To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond profit and believed in advancing technology and society in a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.
To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.
Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early Disney and listen to those people talk everything was about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence and vision is on another level in American History (both good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the course Walt set.
Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.
I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.
He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.
