Why NBC's Friends Made Donald Trump Demand $90 Million
Whether you consider it one of the best reality shows of all time or not, Donald Trump's "The Apprentice" certainly makes no bones about the vast wealth of its host. But how much was he actually paid for the show? If Trump had his way, he would've walked away from hosting the NBC reality competition show a cool $90 million richer for the 15 Season 2 episodes alone ... because he felt that he should get six times as much money as the cast of "Friends" were paid.
"'Friends' had six people," Trump described the logic in Ramin Setoodeh's upcoming book "Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass" (via Vanity Fair). "They're getting $1 million an episode each. That's $6 million. So if they're getting $6 million, and I have higher ratings than they do — because this is the end of 'Friends,' and they were fading out — I said, 'You should pay me $6 million an episode.'"
Trump's logic wasn't entirely sound, considering that he was only beating "Friends" reruns in the ratings at the time. The pay bump would also have been fairly significant, considering the fact that the host earned a relatively meager sum of $25,000 per episode from Season 1 of "The Apprentice." As you might expect, the network wasn't ready to give in to such demands, and for a while, Trump was worried that he went too far — though he does mention in the book that he ultimately got a considerable raise for the show's sophomore season.
Trump's relationship with the network head who denied his raise soured over the years
Though he had a long-standing relationship with NBC, "The Apprentice" star eventually found out that a shared past with the network's higher-ups didn't necessarily mean that they would treat him nicely going forward. In Ramin Setoodeh's book, Trump blames some of his later media coverage in his brief and futile dance to get a massive raise on NBCUniversal head at the time, Jeff Zucker.
Behind the scenes, Zucker and Trump were friends for many years, and according to Trump, Zucker only got his later CNN president gig when he put out a good word for him. Despite Zucker denying Trump's aspirations for $6 million per "The Apprentice" episode, their relationship didn't sour until Trump's relationship with CNN did. The two have a long-standing difficult history, from the huge amount of attention Zucker's CNN gave Trump's 2016 campaign to the later deep animosity Trump felt toward CNN's extensive coverage of various scandals and incidents involving him. "He's human scum," Trump fired off at his former friend in the book.