When you hail from the esteemed Disney family, you comprehend media and money with equal elan. Walt Disney’s grandniece and heiress, Abigail Disney, understands wealth and doesn’t obsess over it. Nonetheless, she is fixated on the wealth of other tycoons and doesn’t shy away from bashing billionaires for being billionaires! The Disney scion had made waves worldwide for her unfiltered opinion, surprisingly, on a high-ranking Disney employee and the pay disparity in the company. Besides her verbal prowess, Abigail is a woman fluent in guts and gumption. She has made a mark as an award-winning filmmaker, philanthropist, CEO, and President of Fork Films. Let’s delve a little deeper into the life of the multimillionaire and what makes Abigail the disruptor at Disney–
Abigail Disney grew up with a golden spoon in California-
Abigail grew up with three siblings in what can be best described as a very comfortable home in North Hollywood, California, where she attended the Buckley School. The granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, boasts a glittering curriculum vitae with a Bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a Master’s degree from Stanford University, and a Doctorate from Columbia University.
A fascinating and opinionated woman, Abigail is a Cordon Bleu-trained cook who thinks the most enjoyable thing about having money is the ability to eat well. “I [always] liked the nicer table at the restaurant,” she admitted in an interview with The Cut. As opposed to public speculation of her worth nearing $500 million, she claimed it to be a lot lesser. “I’m roughly around $120m, and I have been for some time now.” Abigail is married to Pierre Hauser, an author whom she met at Yale. They live in New York City and have four children.
From zipping in private planes to dissing it, Abigail has come a long way-
She is an heiress, and trips on private planes are hardly shocking. The woman admitted to using her dad’s lavish 737 aircraft as a child and an adult. She described the opulent jet as fitted with a queen-sized bed and a shower. Disney admitted to occasionally using it with her four kids till 20 years ago. “We would use the plane occasionally because I have four kids, so it was much easier, obviously, to ride on my dad’s plane with them. Then, at a certain point, I just said, No, I think this is really bad for everybody, shared Disney in an interview.
The lady who always flies commercially since dubbed private jets a climate cancer. The documentary filmmaker tweeted, “I’d like to just elaborate on the private jet thing for a moment. Private jets are a cancer. I’m sorry and I know and love lots of people who ride around in them. But I also occasionally fly biz class and I fail to see what is so hard about that.” She called out bigwigs like Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, and universal punching bags, the Kardashians.
Abigail Disney started making generous donations when she was 21-
By definition, an heiress is a woman who is legally entitled to the property or rank of another. Abigail Disney got hers directly from her ultra-rich grandfather, Roy O. Disney. This inheritance made her incredibly wealthy at 21, and she was also totally independent. Instead of going wild with her wealth, Disney chose to give this money away, a path many billionaires are treading today.
“Within a couple of years, I was giving away more money than my parents, who had much more money than I had, which they told me was embarrassing to them,” Abigail Disney stated.
She openly criticized the CEO compensation of Disney-
‘Class traitor’ that’s the title earned by the 59-year-old Yale graduate for unabashedly voicing her opinions on taxing the rich more and calling billionaires miserable, unhappy people. For someone who has grown up with more money than she could spend, Abigail couldn’t care less for it. In 2018, the heiress castigated the Disney company for paying its CEO, Bob Iger, $65 million.
Per Forbes, in her piece for The Washington Post, she wrote, “It’s time to call out my family’s company—and anyone else rich off their workers’ backs.” She targeted the discrepancy between the CEO’s pay which was a whopping 1,424 times the median pay of a worker at Disney.
To reiterate her dedication to the cause, she also became a part of the group ‘The Patriotic Millionaires,’ focusing on hiking taxes on the rich. In September 2022, Disney released a documentary on income inequality titled, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, co-directed by Kathleen Hughes.
