Barry Diller is 84 and says he has no plans to retire
Barry Diller runs media giants and is not retiring yet.
The short version
- He told an audience in New York he stays curious.
- People Inc., the publisher he leads, just laid off 195 workers.
- The company is shifting jobs from print to digital.
Barry Diller, the media and tech executive who built the Fox television network and ran Paramount, says he has no plans to step down at age 84. Speaking at Business Insider's The Long Play in New York, Diller told Peter Kafka, the chief correspondent for Business Insider, that he still has a motor inside him that will not stop.
Diller said he is still curious and wants to stay engaged and useful as technology shifts. His company, People Inc., just laid off 195 workers from its print and legacy web businesses, according to a memo from Chief Executive Officer Neil Vogel.
Diller told Kafka that the cuts are a sign of the steady decline in print as the company builds up new digital areas. Diller is also known for public projects like New York's High Line and Little Island, built with his wife, Diane von Fürstenberg, and he teased a new project coming to Los Angeles.
Diller said he does not care about his legacy because looking backward is boring. Check your own calendar this week. If an 84-year-old billionaire can keep running companies and learning new tricks, you can tackle that stack of Monday morning invoices.
Photo: JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, AI-edited
