Mel Karmazin, Failure?

One of the ideas behind this blog is that the world of business is full of big egos, and that egos trump economics on a very regular basis. On the other hand, it's rare to find the sitting CEO of a publicly-listed company admitting that the world of big business can often be reduced to a pissing match between two hard-headed individuals. CEOs like to pretend that they're selfless servants of their shareholders, even when everybody knows otherwise.

Unless you're Mel Karmazin, of course. Mel just gave an interview to Portfolio's Nancy Hass where he's only too happy to admit that after merging CBS with Viacom, board meetings were essentially knock-down fights between himself and Sumner Redstone:

You could have sold tickets to those board meetings with you and Sumner.Oh, they were fun. While I was there the Osbournes were on MTV, and I will tell you, Sumner and I were far, far more interesting to watch.

Yeah, loads of fun, I'm sure. Especially for those long-suffering shareholders.

Of course, Mel could always blame Sumner, back in the day, if the share price fell. He can't do that at his new shop, Sirius, whose shares were last seen trading at $3.08 apiece, half the price they were at the beginning of last year, and down from somewhere north of $80 back during the dot-com boom.

" I like the idea of the report card—the stock price," Mel tells Hass. Does that mean he's officially giving himself an F?