The most wanted man on the planet

    来源：2009年2月号《财富》杂志

    Fired as chief of Viacom, Tom Freston took off on a nonstop global adventure. Now he's helping Oprah to start a new TV network and Bono to save the world.

    作者：Patricia Sellers

    Where in the world is Tom Freston? A lot of people have been asking that question ever since the day in September 2006 when Freston fell off the face of the media world.

    One of those people, Oprah Winfrey, didn't wait long to find out. Just a few weeks after Sumner Redstone, the octogenarian chairman of Viacom (VIA), had abruptly removed Freston as CEO, Winfrey found him - in Burma. She had never met the man, but she knew his reputation as a talent magnet who had built MTV and Nickelodeon into two of the most widely distributed cable networks on earth. She had heard about Freston's farewell: At least 1,500 employees at Viacom's Times Square headquarters, upon learning that their former boss had returned to clean out his office, crammed the lobby and spilled onto the sidewalks, shouting, "Tom! Tom!"

    "I'd love to meet you," Winfrey told Freston when she reached him on his cellphone half a world away. She invited him to visit her at her 42-acre estate in Montecito, Calif., outside Santa Barbara. "He walked in the door, and I said, 'Cool,'" says Winfrey, recalling the morning he showed up. "I liked his spiky hair. I liked his loafers. Everything about him was cool."

    She cooked him breakfast (scrambled eggs with cheese) and decided then and there that she wanted him to be CEO of Harpo, her media conglomerate. "I didn't phrase it that way because I could tell he was reluctant to commit to anything," Winfrey tells Fortune. "He was relieved to roam the world and be his own man." Ever since, though, Winfrey has been tracking Freston around the globe, gently pressing him to work with her, and hoping he will help her build the next (and biggest) phase of her empire.