Abigail Disney: ‘I’m Choosing to Be a Traitor to My Class’
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
“Ugh. I hate it,” Abigail Disney groans as I ask her to clear up once and for all just how much she is worth. It’s easier to talk about sex than money, Walt Disney’s grand-niece observes.
“The internet says I have half a billion dollars and I might have something close to that if I’d been investing aggressively,” she says, repeating a line she has used before while dodging such questions. Today, though, sitting on the green banquette of an amber-lit restaurant off Manhattan’s Park Avenue, she decides to set the internet straight.
“I’m going to just say it,” she resolves. After giving away $70m over the past 30 years, “I’m roughly around $120m and I have been for some time now.”
The Disney scion is suddenly getting a lot of practice speaking publicly about money — even if not always her own. At the age of 59 she has emerged as an unexpected class warrior in America’s battles over how its wealthiest families should be taxed and what counts as a fair wage for the people who clean its theme parks rather than sharing names with them. On the day we meet, she put her name to a letter signed by the likes of George Soros and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, arguing for a “moderate” tax on the assets of America’s wealthiest 0.1 per cent.
