Page 78 - Forbes - USA (October 2019)

bronzed from his floating adventures, which took
him from Stockholm to Scotland, then to France,
and on to Italy, the Greek islands and Croatia.
He wears a black blazer and brown leather shoes
without socks, as if he’s just stepped off his be-
loved boat. The paparazzi picked up Diller’s trail
on the island of Panarea in Italy and again in
74 Venice, where Bezos cuddled with Sanchez. “It’s
embarrassing to me,” says Diller of the publici-
ty, so he changes the subject as raindrops pelt
the patio of his corporate abode, designed by
Frank Gehry in waves of shimmering white glass
to resemble the sails of a Spanish galleon taking
wind. “My wife says if I have an engine under-
neath me, I am happy,” Diller notes. “I just need
“Oh, no!” to be on the water. . . . It’s such a great luxury to

have a house that travels.”
Over the past 55 years, as Diller’s magnificent,
swashbuckling career has taken him from deck-
hand to mutineer to admiral, he’s navigated up-
heavals in media and technology while at the
Barry Diller’s same time making big bets ahead of (and some-
times counter to) almost every major trend. In
leathery voice a former life, he was one of the most powerful
hired hands in Hollywood, heading Gulf & West-
R E ern’s movie studio, Paramount Pictures, from
D booms when talk 1974 to 1984 before leaving to build Rupert Mur-
L
L
doch’s Fox Broadcasting into the fourth national
I
A turns to paparazzi network. His string of blockbusters include Sat-

Y
urday Night Fever, Grease and Raiders of the Lost
R
R
Ark at Paramount and The Simpsons at Fox. But
L photos from a in the 1990s Diller pivoted hard after a sojourn
B

E
selling zirconium baubles on QVC convinced him
I that the future lay in the convergence of enter-
F
O recent vacation on tainment, commerce and the internet. Act Two
R
P (or Three or Four—who’s counting?) for Diller
his $40 million has been IAC/InterActiveCorp, an online con-
glomerate that has grown to a value of $20 bil-
superyacht. lion after a tenfold surge in its stock over the
past decade, yielding Diller a $4.2 billion fortune,
good for No. 168 on The Forbes 400 list of rich-
Resting on a curvy, arched sofa in his expansive est Americans.
office, the 77-year-old Diller has pleasantly mean- “Barry’s had one of the most unusual careers of
dered from chatting about the champagne-flute- anybody in America,” says David Geffen (No. 60),
shaped floating island he’s building in the Hud- a close friend and former colleague, now worth
son River to throwing barbs at Donald Trump to $7.9 billion himself. “When he decided he was go-
digressing into the French Revolution to describ- ing to take over QVC I was shocked. I didn’t think
ing IAC/InterActiveCorp, his evolving $20 bil- that was good enough, or big enough, or impor-
lion internet assemblage. The pics in question tant enough, or classy enough for Barry.”
documented a six-week summer yachting holi- In a 1993 New Yorker profile, Diller laid out
day in Europe on which Diller was accompanied a prescient vision of nonlinear TV viewing hab-
by his fashion designer wife, Diane von Fursten- its, essentially describing Netflix. Yet when the
berg, and a carousel of celebrity pals, from singer time came to build his own streaming business,
Katy Perry and actors Orlando Bloom and Brad- Diller admits, “the ideas we had were bad.” De-
ley Cooper to Oprah and Jeff Bezos and his girl- spite owning Ask Jeeves and Vimeo, he was beat-
friend, Lauren Sanchez. en by Google in search and YouTube in video. He
It’s the Friday after Labor Day, and Diller is still passed on the chance to invest in Chinese inter-

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