Barry Diller

Media Mogul / Business Personality

Film and television veteran Barry Diller is the chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, a new media conglomerate specializing in e-commerce. In the 1960s Diller was a television programming executive for ABC, where he was credited with developing the popular ABC Movie of the Week. He left ABC in the early '70s to become the chairman of Paramount Pictures, a post he held for ten years. Under Diller's leadership, Paramount went from last place in Hollywood to the top of the heap, thanks to hit television shows such as Cheers and Taxi and to feature films like Saturday Night Fever (1978, with John Travolta) and Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980, starring Harrison Ford). Diller left Paramount in 1984 and joined 20th Century Fox, where he organized the formation of the FOX Network for boss Rupert Murdoch. In 1992 Diller bought a stake in a home-shopping cable channel, QVC, and ran the unglamorous but profitable television network until 1995, when he left to become head of Silver King Communications, since renamed IAC/InterActiveCorp. Since then Diller has led IAC to a series of acquisitions in Internet companies, including Ticketmaster, Expedia, Citysearch, Match.com and LendingTree.

Extra credit: Silver King Communications became HSN, Inc. in 1996, was renamed USA Networks, Inc. in 1998, and re-renamed IAC/InterActiveCorp in 2003... Diller married fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg on 2 February 2001; it was Diller's first marriage, Von Furstenberg's second... In March 2005 it was announced that IAC / InterActiveCorp was acquiring the Internet portal Ask Jeeves for nearly $1.9 billion.

Other media moguls of the 20th and 21st century include Ted Turner, Robert L. Johnson and William Randolph Hearst.