yet”. But Iger had fought for the film to be made, he says, even though “it hadn’t really been done before, a superhero film with characters of African descent . . . He was so bullish on the film, and what it meant for the company.”

Iger reckons D’Amaro has what it takes to win the doubters over. Last summer, Iger invited members of Disney’s senior leadership team to spend a few days aboard his custom-built 213-foot superyacht, the Aquarius, off the coast of Italy. It was an opportunity for the team to spend time together outside the office and discuss the future of the company. He also wanted to watch how they worked together.

In a telling move, D’Amaro’s first memo to staff set out just three guidelines. Two of them — great storytelling and tech — were echoes of Iger’s 2005 plan. It’s a nod to the past as much as a look to the future. But D’Amaro says Disney will continue to evolve under his leadership: “If you do what you did yesterday as a proxy for what the next day should look like, you’re going to find yourself stuck or irrelevant.”

That future is as uncertain as ever in the entertainment industry, when a mouse originally drawn by hand by Walt Disney can be remade with endless variations by AI tools. Iger seems sanguine. “I think that the artist is always going to have it over AI. Mickey Mouse was created almost 100 years ago. A good story, well told, is going to find its audience no matter what.”

Did his second act end as well as the first? It depends how you define success. His first stint was frontfooted and fiercely ambitious, redefining what Disney meant for generations to come and betting its future on the strength of original IP. The second was about survival.

Iger still has a list of things to do before he hands over his pass. He considers the opening of Shanghai Disneyland to be one of his greatest achievements and he is heading back for its 10th anniversary this month to see how it’s faring. After that, he says he wants to live a life inspired by Walt’s founding principle: “Leave your daily frets behind.” He has taken an advisory role at Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, but is not expecting to take many more official positions.

Instead, he will have more time to spend aboard Aquarius (“That boat is so fast, Jaws can never keep up,” says Spielberg). With his wife, he also owns a women’s soccer team. He has been here once before, he says, “not knowing what it would be like to not have a title, not having an office, not all the infrastructure that comes with it, not knowing whether I get dinner reservations. You know . . . Who am I?” Leaving Disney is a “huge emotional shift . . . It’s just this . . . It’s an ending,” he manages, at last.

Our day at Disneyland is coming to an end. We spend the evening with D’Amaro for a Make-A-Wish Foundation event in the park, shaking hands and joking with young fans and influencers such as MrBeast and the Dude Perfect guys. The past, present and future of Disney in one room.

What about afterwards? Iger says he plans to find some peace in an empty house in Brentwood — the kids have left home and Willow is out. “I’ll probably make a sandwich.” And what about after that? He insists he won’t be calling D’Amaro. “I said to Josh, if you want advice, you call me. I’m available 24 hours a day, but I’m not going to call to give you advice . . . I am being very careful not to impose myself.”

Daniel Thomas is the FT’s global media editor

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram