Word: diller
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. MARTIN DAVIS, 72, creator of Paramount Communications; of a heart attack; in New York City. Former boss to Hollywood heavyweights Michael Eisner, Barry Diller and the late Brandon Tartikoff, the famously temper-prone executive took over the company from Gulf & Western in 1983--and doubled its stock value in his 11 years at its helm. Among his better-known takeover attempts: an ultimately unsuccessful bid to wrest Time Inc. (parent company of TIME) from Warner Communications...
...flattered. The Bradley network is full of the high-profile people he has stroked and courted for decades: billionaire moneyman Herb Allen, media moguls Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, film director Sydney Pollack, Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio. They build support and raise money for Bradley, and in return he makes them feel good about themselves. Says Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz: "I just feel better for knowing him." Bradley likes to say, "This is not just a campaign, but something more"--a high-minded mission. That sounds trite, until you see it in action...
...world Diller comes from, you don't pay a premium for unprofitable businesses. But in the Internet economy, where almost nobody has made a profit yet (and certainly Lycos hasn't), that hasn't kept Yahoo from shelling out $4.35 billion for GeoCities, or stopped the Internet portal @Home from paying $6 billion for Excite--both deals made at hefty price premiums. Of course, they used their richly priced shares as currency. Diller's offer to merge part of his USA Networks with Lycos to form a new company, of which Lycos would own 30%, values Lycos at approximately...
...Diller, who made an unsuccessful run at Paramount in 1994 using stock from the shop-at-home company QVC, has been seen by the Internet community as crashing the party with a most unwelcome piece of news: your companies aren't worth as much as you think. (And for a few wobbly days early last week, he was right.) Wetherell and his ilk are now seeking to show Diller the door. "He's Barry Diller, he's famous, he's a great dealmaker, but he may have overstepped," says Joe Butt, senior analyst at Forrester Research...
...real, says Diller. "There has been an enormous amount of arrogance, of easy money made by people who are extraordinarily arrogant about the real world and how difficult it is to build and sustain a business," he says. He likens Internet companies to "slot machines that pay off again and again. If I was an investor, I'd be corrupted by it to some degree as well...