Barry Diller of IAC/InterActiveCorp photographed by Jamel Toppin for Forbes in September 2019.
Barry Diller, the billionaire founder and chairman of media and technology conglomerate IAC, has cut ties to one time dating app darling Tinder. He sold off his entire stake in the dating app’s owner Match Group for $1.9 billion, Diller’s family office told Forbes.
According to Marius Angeloni, a representative for Diller’s family office, the IAC head owned 16.1 million Match Group shares after the dating app owner–which also counts Hinge, OkCupid and the eponymous Match.com in its portfolio–spun off from IAC as a separate public company in July 2020. Diller quietly sold all of his stock throughout 2021, according to Angeloni, netting an estimated $1.3 billion after tax (Forbes accounted for federal and New York state capital gains tax.)
Diller’s net worth is $4 billion after the sale, Forbes estimates. He continues to hold stakes in a handful of other public companies including IAC, Expedia, Vimeo and Coca Cola.
While neither Diller nor IAC would comment on why he sold, Diller’s stock sale (which has not been previously reported) follows years of controversies and legal battles between IAC and key Match Group portfolio company Tinder. In December 2021, Match Group agreed to pay $441 million to settle a long-standing lawsuit launched by the founders of Tinder, who alleged that Match Group and then-parent company IAC had intentionally lowballed Tinder’s value when it was merged into IAC in 2017 to avoid paying billions in equity. (Tinder was founded in IAC’s incubator, Hatch Labs, and was majority owned by IAC prior to the spinoff.)
Tinder founders Sean Rad, Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen, who launched their lawsuit a year after the merger, initially asked for $2 billion as they claimed Match Group and IAC had delivered misleading information to banks causing them to value Tinder at $3 billion, instead of the $13 billion (or more) they believed it was worth. Diller has denied the allegations. In a 2019 interview with Forbes, he labeled cofounder Rad, who was ousted suddenly from the company back in 2014, “a blowhard and a bad actor.” Rad returned fire, accusing Diller of “insulting the team that built IAC’s most valuable company.”
However, the battle over the deal’s price tag was just one source of tension within Diller’s dating empire. The December 2021 settlement also marked the resolution of a separate legal battle between former Tinder CEO Greg Blatt and former Tinder VP of Marketing and Communications Rosette Pambakian. Pambakian accused Blatt of sexual assault in 2019, prompting Blatt to respond with his own defamation case. Both parties agreed to drop their claims as part of the settlement.
The accusations started much earlier. Whitney Wolfe Herd, a cofounder of Tinder, sued Tinder and IAC for harassment and discrimination in 2014, claiming she was stripped of her cofounder title, and sent threats and derogatory text messages by her ex-boyfriend Mateen and Rad (Mateen, like Rad, was ousted from the company in 2014).
The lawsuit was quickly settled and Forbes previously reported that Wolfe Herd walked away with just over $1 million. Wolfe Herd went on to launch rival dating app Bumble, and she became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire when Bumble went public in February 2021; she has since dropped off the billionaire rankings, according to Forbes’ estimates but is still worth $740 million, making her one of the nation’s most successful female entrepreneurs.
Match Group boasted a market cap of $30 billion after its separation from IAC in July 2020, valuing it at more than three times the size of its former owner at the time (IAC’s market cap was about $9 billion). Match Group was the largest business ever separated from IAC, which has a history of similar spinoffs, such as with Expedia, Ticketmaster and Vimeo. As of Thursday morning, Match Group’s market cap was nearly $16 billion, compared to IAC’s $5.7 billion.
By selling in 2021, Diller dodged a turbulent period for Match Group’s stock, which has fallen nearly 60% so far in 2022. If he had held on to his shares, Diller’s stake would be worth about half of the $1.9 billion for which he sold the shares, and he would be about half a billion poorer.