Meet TikTok's new CEO Kevin Mayer, the former Disney executive who's behind the explosive growth of Disney Plus and has the nickname 'Buzz Lightyear'

Mayer resigned as the head of streaming at Disney on Monday, where he'd overseen the launch of Disney Plus. After working with Disney on the transition, he will start at TikTok on June 1, a TikTok spokesperson told Business Insider.

Mayer will also be chief operating officer of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, while founder Yiming Zhang will stay on as ByteDance's CEO, per TikTok's statement announcing the appointment.

In the statement, Mayer thanked the Disney team, including former CEO Bob Iger and current CEO Bob Chapek, and said he's "thrilled" to join ByteDance.

"Like everyone else, I've been impressed watching the company build something incredibly rare in TikTok — a creative, positive online global community — and I'm excited to help lead the next phase of ByteDance's journey as the company continues to expand its breadth of products across every region of the world," he said.

He will also travel frequently to its other offices in New York, London, Mumbai, and Tokyo, a TikTok spokesperson told Business Insider.

TikTok also has an office in Palo Alto, California, minutes from Facebook's headquarters.

Industry analysts thought his role in the launch of Disney Plus made him a prime candidate, as Business Insider's Travis Clark recently reported. Before Iger stepped down, streaming was Iger's "No. 1 priority," he said in 2019.

Instead, Bob Chapek, the former chairman of Disney parks, experiences, and products, replaced Iger as Disney's new CEO.

Iger has stayed on as executive chairman and "effectively returned to running the company" in recent weeks amid the coronavirus crisis, according to The New York Times' media columnist Ben Smith.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday, Mayer said he didn't leave Disney because he was passed over for CEO.

"The only reason I'm leaving is for what I think of as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he told the Journal.

In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that some analysts were wondering whether Mayer would stay with Disney after he was passed over for CEO.

Barclays managing director Kannan Venkateshwar wrote in a letter to clients at the time that Mayer's future was "[o]ne of the concerns expressed by investors."

He got his MBA from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from San Diego State University, and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mayer would often visit the classroom of first-year students studying Walt Disney Co. at Harvard Business School to answer questions, Bloomberg reported.

His first job was overseeing strategy and business development for Disney's interactive/internet and television businesses worldwide, per the corporate bio, which has been taken down.

He was later named executive vice president of the internet group, where he oversaw Disney's websites, including ESPN.com and ABCNews.com.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal at the time he joined Playboy in February 2000, Mayer said he was looking forward to helping the Playboy website attract a younger audience and expand its international presence.

But just seven months later, Mayer left Playboy.com to become the CEO of Clear Channel Communications. His time at Playboy does not appear on his LinkedIn page or in his Disney corporate bio, which was removed after he left the company this week.

"Kevin is a square-jawed, corporate executive soldier, and Playboy had a cast of characters," Allen Blankenship, a Los Angeles real-estate agent who sold a men's entertainment site to Playboy soon after Mayer came on as CEO, told the Journal last year. "It was not as polished a crew as I'm sure he was used to."

Mayer did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on why he left Playboy.com.

Mayer then spent a few years at LEK Consulting, a Boston-based management consulting firm, before returning to Disney in 2005, according to his LinkedIn.

"He's a closer, he's a benevolent killer," Michael Burns, a friend of Mayer's and vice chairman at Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, told Bloomberg News in October 2019.

As chief strategy officer, Mayer oversaw Disney's acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm — home to the "Star Wars" franchise — and most of 21st Century Fox.

In Iger's 2019 book, "The Ride of a Lifetime," the former CEO described Mayer as "a master strategist and dealmaker."

Per the Wall Street Journal, Mayer picked up the nickname "Buzz Lightyear" at Disney because he "has the self-confidence, swagger and jawline of the 'Toy Story' character — as well as the astronaut figurine's relentlessly hard-driving style and bravado," Erich Schwartzel and Joe Flint wrote in November 2019.

A 2019 investigation by The Wrap found that some of Mayer's former colleagues at Disney described him as a "bully" and a "bulldozer," claiming he had a "belittling" management style.

Disney and Mayer both declined to comment for the Wrap's story at the time, and Mayer did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment regarding the investigation for this story.

The streaming service reached 50 million subscribers in five months — a goal analysts didn't expect it to reach until 2022, per The New York Times.

Mayer's replacement as head of streaming is Rebecca Campbell, who was most recently president of Disneyland in California but has also run ABC stations in the US and Disney's direct-to-consumer businesses in Europe and the Middle East, per Bloomberg.

Mayer told Bloomberg that Campbell is "a force of nature" and he felt he was leaving Disney Plus in "good hands."

Analysts say Disney is one of the media giants that's most threatened by the coronavirus crisis because so much of its revenue comes from theme parks, films, and advertising — all industries that have taken a beating during the pandemic.

When he was promoted to Disney's head of streaming in 2018, Mayer's minimum base salary rose from $1.5 million to $1.8 million, per the company's SEC filings. Base salary is typically only a small part of executive compensation packages, which often include performance bonuses and stock options.

A Disney spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the amount of Mayer's salary at the time he left the company.

Nicknamed the "summer camp for billionaires," the Sun Valley event brings together the country's top executives in media, technology, and sports industries to mingle and make deals.

Per Bloomberg, Lisa Mayer was also an "engineer-turned-MBA."

Mayer currently resides in Los Angeles, a TikTok spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.