The Man Who Said No to Rupert Murdoch: Barry Diller on Power, Media, and Getting Rich at 80

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  An eight-year-old’s moment at summer camp set up Diller’s lifelong independence.

  At eight, unhappy at camp, he waited for his mother to come as promised, and she didn’t. His parents were ‘perfectly nice’ but clueless about children, having never been parented themselves. He kept a stark snapshot of that moment and the conclusion, ‘I’m the only one to protect me.’ He calls it necessity rather than craving, credits ‘my biology’ for saving him, and refuses to take pride in it.

• 02

  Lack of a sense of self, not confidence, propelled his early career.

  Diller says he never felt he deserved a sense of self and still isn’t sure he believes in himself. He envies natively confident people but suspects that with that buoyancy he’d have ended up ‘a shoe clerk at Macy’s.’ Instead, the deficit made him want to please others and to ‘count’ in their eyes—and once that got him going, he kept going.

• 03

  Take the job nobody else wants, and use it to learn.

  An unambitious 19-year-old who slept days and stayed up nights, he joined the William Morris mail room to learn the business, not to become an agent. While others networked to get promoted, he took the dungeon job in the paper file room and read the agency’s 70-year history of the entertainment business for about three years. That reading ‘literally from one day to the next lit a fire of ambition.’

• 04

  Skip specific career goals; get on the broad path and do the job in front of you.

  Apart from defined crafts like medicine, he distrusts people entering entertainment saying ‘I want to run a studio.’ Treating roles as stepping stones means never being present in them. What works is landing a position you haven’t mastered and just doing it: ‘the sparks you set off naturally impress others’ and drag you to the next step. He calls structured networking ‘pro forma thinking’—‘oh, you fools.’

• 05

  Content is instinctive, and predictive data about it is a comforting delusion.

  Numbers tell you what happened, not what will. People want data because instinctive decisions mean living with insecurity, and data lets you say ‘the numbers were wrong.’ But that only works for so long: with creative work ‘there’s no hiding.’ He sees streaming as tech overtaking Hollywood—for Amazon, content is the front of the store selling Prime, a business model divorced from audiences paying for something they love.

• 06

  Success teaches you nothing; failure teaches a lot—especially about cynicism.

  Making things guarantees failures. His repeated lesson is to keep ‘scrubbing my instincts clean.’ Decisions made out of cynicism have consistently been poor. Experience pushes you toward sophistication and worldliness; he has to deliberately hold on to naivety so ‘the corrosiveness of the day’ doesn’t infect his ability to tell good ideas from bad.

• 07

  He loves confrontation because truth comes out of the noise.

  Diller says he’s no good alone staring at a wall; he needs passionate people arguing. If you keep your ear open in even a noisy fight, you hear ‘a better truth’ than any other process yields. He’s direct, blunt and starts out trusting, and has been burned often, but says he can’t remember the betrayals and holds no vengeance. He once heard someone answer ‘that’s stupid’ with ‘that’s what I want—the more stupid I hear, the more ideas’: you have to get stupid before you get smart.

• 08

  Iteration—‘one dumb step in front of the other, course correcting as you go’—is his only method.

  In domains where nothing is known yet, like building a company, he progresses by bouncing off walls, getting pushed back half a step and eventually making fewer mistakes. Rare geniuses may skip the process, but most people are stopped by fear of looking like an amateur.

• 09

  Pay for created value in cash, not stock options; retention is ‘hogwash.’

  For developed enterprises he prefers sharing growth in cash each year: if people create value, they get a share of it then. He found 80–90% of employees sell options the moment they vest. People stay because they like the work and see opportunity, not because of handcuffs. If they want ownership, they can buy stock with their cash. If people can’t build wealth in an enterprise, ‘something’s wrong with the enterprise.’