There must have been some red faces at the Daily Beast yesterday when the website, owned by Barry Diller’s IAC Group, failed to report on a big lawsuit filed against IAC.
The $2 billion lawsuit brought by the founders and current executives at Tinder accuses execs at its parent company IAC of dramatically undervaluing the dating app to cheat them out of valuable stock options.
Most top news organizations, including The Post, covered the lawsuit, but not the Daily Beast. “We call it the ‘Diller Beast,’ ” laughed one insider. “They live for this kind of tech story. This is their bread and butter.”
Sources say that Beast editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman was given a heads-up on the story on Tuesday, but never replied.
But a Beast spokesman said it wasn’t a worthy story for the website.
“This is fundamentally a story about a suit over stock options,” the rep said. “I don’t recall us ever covering a stock options story. We don’t have a business section. So why would we cover this one stock options story when we haven’t written about similar disputes in the past?”