Terminally-ill Simpsons co-creator Sam Simon explains why he's giving away his entire fortune
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At 25, Sam Simon was the showrunner on Taxi. At 33, he helped create The Simpsons. At 58, he was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and given three months to live — and that's when his life's work began.
More than a year removed from that dire diagnosis, Simon is still alive and racing to give away a vast TV fortune built from a lucrative royalty setup he received from his work on The Simpsons. "I make tens of millions of dollars a year, which may not sound like a lot, but over 25 years it adds up," Simon recently quipped to Vanity Fair.
Simon sat down with NBC News' Maria Shriver to discuss his end-of-life epiphany and the reasons why he's giving away everything. --Mike Barry
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Mike Barry is the senior editor of audience development and outreach at TheWeek.com. He was previously a contributing editor at The Huffington Post. Prior to that, he was best known for interrupting a college chemistry class.
