Monday, November 29, 2010

Billionaires Behaving Badly or Opulence Abounds Barry Diller Style

I've been enjoying Gawker today, so I thought I'd share with you the Monday mirth

While Barry Diller has denied raises and bonuses to his IAC staff for the third year in a row
he hasn't cut back on his own spending, at least not on decorating his office,
which apparently needed a new carpet...a $1,000,000 silk rug.

Well, we know that he's not shy about spending
Diller's luxe tastes are no secret, of course. He got dinged in the press earlier this year when it was revealed he spent $4,600 per day in IAC funds on personal travel during 2009. (It isn't cheap to hop from place to place aboard a $45 million Bombardier BD-700.) And he spent more than $200 million on the world's largest sailing vessel, the 300-foot-long Eos, which features a crew of nine as well as and two chefs. From 2000-2010, he was the second best-paid executive at a public company, right behind Oracle chief Larry Ellison.

Of course nothing can be too good for the CEO of a publicly owned company.



Note: the Diller private jet


and the Diller Yacht

Obviously, these belong to the man not the corporation.
Still it's hard not to imagine what the IAC employees feel about all of this.

I suppose that the institutional shareholders of IAC stock think that of this is all OK.

And speaking of Billionaires Behaving Badly...don't even get me started on Berlusconi...