By Lloyd Grove
amous as the 'Money Honey,' Maria Bartiromo is about to begin a Sunday morning show on the Fox News Channel—but not before firing a ringing broadside at her former CNBC bosses.
The “Money Honey” may have moved across the street--from CNBC to Fox--but she’s still the same hyper-competitive, no-nonsense, Brooklyn-born business enthusiast that viewers have come to know as Maria Bartiromo.
“I’m not changing,” the 46-year-old financial news luminary told me on Thursday as she rode back from a sit-down with Ken Frazier, the chairman and CEO of the Merck pharmaceutical empire in the wilds of northern New Jersey. “I’ve always been competitive when it comes to interviews, and I intend to remain the same person.”
The constant battle to book exclusive airtime with heavy hitters like Frazier actually figured in Bartiromo’s stunning decision last November to cross enemy lines from CNBC, where she’d been a franchise player for two decades, to join the Fox Business Network, Roger Ailes’s second-place financial television operation, along with the top-rated Fox News Channel.
“It wasn’t just the intense competition, it was a competition with my own company at CNBC,” said Bartiromo, who is marking five weeks of anchoring her two-hour stock market program on FBN, Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo, and on Sunday debuts her live hour-long interview show on Fox News, Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. (In other words, her famous name and face are all over both cable outlets.) “Six or seven years ago, my boss came and said, ‘Maria, you’re the only one who’s working, the only one who’s picking up the phone and getting big hitters on the air, and I need to make other people do that.’”
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