By Jonathan Taplin
Publication Date: 2026-03-29 13:00:00
O
On January 11, 1994, I drove to Royce Hall at UCLA to hear Vice President Al Gore deliver the keynote address at the Information Superhighway Conference. I was in the early stages of building Intertainer, which would become one of the first video-on-demand companies. The 2,000 people packed into that auditorium didn’t know it, but they were crossing a threshold. The list of speakers reads like a who’s who of the industry: John Malone from TCI, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Schulhof from Sony, Barry Diller from QVC. They were among the richest and most important personalities in the American communications industry. Today, their combined powers and fortunes are a rounding error compared to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen. The world the Hollywood moguls returned to would, in every sense of the word, not be the world they left behind.
Gore’s UCLA speech now reads like a confident moment in the early Clinton fantasy of the managed…