Who Needs Moonshots? How Former Hollywood Mogul Barry Diller Built A $4.2 Billion Tech Fortune Out Of Underdog Assets

h, no!” Barry Diller’s leathery voice booms when talk turns to paparazzi photos from a recent vacation on his $40 million superyacht. Resting on a curvy, arched sofa in his expansive office, the 77-year-old Diller has pleasantly meandered from chatting about the champagne-flute-shaped floating island he’s building in the Hudson River to throwing barbs at Donald Trump to digressing into the French Revolution to describing IAC/InterActiveCorp, his evolving $20 billion internet assemblage.

“Seventy billion dollars from nothing is a lot, but it isn’t $700 billion,” Diller concedes. “It would be so absurd and almost revolting for me to feel bad about that disparity. I wasn’t a founder of a single company. We were opportunists and I think pretty good managers. I wish I had invented a single company, but I also wish I could dance like Fred Astaire and sing like Adele.”

“Everybody thought this television kid knew nothing about movies,” he says, noting that the $9 million film grossed $32 million. “I had this little movie, and I was able to mother it to completion. This little jewel wasn’t the biggest movie ever made, but it was a joy,” Diller says, beaming. “Everybody was betting against it.”

In 1992, QVC was put up for sale, and Diller says that with the backing of Comcast’s Roberts family he invested $25 million and took control of the company. He promptly tried to buy Paramount, but got in a bidding war with Viacom’s Sumner Redstone and lost the $9.6 billion prize. Then, in 1994, on the eve of a planned merger with CBS, the Roberts bought QVC out, earning Diller a $130 million windfall. But he was jobless once again.

Diller’s deals are puny compared to the ones cut in Silicon Valley, but they’re much more like­ly to make money.

Interesting. Bad News Bears was “his”?

What?

Meet 'The Diller Dozen' Forbes400

classic diller!

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