Changes aplenty were announced by IAC Thursday morning, as Barry Diller (left) removed himself from the CEO spot, remaining with the company as chairman and senior executive; a match was found in Match.com CEO Greg Blatt (right) to succeed Diller; and Liberty Media swapped its equity stake in IAC for all of the capital stock of a wholly owned IAC subsidiary that includes properties such as Evite and Gifts.com.
Blatt has been CEO of Match.com since early 2009, after spending more than five years in various senior-management posts with IAC — executive vice president, general counsel, and a member of the office of the chairman. Prior to IAC, Blatt was executive VP, business affairs and general counsel at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and he also served as an associate at New York-based law firms Grubman Indursky & Schindler and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Liberty had been tied to IAC and its previous incarnations since Diller joined Silver King Communications in 1993. In the transaction announced Thursday, Liberty traded some 12.8 million shares of IAC stock — approximately 8.5 million class-B shares and 4.3 million shares of common stock, representing some 60 percent of total votes — for all capital stock in the previously mentioned subsidiary.
Diller now owns shares representing about 34 percent of the total vote classes of IAC stock, and he was granted the right to exchange up to 1.5 million additional shares of common stock he may acquire within the next nine months for an equal number of class-B shares, potentially boosting his voting control to 41 percent.
