Sheila Johnson could have retired when Black Entertainment Television (BET), the company she founded with her then-husband Robert Johnson, sold to Viacom in a deal worth $3 billion in 2001, making her the first Black female billionaire. But the music-teacher-turned-media-mogul says she was too restless, too eager to prove herself after her divorce went through in 2002. “I think I was pissed off,” she says, nodding to her years “as the little woman behind the man.” She adds: “There was a lot of me left on the table.”
Johnson, 74, threw herself into the luxury hospitality business, largely on a whim, and now runs a portfolio of seven hotels and resorts in the U.S., Anguilla and Jamaica called the Salamander Collection, recently ranked the No. 1 luxury hotel brand by USA Today. She owns stakes in three Washington, D.C. teams, the WNBA’s Mystics, the NBA’s Wizards and the NHL’s Capitals. Why sports franchises? “It’s a vanity ploy. You ask any of the white men out there, it’s all vanity. It gives you a certain kind of cachet and power within a town.” At Robert Redford’s suggestion, she founded a film festival that transforms her sleepy town of Middleburg, Va., into a glittery Hollywood outpost every October.
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