We sort of lived paycheck to paycheck, like a lot of African-American families do, still do.
We weren't a welfare family, but we knew that if I wanted a bicycle it meant that somebody else wasn't going to get something else. Or if you wanted to go to college, you knew your parents couldn't pay your way to college.
I failed miserably. I couldn’t get up in the morning. Still can’t.
I knew that if we had a box of cookies in the house, you made sure you got yours fast. It made you make decisions quick…If you talk to anyone from a large family, the tendency is you want to chart your own course, because otherwise how would you get recognized?
I said, hmmm, let me see that. So I looked at it, and I said, wherever he had elderly I crossed out and put black people. Black people are a certain demographic, black people are poorly depicted on television, so on, and so forth.
It doesn't sound like a lot, but to me, from a family of ten, a half million dollars was probably more money than I'd seen in the whole town where I grew up, in terms of the whole black population probably didn't have a half million dollars in net worth.
BET was a business opportunity waiting for someone to put it together.
Being an African American who succeeds at the highest level, since nobody expects minorities to be there.
Fortunately I was able to pay the price. I mean, the NBA did not write me an affirmative action check and say, ‘Bob, if you show up with half the money that the team is worth, we'll give it to you.’ This was because fortunately I had the money to do it.
When an African-American attains a level of success, he or she becomes the primary go-to person for any other business deal. The broader community does not look for anybody else. They say, I've got my Bob Johnson, I've got my Oprah. And that's it. And it just stops.
What I try to do as I'm going up the trail, I try to bring with me other African-Americans who can then use my experience and gain credibility from what I've done to be their own successful person.
Today, if I were to put on jeans and walk into a jewelry store, and I could probably buy the jewelry store ten times over, but the jeweler's going to look at me as a black guy in jeans who probably can't afford it, and maybe who just maybe might steal something.
We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re just painting it black.
Anything that has to do with money, I want to be in that business.
If there’s something I can do and I feel it should be done, I just want to do it. I just don’t want to leave it undone because I’ll sit back and say, why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I start that business?
The failure of any community to avail itself of the resources of the Internet will limit its ability to succeed. BET is bringing its media channels, content and brand resources together with those of our partners to create an online destination that will educate, enrich, empower, and entertain African-Americans.
We are going to brand the Internet, much the way we branded cable some 16 years ago.
I’m in business to make money. You can do well and do good. But at first, you have to focus on the blocking and tackling of running a good business.
BET was never a legacy event for me. BET was something I started as an investment and I knew someday I would sell it.
Whenever I see an opportunity and a chance to change something, I go at it and I lay out all the facts to everybody…And when I come to this space, I'm going to come with talent, I'm going to come with focus. And I'm going to do the job as competitively as the next guy.
I make too much money to be a front man.
We are the only black network in town, so everybody has poured their burdens and obligations on BET, but we can’t solve everybody’s desires for BET. We have to be focused on running this as a profit maximization business.
I never really embraced the notion that BET was an heirloom that belonged to the greater black society. BET was a business that had a great impact on African American society, but it didn’t belong to it. And so, my thing is that we want to contribute, we want to add value. But we have to operate according to the philosophy that you have to exist in a world where business decisions have to be made based on business, not on political notions or social agendas.
A lot of people wanted BET to be everything to everybody. So the educational community wanted us to be an educational channel. In fact, for a long time people would call BET black educational television because they just insisted if you're going to do anything black, it had to be in education.
You've done it for 25 years, there's not much more you can do.
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