At 83, Media Mogul Barry Diller Is Ready to Tell His Story

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. If you've watched the Fox Television Network or USA Network, if you've seen The Simpsons or Home Alone, if you've used Tinder or Angie, then you know just some of the work done under the watch of media mogul Barry Diller. At ABC in his early twenties, he became the youngest VP in network television history, and less than a decade later, Diller was put in charge of Paramount Pictures. After that, he co

I thought, you know, it's a good story.

And the question was, and probably that thing that spurred me on was could I tell it? And could I If I did it, could I tell it true?

The book is full of stories about Hollywood A listers, actors and directors including Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, and Catherine Hepburn, and stories about deals dealers done over the decades. But this is not a business book.

I'm not disrespectful to the people who do it, but I just didn't want to do a book that quote taught anybody anything or said if you do these things in business or whatever.

This is what will happen to you. I just thought it was a good tale.

Who Knew is mostly a Diller's career, but he also opens up about his personal life, about his twenty four year marriage to the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, and for the first time publicly his identity as a gay man.

I did not lead a secret life.

I just refused to make declarations, and I think that was a lack of courage.

I wish I had had it. I didn't.

I'm David Gerret And this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today on the show My Conversation with Barry Diller about his career, his life, and how as an executive he's navigating the uncertainty of President Trump's second term. Barry Diller grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of a real estate developer. Dealer, dropped out of college and started his career at the William Morris Agency. What was the magic of that place when you started out?

Well, for me, since I never wanted to be an agent, it wasn't being an age. It was that they had essentially the entire history of the entertainment business in one room, their fileroom, and so I manufactured my way into reading the fileroom.

If there's a through line in his career, it's chance of Diller being in the right place at the right time. He moved from William Morris to ABC in his early twenties. He was tasked with improving the network's movie library. He ended up creating what became a wildly successful franchise, The Movie of.

The Week, presenting the world premiere of an original motion picture but used especially for ABC. You know, ABC was the most junior of the network. CBS and NBC had invented basically radio. So ABC was the tag along when it entered television, so it was kind of the hip shooting.

Stop him me it. So it was a remarkable place.

As a young man. He was meeting executives and doing deals. It was a job, he says, he grabbed when nobody else was looking. Inherent in that is confidence or hubris. What made you able to do that? To put it together? I think you could do it and then assemble this.

I don't know that I ever. I'm not so sure I ever had confidence. I don't think I've ever had confidence. Really, Oh yeah, sure. I think it's the lack of confidence that at least in my case, made me somewhat effective. I think this is a great good luck of anybody who kind of starts anything from quote zero is you end up learning every job. I mean until it gets to be of scale, but you learn every essential job.

Do you retain that level of engagement? In other words, do you want to be involved in everything all the time or you just content no knowing what's happening.

Once it becomes a success, I basically lose interest, So I'm not a good shepherd of things that have already kind of succeeded. I want to move on to the next challenge, or to the next thing that I'm curious about, or the next thing that's kind of.

Unknown, which is how Dialer made the leap from TV to movies. In nineteen seventy four, he became the chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures. During a decade there, he made movies with the likes of Robert Redford, John Travolta, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, and two decades later his fascination with the commercial possibilities of the Internet started when he was introduced to AOL. You very early on took

Pure curiosity. H Well, I've never seen a screen.

I only knew screens from being used to tell stories, and I came upon screens that were very primitive in the early nineties. But they were interactive. In other words, you acted with something that you saw on a screen. Of course, I didn't know what was to become of it. I didn't know that in three years from then there would be this thing called the Internet that people would start to use. But that interactivity fascinated me.

Are you an inherently creative person that you consider yourself.

So apparently creative? I never thought so. Certainly.

I always had very strong opinions and instincts about things, particularly in entertainment. But I found that I was confident with my instincts and passion in creative affairs is all that really matters. I mean, if you're total dope passionate

Also comes some big mistakes, but you know it's okay.

Is there a very dealer's sensibility as you look back on all the mince as you've been known?

No, I just know where to see it. What there is.

Again lucky because in the range of people's interests, some people are interested in pigeons walking in Antarctica or other abstruse.

Kinds of things.

I have kind of a mainstream sensibility, and I also have a guard against cynicism, and I want to hold onto naivete and so those things put me kind of in a mainstream, broad mainstream rather than on the outskirts of things, and that kind of often.

Has resonance with larger numbers of people.

Let's talk a bit about data, and I gather you hate data.

I don't hate that. I know I don't hate it.

How do you use it?

I guess I like it factually.

That I don't like is anything that is supposedly predictive of future events, or if audience taste based upon certainly you can't do that. I mean, I think the amounts that have been time wasted and spent in trying to divine what audiences will like and not like is its grandest waste of time.

Dealer's career has centered on the silver screen, the small screen, and the Internet, and I wanted to know what's exciting to him in business today.

I now am very much interested in things that cannot be disintermediated, which are places. Travel, one of our companies has expeded. I love travel, and travel you cannot AI travel.

And post COVID, you made a big bet that people would feel similarly.

Oh yeah, yeah, And I like MGM resorts because those experiences you can't get in the way of them.

After the Break, Barry Diller on how he approaches business today and his perspective on the economy during President Trump's second term, plus his decision to open up in his memoir about his personal life and his identity as a gay man. These days, Barry Diller is the chair and senior executive of IAC and Expedia, and like other business leaders, he's trying to navigate a challenging business environment. I asked him what he thinks about President Trump's trade policies in particular.

We're in a very unique moment of instability because of everything that has been shoved on the table by this administration, and will it work out or not? I think the time limit for it either working out or not, particularly in trade, is very short. A few months, it will either be pulled through or it will be an abject failure and be pulled back. So I think right now it's extremely difficult for people in business to make decisions that go beyond this period until they see what conditions

I doubt it'll work out, but I hope I'm wrong.

I also hope that if I'm right, it just ends quickly, and if I'm wrong, hallelujah, everything's great.

Diller is paying close attention to how the private sector is dealing with Trump. The president hasn't been shy to call out some businesses and executives Over the weekend. For instance, he told walmart in a post on social media to quote eat the tariffs that are threatening the retailer's bottom line. Dealer says he's also watching the FCC investigate TV networks and the FCC scrutiny of the merger of Paramount, the

The well list too will pass in a few years, I would think, but.

Politicizing the FCC saying that broadcasters or people whose licenses the FCC holds should be subject to political determinization as led by the chair of the FCC delving into matters of suitability, that the FCC could actually say, we're going to scrutinize that to determine whether you should hold a broadcast license. That's heenus.

Do you have sympathy for Sherry Redstone as she tries to get.

This You know again, I'm amazed by this.

I've been incredibly criticized for this because I said, look, if a guillotine is at your throat and it costs you twenty million dollars or whatever to settle this lawsuit so that you can get out of going into bankruptcy or close to it, then I'm sympathetic to that.

If the guillotine is at your neck.

So yes, I'm sympathetic to that. Contrast that with law firms. Law firms, the worst that could happen to them under what the administration was doing is they could lose a little business. No guillotine is at their throat, they will not be irrevocably harmed.

For them to cave, that's bad.

And for those that stood up and have said, you know, go put sanctions on us, will survive. I'm totally respectful of them, and I would hope if I have some ability to direct things, I would never employ one of those law firms that essentially folded under the circumstances.

Equivocally absolutely. Diller is known as someone who is not shy about saying what he thinks, but over the span of his life, there are things he hasn't addressed publicly. You write about this contrast between you and your wife, that she's a public figure and her since it's entirely wrapped up in that, and you've led a very public life in many ways, but you've been kind of assiduously privateist.

Well, I like privacy, and I mean I respect privacy and others and I and for many reasons, partly because I actually like it as a quality, and partly because privacy protected me in things that I was fearful of. And contrast, my wife is her brand, and so her life has been every aspect of it has been public since she's twenty years old. So she's utterly comfortable with it, and I'm utterly uncomfortable.

But we'll see how it goes.

His memoir marks a shift from that privacy. In his book, he writes to my confused adolescent brain, being exposed as a homosexual meant the end of life as I knew it, And in another passage quote, when I was young in the United States of the nineteen sixties, I was far too afraid. I'm no longer that and too old to care. We've talked a lot about your professional life, and I think to a tea, as I've mentioned i'm doing this interview, everyone's asked me, did you address your personal life in

I don't know.

I mean it's debate today only because I'm so surprised. I am kind of surprised kind of naive that it seems to be kind of the you know, it's.

The catnip that the media like pulls.

And to me, it's not only a news story or whatever, because a lot of my life has never been a secret. But when I started writing it, I said, the only way to do it is to tell the truth.

So I had to tell my life. So I did. I've written the book, and I like what I've written.

Reading the book, I was struck how in your younger life you almost didn't allow yourself to have a personal life. It was a thing that you had to suppresses the wrong word, but you were so focused on your professional life.

I think a lot of people who over index in business.

I mean, sacrifice isn't really could be the word, but isn't really the word for me? But is you don't have room, you know, if you're working and obsessed with working, that crunches down to hear the amount of time or interest you have in almost anything else.

There are a couple of moments in the book where you suggest that you could have said more about your private life sooner and maybe that would have made a difference, and that you regret that.

Do you feel that way.

Well, first of all, it's so many years later now, I think other than media, anybody really cares about people's sexuality. But I think that again, it's a long time ago.

But I would have liked to.

Have had more courage to make declarations. I did not lead a secret life. I just refuse to make declarations. And I wish, I wish, and I think that was a lack of courage.

I wish I had had it. I didn't.

This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode is produced by Naomi Shaven, our senior producer, and our deputy executive producer, Julia Weaver, with help from Simon Hampton. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Chris Palmery. It was fact checked by our editorial team and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sagura. Elizabeth Ponso is our senior editor, Nicole Beemster Borr is our executive producer. Sage

We'll be back tomorrow.