Media titan Barry Diller, the chairman of publishing empire IAC, has built and rebuilt his career more than most executives, from network television to Hollywood studios to the earliest internet empires.

As part of Business Insider's The Long Play, Diller talked to Peter Kafka, Business Insider's chief correspondent covering media and technology, about what successful businesses require: good timing, nerve, and the willingness to walk away from what's working.

During this conversation, titled "The Art of the Comeback: A Masterclass on Resilience," Diller shares his perspectives on AI adoption. He also talks about why his MGM Resorts deal fell apart and how he's leveraging legacy print publications like Southern Living to create new revenue streams.

The 84-year-old media and tech exec told Kafka he wants to keep working as long as he can be engaged and useful.

• The startup world is littered with companies that tried to become the next YouTube.
• Andrew Morse is trying it again, anyway.
• Morse's pitch: a curated app that gives creators incentives a reason to give it exclusive content.

Are you sick of the algorithms that serve you video on giant platforms like YouTube and TikTok?

Or are you a video-maker who's sick of the algorithms that don't serve your stuff to would-be watchers?

Andrew Morse would like to talk to you.

Morse, who spent years working in big media (Bloomberg, CNN) and most recently in local news (The Atlanta Journal-Constution), is building Phareo, a startup he hopes will one day rival internet media heavyweights. The secret sauce, he says: his own AI-powered discovery engine that will make both video-watchers and video-makers happy.

This is, to put it politely, a very tall order.

But it's still worth talking about, since Morse is homing in on a problem you hear a lot about in creator circles these days: the sense that people who make content are getting increasingly bad deals from platforms, because they can't control who sees their stuff.

Phareo (the name is an allusion to Pharos, the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria) says it can solve that problem by giving creators real incentives to make exclusive stuff for the company, via levers like revenue share and options. Morse plans to launch in January with an initial group of 25 creators. The app will start out as a free, ad-supported service, but he hopes to eventually offer a paid tier.

I talked to him this week about his plans, the shifting media landscape, and why he's increasingly worried about the creator economy — at the same time he's launching a creator economy app. This is an edited excerpt of our conversation:

Peter Kafka: You have a classic chicken/egg problem: Consumers are not going to use a new app unless it has compelling content they can't get somewhere else. 
Content-makers don't want to put their stuff there unless there's a big audience.

Andrew Morse: It is the most important question we have to solve.
It starts with dissatisfaction, and it starts with a belief from consumers and creators, that they're not being currently served as well as they could be. So we're working with creators who believe that there has to be a better alternative.

We don't really have anything to lose, given the direction that the platforms are taking and given the overreliance that their creative work has on algorithms that don't serve them. We're going to build with creators and try to build a super-passionate core and grow from there.

But YouTube, TikTok, Reels, etc do a great job of giving me tons of video. And they have unlimited content. How do you move me over from the platforms I'm already using?

It's an ironic conundrum — we're trying to solve the discovery problem, but we have to be discovered ourselves.

Over the years, I've seen many companies say they're trying to solve a discovery problem. 
But it doesn't seem like consumers have a discovery problem. It's the content owners who have a problem getting their stuff in front of consumers. What's the incentive for consumers to move to a platform content-owners like? 


There's an inherent assumption that consumers are satisfied with the platforms. I don't think that that's true. I think consumers are on these platforms because they have to be. Whether they're getting what they want in an efficient way is an entirely different story.

Any advice for your former CNN colleagues who are now working for David Ellison?

Stay focused on the work. It's always the journalism that matters. 
And the truth and the facts and great storytelling will always rise to the top.

We have seen a steady stream of journalists leaving places like CNN and starting their own thing. Do you think that trend accelerates or stalls out as people realize how difficult it is to do solo media for a living?

I'm concerned about this creator economy — which is really about about businesses that have built themselves on the back of YouTube. If you go back to 2016, 2017, a number of really clever, really creative businesses were built on the back of social platforms. When the algorithms changed, it became almost impossible for these businesses to stay afloat. It was hard for us at CNN, but we had a big enough business that we were able to mitigate and ride the wave. For these other companies, it was disastrous. 


I think you're going to see more and more people trying to go out on their own — and that's what scares me. 
Because I think that the sands may begin to shift a little bit.

• Public investors are finally getting a chance to invest in Anthropic.
• But unlike other public companies, Anthropic doesn't want the public's input when it comes to major decisions.
• Instead, Anthropic will be effectively controlled by CEO Dario Amodei and a group of other insiders.

In the next few weeks, public investors will get their chance to buy a piece of Anthropic.

But regular investors will never have a chance to steer the AI giant's decisions: Even though Anthropic is going public, it will essentially remain a private company, controlled by a handful of people with outsized power.

That's not unusual for giant tech companies launched in the past few decades (Larry Page and Sergey Brin have effective control of Google; Mark Zuckerberg has the same at Meta, as does Elon Musk at SpaceX.) It's also something you see at some prominent media companies (Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have effective control of his two public companies; Larry and David Ellison have the same at Skydance.)

Anthropic's twist on the idea is that control is split between two different groups of insiders. There's a clique of seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela, who control 50.1% of shareholder voting power. And there's also a trust with the power to appoint four of the company's seven directors.

Put those two together, and you get a corporate constitution designed to keep public investors outside the real decisions. The founders control the outcome of any shareholder vote; the trust controls the board.

In theory, those two groups could end up in conflict on major issues. The trust-appointed directors might, say, vote to replace Amodei with a new CEO. Or the founder group could veto a sale approved by the board.

In reality, there's a lot of overlap between the two groups. For starters, Anthropic created and funds the trust. And Anthropic itself says it has made sure the trust is staffed with people who see the world the same way its executives do: "In practice to date, the Trustees and company executives have collaborated closely on sourcing, interviewing, and selecting Trustees," the company notes in its S-1 filing.

The main takeaway is that there's no way for an individual shareholder, or even institutional shareholders who own significant chunks of Anthropic's equity, to force it to move one way or another.

The upside of arrangements like this are pretty clear, from a founder's perspective: They insulate their founders and managers from investors who might only care about short-term goals.

The downside: These structures insulate founders and managers from investors who might have very good reasons to want the company to change.

A good counter-example to the trend is Twitter, which went public in 2013 without founder control — which is why Elon Musk was able to buy it nearly a decade later.

In Anthropic's case, that aversion to giving public investors a real voice is synced directly to the company's founding thesis — that the AI it is developing is so consequential and potentially dangerous, that it must be controlled by people who care about more than Anthropic's share price.

And for many investors clamoring to get in on Anthropic's IPO, that lack of control — disclosed up front — won't matter. They just want their shares to be worth more over time. Musk's ironclad control of SpaceX didn't put dampen demand for the biggest IPO in history.

But if investors ever want to force Anthropic to do something the Amodeis and their cofounders — or the Anthropic-created trust — don't want it to do, they'll be out of luck. Buyer beware.