An Interview With Barry Diller

Barry Diller

Image: Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York Times/Redux

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Barry Diller has been famous since the 1970s as a television pioneer (Cheers, The Simpsons, the Fox Television Network), as a Hollywood executive (at Paramount, he green-lighted Saturday Night Fever, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Beverly Hills Cop) and, more recently, as an internet mogul-as chairman of both the online conglomerate IAC and travel-services company Expedia.com.

The 65-year-old college dropout and former William Morris Agency mailroom clerk has managed over the last four decades to position himself at the forefront of whatever has been new in the popular culture.

 "What I don't want to do, and I think I'm incapable of doing, is quote ‘hanging on,' " Diller tells Portfolio.com in an exclusive interview. "I will continue to do whatever, so long as I'm curious about it. The only thing that's ever driven me is curiosity."

Diller sat down for an interview on September 19, the day after he defended the mixed performance of Expedia.com and IAC (notably the flagging fortunes of LendingTree.com, the Home Shopping Network and TicketMaster), to investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVI conference. He also announced the acquisition of a majority stake in GarageGames-which Diller reveals to Portfolio.com was a $50 million-plus investment to develop high-graphic videogames on the internet, without the need and expense of those pesky consoles

In the  interview, Diller discussed the endless possibilities of the internet (including Matt Drudge), the bleak future of ink-on-paper newspapers, his likes and dislikes among media executives (he likes former G.E. chairman Jack Welch, but not necessarily DreamWorks C.E.O. Stacey Snider), his addiction to megayachts, and his relationship with his celebrity fashion-designer wife, Diane von Furstenberg.

Lloyd Grove: (Entering Diller’s sun-dappled office in IAC’s Frank Gehry-designed headquarters building overlooking the Hudson River) Wow.

Barry Diller: Yeah. It’s pretty good.

L.G.: So your stock went up 93 cents. Was that a result of your brilliant performance yesterday?

B.D.: Hardly.

L.G: Or was it the Fed, or—

B.D.: I think we can attribute this to the Fed. I think one thing that I did say—which I think investors were listening to, looking for—was that for one of our largest segments, which is H.S.N. [Home Shopping Network], the trends were much better. So I think that’s what probably helped. But who ever knows about the market?

L.G.: But that was believed.

B.D.: I think everybody was believed yesterday.

L.G.: Really?

B.D.: Yeah, I think everyone at the Goldman Sachs thing [the Goldman Sachs investor conference]. I think everybody yesterday got this incredible shock from the shock of a greater cut than people had anticipated.

L.G.: So you’re not going to take too much of the credit for this.

B.D.: A day, you know. A day in, a day up, a day down. Honestly.

L.G.: Wall Street hasn’t been particularly kind to you. Why is that?

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