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i can't stop thinking about how the uber-wealthy's control of the stock market pervades every single part of our lives, from institutional violence to culture. i don't know economics well, but i DO hate-obsess over disney a lot
i did a deep dive into the history of pixar yesterday, because i looked at a list of every single disney animated film and realized not 1 of them is an original story created by Disney, and most are based on works in the public domain
disney and copyright laws are a different chimera, but i also realized that all Pixar stories /are/ original and came from the minds of creators at pixar studios. here is a short story on how the stock market impacts every piece of media we consume:
(heavily abridged) basically a computer graphics nerd had a dream to create the first computer-animated film. He founded Pixar, but money was an issue. He and his team joined up with Lucasfilm (Star Wars, Indiana Jones), and started doing a lot of CGI for their movies.
Pixar spent a lot of time creating software and hardware and improving entertainment graphics significantly while working at Lucasfilm. George Lucas's divorce was the trigger that made them consider being independent, and they focused mostly on hardware
A bunch of other shit happened, and Pixar was now an independent company but struggled financially. Enter Steve fucking Jobs. He invested $5 million and became chairman of their board of directors. So now Pixar's biggest shareholder was Steve Jobs, who prob couldn't make a GIF
Pixar started its partnership with Disney for Toy Story in 1995. Every single Pixar film you've ever seen was developed entirely by Pixar's studio team, Disney is just the distributor. Disney is also insanely greedy
Pixar made several films, and Disney distributed them. Nobody at Disney animation studios works on their movies. Now, Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Michael Eisner (confirmed pervert, btw) were always bickering. Pixar wanted 100% of profit for movies they made,
and wanted to just let Disney make money off of distribution. Disney wanted as much $$$ as possible despite not contributing anything creatively to Pixar films. Steve Jobs eventually said Pixar (i.e. him) would never work with Disney again once their contract was up
Now it's 2004, and Steve Jobs is committed to not working with Disney and wants Pixar to work with a different distributor like Sony or WB. But then Eisner resigns as CEO. (The beef between these 2 men was basically the foundation of Pixar and Disney's contentious relationship)
So, entirely fuck Steve Jobs, BUT had he fully committed to divorcing Pixar from Disney, it would have remained an independent studio and one of the only large companies to wholly make original stories.
But after Eisner resigned and a new CEO Steve Jobs liked better entered the picture, everything changed. By 2006, Disney made an offer to buy Pixar for something to the tune of $7 billion, which Steve Jobs accepted.
So, because Steve Jobs invested $5 million into Pixar to keep them from going bankrupt in the 80s, he was now chairman of the board and the biggest shareholder of Pixar despite not being a creator in any way, shape, or form.
And now, because he let Disney buy Pixar for $7B, he rocketed to the biggest individual shareholder of Disney stock (7%), with an estimated $3.9 BILLION from this deal, and now sat on the Disney board of directors.
So now Pixar is a subsidiary of Disney because of Steve Fucking Jobs. Its studio is completely separate from Disney's (which caused some drama over Ratatouille and Bolt in 2007), but it is one of Disney's many cash cows
Disney's acquisition of Pixar is a creative chokehold. It's why we have Cars 3 and Madagascar 4. Pixar, while independent, created new stories and revolutionized animation. But its golden era is cut off because Disney is obsessed with cash grabs, not enriching culture
and now, because of the merger, this puts Pixar's entire library under Disney's evil eye for copyright infringement. Disney copyright laws are another behemoth I could talk about for a long time, but here is my point:
Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Disney to make massive personal gain in stock. His $5million investment in the 80s became an overnight $3.9 Billion payoff in 2006, and as a result, entertainment culture suffers because of ONE MAN'S stock holdings.
Wealthy people use the stock market to chokehold EVERY SINGLE THING we interact with. . Anything you interact with is dictated by how the very few super-rich treat the economy like a casino, *literally* killing people and culture in a myopic rat's race for resource hoarding.
if you like this thread wait until the day I talk about disney and copyright laws and the slow death of creativity in american entertainment
