Dimitri Kontopidis promoted to VP at Disney

California: Dimitri Kontopidis has been promoted to vice president, product and technology strategy and operations at The Walt Disney Company, rounding off a swift ascent since jumping ship from YouTube in early 2025. The role sits within Disney’s product and technology arm, where Kontopidis now oversees strategy and operations from the Burbank campus.

The promotion caps a run of more than nine years at YouTube, where Kontopidis rose from associate to senior principal within the platform’s strategy, analytics and finance group, an outfit that answers ultimately to Alphabet’s chief financial officer. There he cut his teeth at the messy intersection of subscriptions, premium content and big-ticket strategic bets, eventually taking charge of strategy for YouTube Premium and Music Premium, services that between them claim more than 100m subscribers worldwide.

Kontopidis also had a hand in prising open YouTube’s live-sports ambitions, working alongside the platform’s content-partnerships and product teams to land its first exclusive live-sports package, a “Game of the Week” tie-up with Major League Baseball. Before Google came calling, he spent close to two years as a management consultant at PwC and Strategy&, grinding through large-scale tech transformations for clients.

Kontopidis holds an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, earned while working full-time and finished with honours in the top tenth of his class, plus an undergraduate degree from USC’s Marshall School of Business, completed magna cum laude. From baseball rights deals to boardroom strategy memos, the path from Mountain View to Burbank has been anything but a straight line, but Kontopidis has made every twist count.