Friday, September 14, 2012

As the Sumner Turns

The Chairman of the Board for CBS & Viacom, Sumner Redstone, has been a very busy philanthropist. He has donated $130 million to charity, including $18 million to Boston University Law School, which will be naming a building after him.

I'm sure he's hoping that these last two or three years of philanthropy will make up for his 80-plus years of ruthlessness.

By the way, according to the linked article, he's also writing a second autobiography. I read the first one, and I have a tip for him. This time he should let an editor tell him that he's coming off as the most unlikable human imaginable. You have to read it to believe it. I challenge anyone finishing that book to say anything nice about the man...and he wrote it about himself.

They either told him he was coming off badly and he ignored them, or they were too afraid to tell him because he was the boss (he owns Simon & Shuster), or they didn't tell him on purpose to passive aggressively get back at him.

The whole time I was reading it, that's what was going through my mind.