If you don’t know Barry Diller’s name, you definitely know his work.
He invented the made-for-TV movie and the TV miniseries. He greenlit Raiders of the Lost Ark, An Officer and a Gentleman, Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Terms of Endearment, and the Star Trek movies. He created the Fox television network and helped bring the world The Simpsons. He turned QVC into a home shopping behemoth. He assembled a digital empire that built or grew Expedia, Match.com, Ticketmaster, Vimeo, and many more companies now part of everyday online life.
And that’s just scratching the surface.
I’m lucky to call Barry a friend, and I thought I knew his story. But his new memoir Who Knew still managed to surprise and teach me a lot about him, his career, and the many industries he’s transformed.
The book opens with Barry’s complicated childhood in Beverly Hills. From the outside, his family life looked idyllic. But his brother struggled with addiction; his parents, though loving, were often emotionally distant and preoccupied. Meanwhile, Barry was grappling with his sexuality in an age when being gay meant living in constant fear of exposure.
This part of Who Knew is raw and honest in a way most business memoirs usually aren’t. But Barry’s early years are key to understanding not just who he became as a person but also how he succeeded professionally. Reading the book, you can see how the same coping mechanisms he developed as a kid—learning to read people, defuse tension, compartmentalize, adapt—evolved into business instincts later on.
After barely graduating high school, Barry started in the mailroom of William Morris, a talent agency, at 19. Most people trying to break into Hollywood treat the mailroom as a stepping stone. The goal is to get out fast, become someone’s assistant, then get promoted to agent yourself. But Barry spent years there by choice, reading every contract and deal memo in the agency’s history. (His obsessive self-education reminded me of my own approach to learning.)
By the time he joined ABC at 23, he knew more about how the entertainment industry actually worked—the deal structures, the power dynamics, who mattered and why—than executives twice his age. That foundation let him revolutionize an industry in ways you can only do when you truly understand it.
At ABC, Barry came up with the made-for-TV movie: 90-minute films produced specifically for television, with different stories and casts each week. Within a year, ABC was producing 75 original movies annually. By 27, Barry was the youngest vice president in network television history. Then he created the miniseries.
Five years later, he was named chairman of Paramount Pictures, which had fallen to fifth place among the major movie studios. Barry rebuilt it into the number one studio by focusing on ideas first, not pre-packaged deals that came with the stars, directors, and writers already attached. He built a team of young executives and put them through what he called “creative conflict”: exhausting late-night sessions where his team would tear ideas apart to find their essence. Only if an idea survived that process would they develop it and then attach the right talent.
After leaving Paramount, Barry joined 20th Century Fox as chairman. But what he really wanted to do at Fox was create something that didn’t exist yet: a fourth national network to rival ABC, CBS, and NBC. That’s probably what surprised me most in the book—learning that Fox Broadcasting was Barry’s idea, not Rupert Murdoch’s. Barry had been pitching a fourth network for nearly a decade, even though conventional wisdom said that America could only support three networks. But Barry thought they’d become homogenous and identified an opening for something new. Eventually, he got Murdoch to agree.
That pattern shows up throughout the book. Barry is able to see opportunities that are invisible to everyone else and sound crazy until they don’t. When he left Fox at its peak to run QVC, people were baffled, including me. In reality, Barry had recognized that the future of commerce was hiding in plain sight, on a home shopping channel, where phone calls spiked in real-time as products were pitched on TV. This epiphany about interactivity—screens as two-way, not just passive—helped Barry do super well in the digital era.
Barry was early to see the internet’s potential and willing to bet on it when others weren’t. In 2001, he was in the process of buying Expedia from Microsoft when 9/11 happened and air travel grounded to a halt. He had an out clause but decided to go through with the acquisition anyway, betting that travel would come back. It did, and Expedia became one of the first major successes in what would become IAC: the unlikely conglomerate of 150+ internet businesses Barry assembled over the next two decades.
I’ve always wondered why one studio succeeds while another fails, and how revolutionary ideas get greenlit when conventional wisdom says they’re impossible. Barry provides a lot of insight, especially about media and entertainment, that I didn’t know before. He’s also candid about his failures: the disastrous stint running ABC’s prime-time programming, getting outmaneuvered in bidding wars, trusting the wrong people. I like that Barry doesn’t gloss over mistakes or reframe them as “learning experiences.” He just tells you he screwed up.
In his book, Barry attributes much of his success to luck and timing. But there’s a difference between being in the right place at the right time and knowing what to do once you’re there.
Who Knew? Barry did. He just had to wait for everyone else to catch up.
Source: https://www.gatesnotes.com/books/books-home-topic/reader/who-knew