Legal wrangling over the splitup of Barry Diller's online conglomerate; a bitter spat between Diller and longtime backer John Malone of Liberty Media delayed the breakup. Gifts.com used to be run out of online retailer HSN, which is due to be separated; that left it headless, a good fit for the jobless. It's a good move for Rapp; we hear he'd been considering a junior position at Facebook, or running IAC's healthcare investments. Gifts.com may not be much — Compete.com lists its audience at below 1 millon, after a predictable spike in December — but at least Rapp gets a C-suite title.

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.