Barry Diller is calling on the legacy Hollywood studios to end the dual writers and actors strikes, otherwise it’ll be “catastrophic” to the industry.
The media mogul, speaking on the podcast “On with Kara Swisher,” said the strikes would only strengthen streaming giant Netflix during a tumultuous time for legacy media.
“The strike does one thing, and one thing only, it strengthens Netflix and weakens the others,” said Diller, the chairman of IAC and Expedia, who once held top roles at Fox, Paramount and ABC Entertainment.
He also advised studios to cut Netflix and other streamers out of the negoations with the unions.
“They should certainly get out of the room with their deepest, fiercest and almost conclusive enemy, Netflix, and probably Apple and Amazon,” he said, noting their different business models. He said the legacy studios, actors and writers should be “natural allies” given their century of working together.
The remarks echo comments Diller made earlier this summer on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” in which he said the strikes could cause a domino effect that could produce “an absolute collapse of an entire industry.”
Writers Guild of America members have been striking for more than 100 days, while the actors’ union joined the picket lines in July, halting production of TV shows and movies.
In recent weeks, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has gone public with its latest contract proposal to the writers. It was quickly apparent talks between the studios and writers remain heated.
“There was a very recent attempt to get it on track with the WGA, which I gather collapsed in the last couple of days,” Diller said on Swisher’s podcast, which was recorded in late August. He added it “looks bleak” that the strike could end by September.
Representatives for SAG, WGA, AMPTP and Netflix didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Recent discussions with the writers union included a sit down with top media brass including Disney CEO Bob Iger, NBCUniversal film head Donna Langley, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
In recent earnings calls, Netflix and its media peers have said they hoped to come to a resolution quickly with the writers and actors.
Diller said for the “old majors” like Disney, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Paramount Global, if the strikes last through the end of the year the lack of fresh content by the spring or summer of 2024 on their streaming services will lead to subscriber cancellations and revenue losses.
“When they have to gear up to make more programming to get back subscribers, they won’t have the revenue base to be able to produce,” Diller told Swisher. “So that is kinda catastrophic.”
He goes on to call Netflix “an evil genius” that was able to dominate and leave legacy media scrambling to notch profits on their streaming businesses.
While making streaming a profitable business has been an ongoing focus for media companies, Diller said these companies should shift back to focusing on their broadcast and pay-TV networks. While cord-cutting of traditional pay-TV bundles continues to accelerate, the business still remains profitable.
Diller said legacy media should take some of its “shows and creativity and build our networks back up. It’s there for the take.”
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC. NBCUniversal is a member of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an opening ceremony for Tesla China-made Model Y program in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 7, 2020.
Aly Song | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is expanding its robotaxi service area and bringing xAI’s Grok to vehicles as it rolled out a new iteration of the artificial intelligence chatbot.
Shares gained about 3%.
Musk said on X that Grok, his AI chatbot that praised Adolf Hitler and posted a barrage of antisemitic comments recently, will be available in Tesla vehicles “next week at the latest.”
xAI officially launched the Grok 4 update overnight as the company continued to face backlash for the vitriol written by the chatbot.
In response to a user post on his social media platform X, Musk said the company is expanding its Austin, Texas robotaxi service area this weekend. He also said Tesla is awaiting regulatory approval for a launch in the Bay Area “probably in a month or two.”
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The expansion of robotaxi and Grok integration comes at a fraught time for Musk and his empire.
Tesla set its annual shareholder meeting for Nov. 6, a Thursday filing showed. A group of investors recently called on the electric vehicle company to schedule the meeting.
Its last shareholder meeting was in June 2024, as Musk established himself as a major backer of President Donald Trump‘s reelection campaign. Musk later led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.
After stepping down from DOGE at the end of May, Musk has openly feuded with Trump on social media over the major tax bill, with the president suggesting the government look at cutting contracts for Musk’s companies.
Shares have tanked from their post-election high over investor concerns that the public fight could hamper Tesla. Slowing sales and rising competition also stifled some investor appetite.
Tesla shares fell Monday, with the company losing $68 billion in value after Musk continued to blast Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and said he was establishing his own political party, the “America Party.”
The world’s richest man suffered another blow Wednesday when Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of his social media platform X, leaving the role after a turbulent two years for the company.
The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
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