A 1970s FCC rule let two broke comedians own 15% each of a show NBC almost didn't air, and refusing to resolve any plot or character arc made it endlessly rewatchable and endlessly resellable. Seinfeld has now generated an estimated $7 billion on a $250 million production cost, and still draws 72 million US viewers a year.
Home Depot turned a 1978 firing into a $350 billion retailer by inventing the warehouse home-improvement store, arming clerks with trade skills, and paying workers in stock. A GE-style efficiency push nearly wrecked that culture before a quiet successor restored it and built the e-commerce backbone that saved the company during COVID.
Disney's business model is a flywheel: make a beloved story once, then sell it forever through parks, merchandise, and reissues. This episode traces how Michael Eisner and Bob Iger rebuilt that flywheel twice, first with animation and ESPN, then with Pixar, Marvel, and streaming, and asks whether the flywheel still turns.
Walt Disney built the first intellectual property flywheel: create beloved animated characters, saturate distribution, then feed merchandise, TV, and theme parks off that IP without cannibalizing it. After a devastating 1928 betrayal cost him Oswald the Rabbit, Disney invented Mickey Mouse and never let a distributor own his characters again.
