How it pays to get fired

Just ask Viacom ex-CEO Tom Freston, who is walking away with $84.8 million. In addition to severance, which covers around $60 million of that, there's salary, deferred compensation and various target bonuses. It all seems straight-forward enough - well, as much as these crazy numbers can be - until the really goofy part pops up in the filing. As part of his employment agreement, Freston becomes a Viacom adviser for three years - at a fee of $1 million a year. For all that, he just needs to devote five days a month to the job (not that he'll actually be asked to do anything). Oh, and he still gets medical coverage through mid-2009. "They may very well have said, `We don't want him mad at us,''' executive recruiter John Challenger told Bloomberg News.