Viacom vs Google, father vs son?
There’s nothing like an Oedipal conflict to heat up the tech world.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Philippe Dauman, Jr, son of Viacom CEO, Philippe Dauman, has accepted a position at Google. This puts father and son on opposing sides of a $1 billion lawsuit over YouTube’s alleged infringement of Viacom’s intellectual property.
The son has been following in the father’s footsteps since the day the father gave the son the same name. Later, the son would attend college at the father’s alma mater — Yale –and follow him again to Columbia Law.
The son then earned an MBA — something the father never did — and, surrounded by job offers, took the one that would square the two men off. Some have suggested that the move represents a conciliatory gesture from Viacom to Google, and others may believe that Viacom has planted a spy — both unreasonably speculative in our view.
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About the Author, Dan Kaplan
Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.
It's funny how it goes.