With the Nelson Peltz proxy fight in the rearview mirror, Disney CEO Bob Iger says that he is now free to focus on moving the company forward, with succession being a top priority.

In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC on Thursday morning, Iger said that in meeting with shareholders over the past few months, succession was a key issue, and he sought to reassure the Street that he was focused on the problem.

“The board engaged in a succession process the moment I came back, and they’re taking it very, very seriously. I don’t think it has changed because of the activism battle at all,” Iger told CNBC’s David Faber. “They established this as their number one priority from the moment I came back, they formed a committee right away, they’ve been meeting regularly, they’re going to meet even more regularly going forward because I’m not going to be here forever.”

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He also suggested that while his contract runs through 2026, his successor will be announced “at the right time,” hinting that a name could emerge sooner.

“I think it’s really important to have a good transition process, you know, this is a big complicated company,” Iger added. “And not only is it important to choose the right person, but it’s really important to give that person all the opportunity in the world to be successful in the job, and the board’s very focused on who the person is and when the decision should be made, and essentially, how the handover of sorts will take place.”

He also addressed the proxy fight, with Faber pressing him on whether Peltz’s crusade was a personal one given the backing of former Marvel chairman Ike Perlmutter.

“If you’re asking whether it’s personal on their side, you probably should ask him, he probably would say no. I think there probably was, to some extent, a degree of personal animus that was on the table here,” Iger replied.

And when asked whether it was true that he was prepared to step down from Disney’s board should Peltz win a seat, Iger said that “his presence on the board, we believed, could be distracting and that might have made it very, very difficult for us to do our jobs the way we feel they need to be done.”

Iger also brushed aside questions about Elon Musk’s trolling of the company, telling Faber that “there’s no relevance to The Walt Disney Company or to me.

“People have been coming after me and the company for years,” he added. “I don’t get distracted by those things.”

But Iger did seem to acknowledge that critiques of Disney’s content as being “woke” may have a certain degree of merit, though he added, “the term woke is thrown around rather liberally, no pun intended in that regard. I think a lot of people don’t even understand really what it means.

“I think the noise is sort of quieted down. I’ve been preaching this for a long time at the company before I left and since I came back then our number one goal is to entertain,” Iger added. “The bottom line is that infusing messaging as a sort of a number one priority in our films and TV shows is not what we’re up to. They need to be entertaining, and where the Disney company can have a positive impact on the world, whether it’s, you know, fostering acceptance and understanding of people of all different types, great.

“But generally speaking, we need to be an entertainment-first company … And understanding that look, we’re trying to reach a very, very diverse audience. And on one hand in order to do that, what you do, the stories you tell, have to really reflect the audience that you’re trying to reach, but that audience because they are so diverse, really, first and foremost, they want to be entertained, and sometimes they can’t be turned off by certain things. And we just have to be more sensitive to the interest of a broad audience. It’s not easy, you know, so that we can’t please everybody all the time, right?”

The CEO also gave an update on Disney’s streaming efforts, saying that Disney will be “launching our first real foray into password sharing” in June, with a full rollout planned for September.

When asked whether Disney’s goal is to solidify itself as the No. 2 in streaming, Iger said, “I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the goal,” but still heaped praise on the company’s biggest streaming competitor.

“Netflix is the gold standard in streaming. They’ve done a phenomenal job in a lot of different directions,” he said. “I actually have very, very high regard for what they’ve accomplished. If we can only accomplish what they’ve accomplished, that would be great.”

And with regard to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the settlement over the Disney World oversight board, Iger described the deal as a “win-win.”

“We call it a win-win. This is a good thing for the state of Florida and a good thing for the Walt Disney Company,” Iger said. “This gives us an opportunity to engage more effectively and more deeply with the oversight board, which has also been reconstituted to some extent, and make the kind of investments that we need to make in that business not only to grow our business, but to grow in terms of the state of Florida create more jobs, more revenue for the state of Florida.”

And when asked whether this means that there will be no more public fights between DeSantis and the company, Iger replied: “I would hope not, but I can’t I can’t speak for Governor DeSantis in that regard.”