Walt Disney's wife said she never felt financially secure — everything they had was tied up in the company

That wager paid off as Snow White would go on to gross $8 million in its first year (the equivalent of $188 million in today’s dollars).

In the 1950s, Disney was making another bet, this time into the creation of Disneyland — and Lillian was concerned.

‘We haven’t got anything’

“I’ve always been worried. I have never felt secure. Never,” she said. “He’s always telling us how wealthy we are, how much we’ve got, and we haven’t got anything.”

The quote was dug up by the hosts of the Acquired podcast in an episode looking at the company’s moonshot philosophy in its early days.

Disney, the hosts point out, did not hoard money. He lived a life that, at the time, would have been considered extravagant. And he struck deals with the company that increased his compensation beyond his $153,000 salary ($1.9 million in today’s dollars). Chief among those was the formation of Retlaw Enterprises, a privately held company that controlled the merchandising rights to Walt’s name, a cut (ranging from 5% to 15%) of Disney’s merchandising deals, and the engineering division that designed Disneyland.

Retlaw (Walter, spelled backwards) was formed to give Walt’s family a slice of the income from Disneyland and some other Disney operations. It would grow to own television stations and property by the early 1990s, but it sold those in 1998.

Valid concerns

Even if Walt hadn’t kept reinvesting money into Disneyland and other projects, Lillian’s concerns would have been valid.