Robert Johnson, the founder of BET, who sold the cable channel dedicated to black entertainment to Viacom in 2001, said recently that he was offered a Cabinet position at a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month.
Johnson, a CNBC contributor, told the network that at his Nov. 20 meeting with Trump, the two discussed how the next president would reach out to the African-American community.
“It was an easy discussion, because I wasn’t coming there on a job interview,” Johnson said. “He hinted at something I could be interested in, and I quickly shut that down. It was a Cabinet position.” Johnson would not reveal which Cabinet position the billionaires discussed, but several are still open, including secretary of labor and secretary of treasury.
Johnson, now the founder and chairman of the RLJ Companies based in Bethesda, Maryland, said he “shut down” the Cabinet talk because as a veteran chief executive, working in a bureaucracy doesn’t really appeal to him.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Helena Andrews-Dyer
