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If you're not a believer that life is about the journey rather than the destination, Tom Freston's story may convert you. Since Labor Day 2006, when Redstone summoned Freston to his home in Los Angeles' gated Beverly Park and told him, after 19 years of working together, "We've decided that we're going to have to make a change," Freston has moved from shock to embarrassment to anger, and past all that.
He walked out of Viacom with $60 million in severance and is one of the few ex-CEOs who actually knew what to do with the money: Change your life for the better. Thirteen days after he was fired, Freston flew to Singapore, then on to Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, and China with his wife, Kathy, her mother, Joan, and his brother, Bill. Ever since, Freston, now 63, has been roaming the planet, visiting 30 other countries, mainly in Africa and Asia. "You really realize that you're not at the center of things," he tells Fortune. "You're less than a pinpoint on the map."
It's a good time to be a small target, given the woes of Viacom and Freston's former boss. This past October, Redstone, 85, was forced to sell $233 million worth of Viacom and CBS stock to meet obligations related to $1.6 billion in private debt. His own financial troubles plus the recession and soft ratings at MTV are hurting Viacom shares, now trading around $16, vs. $37 the day Freston was canned.
While Redstone flails, Freston has spent the past two years dodging the press, resisting employment opportunities ("I told him, 'If you want backing to do anything, you can count on me,'" says Rupert Murdoch), and fending off advice from his high-powered friends to get back in the big game. Only lately has he been receptive to such talk from Jeffrey Katzenberg. "Having walked the walk before him - getting myself inelegantly, and with great fanfare, fired - I felt I could offer him a good shoulder to lean on," says Katzenberg, who was ousted by Michael Eisner at Disney in 1994 and is now CEO of DreamWorks Animation. "I told him, 'It ain't fatal. The amazing thing is, one door closes and another opens.'"
Freston's decision, at long last, to enter a few of those doors is noteworthy, given his track record as a leading indicator of the zeitgeist. Last June he signed on as a consultant to Winfrey - a role that understates his deep involvement in the creation of OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network. The new cable network, all about the Oprah ethic of living a meaningful life, is supposed to launch in at least 70 million homes early in 2010.
Even faster at tracking down Freston after he was fired was another celebrity recognizable by one name, Bono, who called Freston the very next day. "Fuck 'em. Count your blessings" was his advice, delivered with rock-star bravado.
Bono, whose side gig is saving the world from extreme poverty and AIDS, quickly went into recruitment mode. Freston agreed to pitch in but resisted taking a real job. Without title or pay (pro Bono, that would be), he set out to help the U2 frontman restructure his humanitarian organizations, the advocacy group ONE and the fundraising campaign Product RED. "I've linked up to a refreshing subculture of activist young people who are committed to improving the world," says Freston, who feels a little like he did 28 years ago when he was launching MTV. "It's the same young people that Obama has tapped into."
The likes of Oprah and Bono had to twist Freston's arm because he doesn't need to work anymore. He followed the advice of his billionaire pal David Geffen to get out of the stock market ("The party's over!"), which Freston did by last June. These days he is putting his money into an orphanage and medical clinic in Southeast Asia and reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, where he once lived. Last summer, if you had the right map, you could have found Freston running around Kabul with a cameraman, researching one of two film projects there. Says Katzenberg: "In his heart and his gut, Tom is a mad adventurer."