• The New York Times, Monday, March 17, 2008 11:15 AM

IAC/InterActiveCorp, one of the Web's largest media firms, is floundering badly. Its stock is down 44 percent over the last year and 17 percent over the last five years--during a period when the overall stock market rose 54 percent, according to the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. The company's chairman and CEO, Barry Diller, has been taken to court by majority shareholder (and Liberty Media CEO) John Malone over Diller's decision to break IAC into five separate entities, a move the would dilute Malone's voting power as a major IAC shareholder.

Despite the Malone suit, most analysts agree with the decision to split IAC into five smaller entities because there wasn't much holding them together in the first place. In other words, IAC's properties lack a clear, common goal, indicative of the man himself. Even Diller's wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, admitted, "He has a vision, and he's not quite sure what it is, you know...and then he kind of fakes it until he makes it."

An anonymous IAC executive likened the company to "a mergers-and-acquisitions deal shop" (see the Times report for IAC's M&A history), adding, "Its mission is nothing more than doing what is interesting to Barry." Indeed, IAC may have profited from Diller's savvy investing, but it hasn't necessarily benefited from his ability to run a company. As Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says, there isn't any "objective evidence" that Diller has created value or improved the performance of any of the assets IAC has acquired over the years.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »