Barry Diller's e-commerce empire keeps growing
Good insights into what Barry Diller is now up to in this Wall Street Journal interview (subscription required) that reveals that he has spent some $2 billion in acquisitions all consolidated under a company temporarily named USA Interactive after he sold his "company's cable, film and TV operations to France's Vivendi Universal SA and kept his new-media assets."
Barry Diller is a legend in Hollywood, where he worked his way up from the mailroom to become head of the Paramount movie studio at age 32. For the past few years, however, he has turned away from "old media" and morphed into an Internet mogul. He has bought up companies like Hotels.com, Match.com and Expedia.com. On Monday, Mr. Diller's company acquired LendingTree Inc., an online mortgage exchange, for about $716 million.
...Mr. Diller, now 61, vows that USA Interactive will be a dominant player in e-commerce -- and says e-commerce is ripe for growth, despite the dot-com crash of a few years ago. He believes the potential is such that he would like USA Interactive to be valued at the lofty stock-price multiples of eBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. But the company's results have been dragged down by poor performance at its Home Shopping Network unit, which Mr. Diller has hinted he may sell, and uncertainty about how much value he will gain from his company's 5% stake in Vivendi.