CBS Chairman of the Board Sumner Redstone and the people he hires have always been known as ridiculous penny pinchers who like to hire other penny pinchers to run the "leanest" possible organizations imaginable. There was a time when I was working for CBS that every purchase of over $500 had to be personally approved by the CEO of the company. I kid you not. The person that ran our radio station in Chicago instituted a rule that said only executives got to use the nice stationery. That's how ridiclous it got.
And yet, because of the lavish pay Redstone gives his CEOs (at the expensed of every other person on the payroll), he has personally been among the biggest contributors to the insane explosion of CEO salaries.
The New York Times examines this strange and ironic twist.
