In an interview with Wired's Steven Levy, Williams lashed back at two traditional media fogeys who pooh-poohed his company's potential at the Sun Valley schmoozefest in July. Barry Diller, of IAC, and John Malone, the satellite TV mogul, said the microblogging service would never make much cash.

"I didn't argue my case," Williams says. "But all the Internet guys there were laughing at those media guys. Are you kidding? Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there's obviously a huge business."

And, hey, that's coming from a guy who made four whole million dollars last year, old media people, so you better listen up. These guys have spreadsheets that would blow your minds.

Barry sent out an email to corporate last night saying the case will be this week, everything will be fine, iac's stock been doing really well thanks to everyone at IAC corporate etc. I don't have a copy but if you know someone there who can get you one, might be interesting to read in a Dr. Pangloss kind of way.

As I'm sure most of you are aware, IAC will be in court this week to resolve a business dispute with Liberty Media related to how we implement our planned spin-offs. The trial will begin tomorrow in Delaware, and is expected to run through the end of the week. The media has not surprisingly become enchanted with this dispute, so I expect a fair amount of press coverage during the process attempting to paint the trial as going one way or the other. Please do your best to ignore it. I will try as well but probably fail.

At the end of the day, it's purely a business dispute. We are highly confident in our legal position and are looking forward to proving our case to the judge. But, whatever the outcome, you have much to be proud of. And no one, including those seeking to dramatize this dispute with generic and often wrongheaded characterizations of our Company, can or should take that away from you.

• Ask. Diller said he planned to spend $100m developing and promoting IAC's flagship search engine. After an impenetrable advertising campaign, touting Ask's New Jersey algorithm, what's the impact on the search engine's market share? Nothing measurable. The chief executive, a Diller favorite, is out.
• Vimeo. Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen's College Humor remains popular among college students and those whose humor remains frozen in sophomore year. But IAC's bigger interest was the online video site, a precursor to Youtube, which the College Humor techies set up in the spare time. Vimeo creator and Julia Allison cheater, Jakob Lodwick, was fired late last year. Vimeo's traffic is hardly measurable beside Youtube.
• VSL (a highbrow email newsletter of cultural recommendations dreamed up by Kurt Andersen and Diller's content guru, Michael Jackson) is close to Diller's heart. "Without Very Short List, I would be much diminished," said Diller. Unfortunately, the internet as a whole would not be. Last time I checked, the subscription list was only some 20,000 people. (I'm told the base has grown several hundred percent since then.) Culturally-literate email-reading billionaires are in short supply.
• 23/6, IAC's stab at political humor with the help of the Huffington Post, is stillborn. Michael Jackson's other joint venture, a business site done in collaboration with Dow Jones, may never even get off the ground. Says one insider: "It's obvious it won't work somewhat from the outside but the inside scoop is zero progression/movement. As Sanchez (IAC's foul-mouthed head of corporate communications) might have said, just a lot of wanking."
• Lending Tree will be spun off for less than half the price Diller paid for it. This is not the best moment in the cycle to sell a mortgage broker. And the mogul did himself no favors by alienating Rich Barton, an IAC board member, who left aggrieved after Diller spun out Expedia, his online travel agent. Barton founded a competitor, Zillow.

IAC holds some prospering and substantial businesses such as Ticketmaster, the online ticketing site, and Match, the online dating exchange. But even these have been forced uncomfortably to walk in lockstep with IAC's other businesses, even when the logic has been flimsy. The unvarnished truth is that Diller, who built up Fox into the fourth television network for Rupert Murdoch, has a dismal track record in running internet businesses. No amount of Diller's brutal charm can obscure that.

What the mogul does have is the contrarian courage of a great investor, and a mastery of the dark arts of corporate infighting. He acquired e-commerce assets during the downturn, when other investors had written off the internet as a blip. And he's playing hardball with as much skill and ruthlessness as his disgruntled shareholder, John 'Darth Vader' Malone.

That raises the question. Why does Diller, a 65-year-old who enjoys his yacht and parties he throws with his hostess, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg, even pretend to run these businesses? He should not be the plucky entrepreneur fighting off the evil corporate raider. Diller is on the wrong side of that eternal conflict. He has certain skills and the temperament, just none suited to a managerial role. The detached and machinating capitalist played in the current struggle by John Malone? That should be, in the next business life at least, Diller himself.

A decade and a half ago, Diller was cast out of Hollywood's Paramount studio with nothing more than a PowerBook and a Gulfstream. He set out to become an entrepreneur, running his own show and building something new. Instead, he became a trader of assets. His first big trade: obtaining a hand-me-down home-shopping network, HSN, which Malone helped him buy. There his troubles began.

Since then, Diller's career has been of buying low and selling high: Ticketmaster, CitySearch, Match.com, Expedia, Ask.com, and the like. (He bought and sold Ticketmaster, in some form, an astounding seven times.) Can you name single hit that has emerged from Diller's own mind? Exactly. With Diller steering the wheel, IAC-borne startups like Gifts.com, Zwinky, 23/6, and the like have gone nowhere.

And yet Diller steadfastly fancies himself an entrepreneur, not a trader. Profiles constantly talk about how he zooms in on particular businesses, eager to offer the real managers running his businesses advice, desperate to somehow leave a mark on the things he bought with other people's money, as if they somehow belonged to him.

An obvious guess: Bill Miller, Legg Mason's chief investment officer, is a famed tech investor, most noted for making an early bet on Amazon.com. But as a stock pick, IAC, has been a stinker, dropping 38 percent over the past year. And Legg Mason is one of only two institutional investors who could have easily parted with 20 million shares. (Lord Abbett, another mutual-fund company, is the only other.)

Miller has been unwinding his stake since March, so a sale would not be surprising. But it's a blow to Diller nonetheless. The media mogul has sought to boost his company's shares by splitting it into five more focused parts, targeting specific sectors of e-commerce. Shareholders would then choose which ones they want to invest in. Whoever sold that large stake to Liberty, whether Miller or anyone else, has signalled an obvious choice: none of the above.