Who owns Expedia? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Expedia Group is one of the largest online travel companies in the world, and its ownership tells a story that runs through three decades of internet history. It began as a software project inside Microsoft, passed through the hands of Barry Diller's media empire, spent years entangled with John Malone's Liberty Media, and finally emerged as a standalone public company with an unusual voting structure at its center.

On paper, Expedia Group is owned by public shareholders. Index funds and asset managers hold most of the stock. But economic ownership and voting control are not the same thing at Expedia, and the gap between them is the most important fact about how the company is governed. Barry Diller owns a modest percentage of the shares yet holds a large share of the votes, a design that has shaped every major decision the company has made.

Understanding who owns Expedia means separating three things: the founders who built it, the institutions that hold most of its equity today, and the one person whose voting power has defined its boardroom for twenty years.

Expedia was founded in 1996 as a division of Microsoft, launched by employee Rich Barton along with Lloyd Frink. Barton pushed Microsoft to let travel shoppers book their own flights and hotels online, a radical idea when travel agents still dominated the industry. The service quickly outgrew its parent.

In 1999, Microsoft spun Expedia off through an initial public offering priced at $14 per share, while keeping a controlling stake. The stock jumped on its first day of trading and gave the young company a market value of around $2 billion. That IPO set Expedia on the path to independence, though full independence would take several more years and two more owners.

Today Expedia Group is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and operates a portfolio of travel brands that includes the flagship Expedia site, Hotels.com, the vacation rental marketplace Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity, CheapTickets, ebookers, and Wotif, plus a large business-to-business division that powers travel booking for other companies. For the full year 2025, Expedia Group reported revenue of $14.7 billion on gross bookings of roughly $120 billion, both up 8 percent from the prior year.

Expedia Group is a publicly traded company. Its shares trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker EXPE, and anyone can buy them. That makes the broad answer to "who owns Expedia" simple: its public shareholders do.

The complication is that Expedia has two classes of stock. Regular common stockholders get one vote per share. Holders of Class B common stock get ten votes per share. As of the end of 2025, there were about 117 million common shares outstanding and about 5.5 million Class B shares. That small block of Class B stock carries voting weight far out of proportion to its size, and nearly all of it sits with one person. The result is a company that is economically owned by the public but has long been controlled at the ballot box by a single individual.

Neither founder controls Expedia today. Rich Barton left the CEO role in 2003 and went on to co-found Zillow and Glassdoor, though he later returned to Expedia's board and served as CEO again from 2019 to 2020 before Peter Kern took over. Public filings do not show Barton or Lloyd Frink holding a controlling equity position in the company they started. The founders built Expedia, but they do not own it in any meaningful voting sense.

The real story of Expedia's control runs through Barry Diller and John Malone. In 2001 and 2002, Diller's USA Networks, later renamed IAC/InterActiveCorp, bought a controlling stake in Expedia from Microsoft, paying roughly $1.5 billion for an initial 75 percent interest. IAC took full control, and in August 2005 it spun Expedia out as a standalone public company. Diller became chairman and senior executive at that spin-off, and he has held those titles ever since.

For years, Diller's grip on Expedia depended on a stake he did not personally own. Liberty Media, controlled by cable billionaire John Malone, held a large block of Expedia shares, later housed in a separate public entity called Liberty Expedia Holdings. Under a long-running stockholders agreement, Diller held a proxy that let him vote most of the shares Liberty owned. This "Diller Proxy" is what gave him effective control of the company without requiring him to buy a controlling stake himself. Malone provided the shares, and Diller provided the votes.

That arrangement was unwound in 2019. Expedia Group agreed to acquire Liberty Expedia Holdings in an all-stock deal valued at about $2.6 billion, which closed in July 2019. The Diller Proxy was terminated. In its place, Diller entered a new governance agreement and exchanged roughly 5.7 million of his common shares for an equal number of super-voting Class B shares, giving him around 29 percent of the total voting power in his own right. Control that had once rested on Malone's stake was now anchored in Diller's own Class B holdings.

The table below traces how ownership and control of Expedia have shifted through its major structural events.

With the Liberty stake absorbed, the largest economic owners of Expedia today are index funds and asset managers. The Vanguard Group is the single biggest holder, with roughly 12 percent of the common shares. BlackRock follows with around 8 percent, and value investor Dodge & Cox holds close to 6 percent. Together, institutions hold the large majority of Expedia's common stock, which is typical for a large-cap company in a major index.

These holders own the economics of the business. What they do not own is proportional control. Because their shares are ordinary common stock with one vote each, their combined voting weight is diluted by Diller's ten-vote Class B block. An investor can own a much larger slice of Expedia than Diller and still cast fewer votes.

Barry Diller is the central figure in Expedia's control structure. He has served as chairman and senior executive since the 2005 spin-off, and through his Class B shares he holds the largest share of the vote of any individual. His stake is held across a set of family trusts and a family foundation rather than in his name directly, but the voting power is concentrated with him. As of the company's most recent annual filing covering 2025, Diller remained chairman and senior executive, and there has been no confirmed handover of that role.

Ariane Gorin runs the company day to day. She became CEO in May 2024, succeeding Peter Kern, after leading Expedia's business-to-business division. Gorin also holds a board seat. Her appointment marked a shift toward a leader with deep operating experience inside the company's commercial engine rather than an outside hire.

The board of directors includes Diller as chairman alongside a mix of independent directors and executives. The key point about Expedia's leadership is the split between management and control: Gorin manages the business, but Diller's voting stake means the boardroom balance of power still runs through him.

The most significant governance dispute in Expedia's recent history concerned Diller's voting power itself. After the 2019 Liberty Expedia transaction and Diller's move into Class B shares, shareholders sued, arguing the deal entrenched his control on terms that disadvantaged other investors. The litigation settled in November 2021. Under the settlement, Diller and his family members were capped at 20 percent of the total voting power, with any shares above that threshold voted in a specified way. The settlement also gave Expedia a right of first offer if Diller tries to sell a large Class B block.

The settlement and related agreements attached an expiration date to Diller's super-voting rights. The Class B voting premium above Diller's original block is set to collapse once he is no longer Expedia's chairman or senior executive. In practice, this means Diller's outsized control is personal and time-limited rather than permanent. Whenever he steps back, the extra voting weight tied to those shares is designed to fall away, which would move Expedia toward a more conventional one-share-one-vote structure. Investors watching the company's governance treat this transition as a matter of when, not if.

Like other companies with unequal voting rights, Expedia draws ongoing criticism from corporate governance advocates who argue that dual-class structures let insiders control decisions out of proportion to the capital they put at risk. The concern is not unique to Expedia. It is a recurring debate across technology and media companies, and it shapes how index providers and proxy advisers view the stock. For Expedia, the criticism is tempered by the 20 percent cap and the sunset provision, both of which limit how far the structure can be pushed and how long it can last.

Ownership structure is not an abstraction at Expedia. It determines who gets to decide the company's direction. Because Barry Diller holds a large share of the vote through Class B stock, major moves such as mergers, leadership changes, and capital decisions have effectively required his support for two decades. That concentration can be a strength when it provides stability and a long-term view, and a weakness when it insulates decisions from the investors who own most of the economics. Anyone valuing the business, whether with a formal business valuation or a simpler model, has to weigh that control premium.

The structure also shapes what a public shareholder is actually buying. Someone who purchases Expedia common stock owns a claim on the company's cash flows but very little say in how it is run. That is a different proposition from owning a company like Airbnb or a marketplace like Turo, where voting and economic ownership may be more closely aligned or where founder control is exercised differently. For Expedia, the gap between votes and shares is the defining feature.

The sunset provision makes ownership at Expedia inherently forward-looking. The current arrangement is built around one person, and it is designed to change when that person leaves. That gives the company a built-in governance transition ahead of it, one that could eventually hand more control to ordinary shareholders. For long-term investors, the question is less about who owns Expedia today and more about who will own the votes once Diller's role ends.

Finally, ownership shapes competitive strategy. Expedia sits in a crowded online travel market against rivals and adjacent platforms, and a controlling shareholder can push through bold or unpopular bets that a more diffuse ownership base might block. Mapping that landscape, whether through a formal competitive analysis or a broader market analysis, shows why concentrated control has mattered so much in an industry where scale, brand, and capital allocation decide the winners.

Expedia Group is a publicly traded company owned by its shareholders. The largest economic owners are institutional investors led by Vanguard and BlackRock. However, Barry Diller controls the largest share of the voting power through super-voting Class B stock, so control and economic ownership are split.

Yes. Expedia Group trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker EXPE. It has been a standalone public company since IAC spun it off in August 2005, and it carried a market capitalization of roughly $35 billion in early 2026.

Expedia was founded in 1996 by Rich Barton, then a Microsoft employee, along with Lloyd Frink. It launched as a division of Microsoft before being spun off in a 1999 IPO. Barton later founded Zillow and Glassdoor.

Ariane Gorin has been CEO of Expedia Group since May 2024, when she succeeded Peter Kern. She previously ran the company's business-to-business division. Barry Diller remains chairman and senior executive.

Barry Diller has been chairman and senior executive of Expedia Group since the 2005 spin-off from IAC. He holds super-voting Class B shares that give him outsized voting control, capped at 20 percent of the total vote under a 2021 legal settlement, with those extra rights set to expire when he leaves his role.

The largest institutional shareholders are The Vanguard Group at around 12 percent, BlackRock at around 8 percent, and Dodge & Cox at close to 6 percent. Barry Diller's family trusts hold the Class B super-voting shares that carry disproportionate control.