May 21, 2025 • 17 mins
After decades in the public eye, 83-year-old media mogul and Fox co-founder Barry Diller is finally ready to tell his story.
On today’s Big Take podcast, Diller joins host David Gura to talk about his new memoir, Who Knew, his storied career as an entertainment executive and his decision to speak publicly about his sexuality for the first time. Plus, how he’s navigating President Trump’s shifting trade and regulatory policies.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:23):
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
founded Fox, and he took an early interest in the Internet. Today,
Barry Diller is in his eighties with a networth of
almost six billion dollars. That's according to Bloomberg News. Diller
(00:46):
is the chairman and senior executive of Expedia and the
holding company IAC, which owns magazines including People and Food
and Wine, along with The Dailybeast, care dot Com and
a significant stake in MGM Resort Now. Dealer has published
a memoir fifteen years in the making called Who Knew.
I sat down with him last week at IAC's headquarters
(01:09):
in New York. Are you in a retrospective mood? You're
eighty three years old? Is that part of the mechanism?
As well, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I thought, you know, it's a good story.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
This is what will happen to you. I just thought
it was a good tale.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I did not lead a secret life.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I just refused to make declarations, and I think that
was a lack of courage.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
I wish I had had it. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
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
(02:47):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
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
(03:54):
it entered television, so it was kind of the hip shooting.
It would try anything just to get attention, and it
was kind of run like a candy store, which is
why they would give a twenty five year old's immense
responsibilities because there was no one, There was no bureaucracy to.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Stop him me it. So it was a remarkable place.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
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
(04:54):
to be of scale, but you learn every essential job.
You are the head of marketing, You are the head
of sales, you are the head of affiliate relations, are
every task and also every creative aspect of it in
the very beginning. If you do those things, you then
(05:14):
know how to manage other people doing those things, whereas
if you come in at more senior levels, you only
learn to manage top down rather than bottom up, and
bottom up is the only thing that I think produces
anything valuable.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
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
(06:12):
he was introduced to AOL. You very early on took
an interest in the Internet. What was it about it
that spark Jura for Stardos's the time?
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Pure curiosity. H Well, I've never seen a screen.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
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
(06:45):
would be this thing called the Internet that people would
start to use. But that interactivity fascinated me.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Are you an inherently creative person that you consider yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
So apparently creative? I never thought so. Certainly.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
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
(07:21):
about something stupid is terrible. But if you're not that,
then the difference between you and the other person is
both your ability to be willful and the ability to
argue creatively out of passion, and out of that kind
of creative conflict comes some good things.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Also comes some big mistakes, but you know it's okay.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Is there a very dealer's sensibility as you look back
on all the mince as you've been known?
Speaker 2 (07:46):
No, I just know where to see it. What there is.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Again lucky because in the range of people's interests, some
people are interested in pigeons walking in Antarctica or other abstruse.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Kinds of things.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Has resonance with larger numbers of people.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Let's talk a bit about data, and I gather you
hate data.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
I don't hate that. I know I don't hate it.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
How do you use it?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I guess I like it factually.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And post COVID, you made a big bet that people
would feel similarly.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Oh yeah, yeah, And I like MGM resorts because those
experiences you can't get in the way of them.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
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
(10:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
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
(10:33):
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
are going to be. So it's an odd time. Listen,
(10:56):
I'm willing to give the administration the time to pull
it through without unduly trashing it or criticizing it.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I doubt it'll work out, but I hope I'm wrong.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I also hope that if I'm right, it just ends quickly,
and if I'm wrong, hallelujah, everything's great.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
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
(11:36):
and the FCC scrutiny of the merger of Paramount, the
owner of CBS, with Skydance Media. On Monday, the CEO
of CBS News announced she's leaving the network, saying she
and the company do not agree on the path forward.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
The well list too will pass in a few years,
I would think, but.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
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
(12:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Do you have sympathy for Sherry Redstone as she tries
to get.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
This You know again, I'm amazed by this.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
If the guillotine is at your neck.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
For them to cave, that's bad.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
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
(14:29):
since she's twenty years old. So she's utterly comfortable with it,
and I'm utterly uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
But we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
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.
(14:58):
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
the book? Was that a dilemma or a debate for
you as you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
The catnip that the media like pulls.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So I had to tell my life. So I did.
I've written the book, and I like what I've written.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I think a lot of people who over index in business.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Do you feel that way.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
But I would have liked to.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
I wish I had had it. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
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
(17:37):
Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked this episode,
make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever
you get your podcasts. It helps people find the show.
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
We'll be back tomorrow.
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
(00:23):
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
founded Fox, and he took an early interest in the Internet. Today,
Barry Diller is in his eighties with a networth of
almost six billion dollars. That's according to Bloomberg News. Diller
(00:46):
is the chairman and senior executive of Expedia and the
holding company IAC, which owns magazines including People and Food
and Wine, along with The Dailybeast, care dot Com and
a significant stake in MGM Resort Now. Dealer has published
a memoir fifteen years in the making called Who Knew.
I sat down with him last week at IAC's headquarters
(01:09):
in New York. Are you in a retrospective mood? You're
eighty three years old? Is that part of the mechanism?
As well, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I thought, you know, it's a good story.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
This is what will happen to you. I just thought
it was a good tale.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I did not lead a secret life.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I just refused to make declarations, and I think that
was a lack of courage.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
I wish I had had it. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
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
(02:47):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
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
(03:54):
it entered television, so it was kind of the hip shooting.
It would try anything just to get attention, and it
was kind of run like a candy store, which is
why they would give a twenty five year old's immense
responsibilities because there was no one, There was no bureaucracy to.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Stop him me it. So it was a remarkable place.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
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
(04:54):
to be of scale, but you learn every essential job.
You are the head of marketing, You are the head
of sales, you are the head of affiliate relations, are
every task and also every creative aspect of it in
the very beginning. If you do those things, you then
(05:14):
know how to manage other people doing those things, whereas
if you come in at more senior levels, you only
learn to manage top down rather than bottom up, and
bottom up is the only thing that I think produces
anything valuable.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
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
(06:12):
he was introduced to AOL. You very early on took
an interest in the Internet. What was it about it
that spark Jura for Stardos's the time?
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Pure curiosity. H Well, I've never seen a screen.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
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
(06:45):
would be this thing called the Internet that people would
start to use. But that interactivity fascinated me.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Are you an inherently creative person that you consider yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
So apparently creative? I never thought so. Certainly.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
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
(07:21):
about something stupid is terrible. But if you're not that,
then the difference between you and the other person is
both your ability to be willful and the ability to
argue creatively out of passion, and out of that kind
of creative conflict comes some good things.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Also comes some big mistakes, but you know it's okay.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Is there a very dealer's sensibility as you look back
on all the mince as you've been known?
Speaker 2 (07:46):
No, I just know where to see it. What there is.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Again lucky because in the range of people's interests, some
people are interested in pigeons walking in Antarctica or other abstruse.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Kinds of things.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Has resonance with larger numbers of people.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Let's talk a bit about data, and I gather you
hate data.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
I don't hate that. I know I don't hate it.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
How do you use it?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I guess I like it factually.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And post COVID, you made a big bet that people
would feel similarly.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Oh yeah, yeah, And I like MGM resorts because those
experiences you can't get in the way of them.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
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
(10:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
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
(10:33):
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
are going to be. So it's an odd time. Listen,
(10:56):
I'm willing to give the administration the time to pull
it through without unduly trashing it or criticizing it.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I doubt it'll work out, but I hope I'm wrong.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I also hope that if I'm right, it just ends quickly,
and if I'm wrong, hallelujah, everything's great.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
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
(11:36):
and the FCC scrutiny of the merger of Paramount, the
owner of CBS, with Skydance Media. On Monday, the CEO
of CBS News announced she's leaving the network, saying she
and the company do not agree on the path forward.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
The well list too will pass in a few years,
I would think, but.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
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
(12:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Do you have sympathy for Sherry Redstone as she tries
to get.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
This You know again, I'm amazed by this.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
If the guillotine is at your neck.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
For them to cave, that's bad.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
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
(14:29):
since she's twenty years old. So she's utterly comfortable with it,
and I'm utterly uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
But we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
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.
(14:58):
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
the book? Was that a dilemma or a debate for
you as you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
The catnip that the media like pulls.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So I had to tell my life. So I did.
I've written the book, and I like what I've written.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I think a lot of people who over index in business.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Do you feel that way.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
But I would have liked to.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
I wish I had had it. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
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
(17:37):
Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked this episode,
make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever
you get your podcasts. It helps people find the show.
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
We'll be back tomorrow.
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Sarah Holder
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