Barry Diller's Secret Opulence
Managers at IAC aren't feeling very thankful toward their happy-go-lucky leader right now: They found out just this week there will be no raises or bonuses for the third year in a row. So now they're dishing about his perks.
One disgruntled IAC staffer let us in on the secret behind the $1 million carpet job in Diller's corporate suite, which we first wondered about three years ago: The rug, said this employee, is spun from pure silk, and runs to $1,000 per square foot.
This same employee, who has access to company expense reports, says IAC pays for all of Diller's cars, which have been kept fashionably fresh: Diller's 2009 company Mercedes gave way to a 2010 company Maserati.
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.
What is less talked about is how Diller's perks affect the pay of his minions. Our tipster, with his or her access to company books, calculates that the company could have doled out raises if Diller had be willing to cut back on the fringe benefits. Whether that's true or not, the disgruntled chatter does show how visibly uneven cutbacks can wreck morale — an asset that's effectively priceless.
Update: An IAC spokeswoman said the company has been giving some raises during the past three years; our original source said it was managers who have been frozen out of raises and bonuses, unless they get a promotion or title change. We changed the first sentence of the post to specify managers rather than all staff.
[Photo of Diller with wife Diane von Furstenberg and author Fran Lebowitz via Getty Images. Photo of Diller's plane via Flickr. Photo of Diller's boat via FotoCommunity]