It's Wednesday, September 30th.

Welcome to Mark Eulary.

I'm Chris Hill.

Joining me from the financial capital of the United States of America, it's Maria

Gallagher.

Good to see you. Nice to see you too, Chris.

Happy International Podcast, a shout out to the dozens of listeners. Thank you, whoever you are, wherever you are,

across America around the world. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen to us. So thank you for that.

Today we have an automotive deal that looked like it was falling apart. Maybe it's not. This is very much

in flux. We'll get to that. We have a newly public software company to get to it, but we are

going to start with the house that Mickey built. The Walt Disney Company is laying off 28,000 employees at their theme parks.

This is roughly a quarter of the people who work at Disney's U.S. parks.

And Maria, for... who work at Disney's U.S. Parks and Maria for all of the talk of Disney Plus and the studios

and TV and the merchandise, this is a reminder of just how big the theme parks are to Disney's business.

Exactly, so this segment was actually 37% of the company's total revenue.

So like you said, they've laid off 28,000 employees.

67% of those are part time.

They kind of blamed, they blamed COVID, they also blamed the California governor for not letting

them reopen the way that they had reopened in Shanghai, Japan, Paris, and Florida.

So it's interesting that's one of those things

where you don't know what you would have necessarily done better.

And most of these employees had been furloughed.

...