BARRY DILLER, born on this date, is an American billionaire businessman. He is chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group and founded the Fox Broadcasting Company with Rupert Murdoch and USA Broadcasting. Diller was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1994.
Diller began his career through a family connection in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency after dropping out of UCLA after three weeks. His proximity to the company’s file room meant that he could spend free time reading through the archives and learning the entire history of the entertainment industry. He was hired as an assistant by Leonard Goldberg, then West Coast head of ABC, who was promoted to network President at the same time Diller went to work for him in 1964, taking him on to New York City. Diller was soon placed in charge of negotiating broadcast rights to feature films. He was promoted to Vice President of Development in 1965. In this position, Diller created the ABC Movie of the Week, pioneering the concept of the made-for-television movie through a regular series of 90-minute films produced exclusively for television. In 1973, Diller would be made vice president of ABC’s prime time programming.
Diller served for 10 years as the chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount Pictures Corporation from 1974 until 1984. With Diller at the helm, the studio produced hit television programs such as Laverne & Shirley, Taxi, and Cheers, and films that include Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Ordinary People, Raiders of the Lost Ark and sequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Reds, Terms of Endearment, and Beverly Hills Cop.
Diller is responsible for what the media dubs “The Killer Dillers” – people whom Diller mentored and who later became major media and internet executives in their own right. Examples include Michael Eisner (who was President of Paramount Pictures while Diller was its chairman & CEO, and went on to become chairman & CEO of The Walt Disney Company), Jeffrey Katzenberg (a head of production of Paramount under Diller who became a co-founder of DreamWorks SKG and former head of DreamWorks Animation and Walt Disney Studios), Strauss Zelnick (President at Fox while Diller was its chairman and CEO who became the founder and CEO of private equity firm ZMC, the chairman and CEO of video game company Take-Two Interactive), Don Simpson (who was President of Production at Paramount under Diller and Eisner before forming an independent production company initially based on the Paramount lot with Jerry Bruckheimer), Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO of Uber), Dawn Steel (a VP of Production for Paramount when Diller was Chair & CEO; she went on to become President of Columbia Pictures, one of the first women to run a major movie studio) and Garth Ancier (former president of BBC America).
In 2001, Diller married fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, mother of Prince Alexander von Fürstenberg and Princess Tatiana von Fürstenberg. Diller owns an estimated third of her eponymous fashion company. As of June 2020, Diller’s estimated net worth was $4.2 billion. He owns Eos, one of the largest private sailing yachts in the world.
The media has speculated on Diller’s sexual orientation. As reported in James B. Stewart’s 2005 book DisneyWar, Michael Eisner sent a confidential letter to The Walt Disney Company board of directors in 1997 during its search for a successor to Eisner: “Pressed by the board to name a successor, Mr. Eisner cited the entertainment executive Barry Diller, but then wrote a confidential letter to the board saying that ‘the fact he is a homosexual should have no weight,’ which, at the time, all but guaranteed Mr. Diller would never succeed him.” — James B. Stewart, DisneyWar
New York wrote in 2001 that Diller is “often referred to as bisexual”, having “lived most of his adult life as a more or less openly gay man”, while his relationship with Diane von Fürstenberg “is said to be a warm and genuine one”. Diller wrote about his homosexual relationships in his 2025 memoir Who Knew. However, Diller has described his sexuality as also being fluid.