Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
A Barry Diller sampler from the Reuters Global Media Summit
Interviewing IAC chief and media mogul Barry Diller nearly always means that you’ll get more quotable quotes than you can stuff into one article. He didn’t disappoint at this year’s Reuters Global Media Summit on Wednesday. Here are thoughts from Diller on a range of subjects from mergers and acquisitions and Comcast to AOL, MGM and marriage.
Q: What are you going to do with the cash on the balance sheet? What’s the focus? Are you still being cautious?
A: “I’d say we still are. It’s definitely a looming problem. The only thing worse than spending cash stupidly is essentially not to put it down at all, not to do anything.”
Q: What would be the right opportunity to buy something?
A: “There’s no road map here. Anything of size, let’s call it $1 billion plus, is known. … Of the potential availables, nothing seems smart right now.”
Daily Beast staff ‘happy as clams,’ says Barry Diller
The journalists and staff who work at The Daily Beast don’t look at life like you other sad-sack scribes out there who are watching your job market wash out to sea with the ebb tide. In fact, they are happy in a particularly mollusk-like way.
“They’re as happy as clams,” said Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which is financing the online news outlet with its editor, Tina Brown. “They wake up every morning filled with possibility.”
