- Barry Diller thinks employees should come into the office — but he’ll settle for four days a week.
- Diller told CNBC different hybrid work models are causing chaos, and advocated for a standard model.
- On Fridays, Diller sees a future where people “can work from home or work at your own schedule.”
Barry Diller believes all the hybrid work models adopted by different companies in the wake of the pandemic are spawning “chaos.”
And while he’s adamant that most employees should come into the office, he thinks four days could soon be enough — with flexibility on Fridays, the IAC and Expedia chairman said in an interview Thursday on CNBC.
On Fridays, Diller foresees a future where employees “can work from home or work at your own schedule,” he said. “I think that is going to be the sensible evolution of all this — but it has to be standardized. You can’t have 17,000 different programs.”
Diller told CNBC he believes most employees should have gone back to the office after the pandemic subsided.
“If you have to talk to anyone else, you cannot work from home,” he said. “Come into an office and be part of an environment … that betters your life, your career, and betters the business.”
Diller was responding to comments made Wednesday by New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, who told CNBC he believes a four-day workweek is inevitable, fueled by the rise of AI.
The billionaire hedge fund manager said one of the reasons he invested in golf is because he anticipates people will have more leisure time.
“We hear from people that Fridays are just not — people are not as productive on Fridays,” Cohen told CNBC, “and so I just think it’s an eventuality.”
In his appearance on CNBC, Diller also issued an urgent warning about AI and called Trump Media “a scam.”
