Abigail Disney, the wealthy granddaughter of Walt Disney Co. DIS, +0.83% co-founder Roy Disney, has long been critical of fat executive paychecks.
On Thursday, she put it like this:
‘If your CEO salary is at the 700, 600, 500 times your median worker’s pay, there is nobody on Earth … Jesus Christ himself isn’t worth 500 times his median worker’s pay.’
That’s how she responded when asked during a CNBC interview on Thursday whether Disney CEO Bob Iger is overpaid.
According to a securities filing earlier this week, Iger agreed to a new deal that cut his max potential annual pay by $13.5 million. He was awarded $65.6 million for his performance last fiscal year.
“We don’t have a society structured around fairness right now,” Disney continued. “The problem is that there’s a systematic favoring of people who have accumulated an enormous amount of wealth.”
For her part, Disney signed a letter with about 200 other New York elites asking lawmakers to introduce a “millionaires tax” on those earning more than $5 million to help fund affordable housing, infrastructure and other initiatives.
But when she was asked by CNBC’s Joe Kernen why she doesn’t just write a check to help the inequality, things got a bit tense on the set.
“It’s ridiculous to say that,” Disney responded. “My measly few hundred million dollars will do nothing to address the roads, infrastructure, schools, hospitals.”
