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American businessman and media executive (born 1942)
Barry Charles Diller is an American billionaire businessman. He is chairman 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 was born on February 2, 1942, in San Francisco, California, to Michael Diller and his wife Reva (née Addison). He was raised in Beverly Hills. In May 2012, New York magazine described Diller as a "second generation Austrian Jewish kid". On the April 14, 2026 episode of Finding Your Roots it was revealed that Diller's paternal ancestors came from the village of Pianovychi, near Staryi Sambir in the Lviv Oblast of modern-day Ukraine (which was part of the Austria-Hungary-controlled region of Galicia until 1918), and his maternal ancestors came from the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire (modern-day Vilnius, Lithuania).
In 2011, the Diller-von Fürstenberg Family Foundation announced a donation of $20 million to support the completion of the High Line park in Manhattan. In 2012, Diller donated $30 million to the Hollywood Fund, which provides health and social care to retired individuals from the show-business world. In 2015, Diller and his wife committed to donate $260 million toward Little Island, a public park and performance space on a reconstructed pier 55 in the Hudson River in New York City. It is stated to be the largest donation to a public park in city history. The park was completed on May 21, 2021.
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 became vice president of ABC's prime time programming.
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. In March 2026, Diller acquired former U.S. President John F. Kennedy and former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' former penthouse at Carlyle Hotel in New York City for $11 million.
Biographical detail compiled from Wikipedia and Wikidata, which are edited openly and may be incomplete or out of date. Fleet data is our own. Source →
