Biography & Early Wealth Journey

Newsweek reports that Nye signed a distribution deal with Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment back in 1993, but in 2008, Nye says he was notified of a purported "accounting error" on his yearly profit participation statement from Disney, saying he actually owed the company some $500,000 as a result of this error. When Nye attempted to negotiate a lower payment, Disney insisted that he request an audit, but Nye's suit says that the company "had no intention of ever accommodating" such an audit. The process took years, and eventually an auditor found more than $28 million in underreported profits, a sum for which Nye says he should have been paid about $9.4 million. But now, he's looking for $28 million including punitive damages as well.

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The court decision schedules the trial for May of next year, a loss for Disney and its motion for the case to be moved into summary adjudication. But in a press statement to Newsweek Nye's lawyers at Hamrick & Evans expressed disappointment that Disney was not found to have breached fiduciary duty to Nye in the ruling:

Primary Income Streams & Multi-Million Contracts

"While we are disappointed with the Court's ruling yesterday and the flawed legal reasoning upon which it relied, we welcome the opportunity to litigate the remainder of our clients' case at trial and finally recover the damages Mr. Nye and his fellow producers are entitled to, including an award of punitive damages…More importantly, it is our hope that this case, which Disney has fought so hard to stall, will finally shine some light upon the improper accounting practices that Disney utilizes to unjustly deprive profit participants, like our clients, of their fair share of revenues from the programing that they work so hard to create."

Now, Nye will get his day in court with Disney, starting in May, 2020.

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