CBS News is spending a lot more cash to fund Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes takeover.Weiss’s new pick to run the venerated newsmagazine, Nick Bilton, is making far more than his predecessor. The British-born contrarian was installed as 60 Minutes’ new executive producer last week, and is reportedly salaried at $2.5 million—a million more than veteran broadcast journalist Tanya Simon, who ran the show from April 2025 until just last week, according to Page Six. Weiss announced Bilton’s hire the same day that she fired a large swath of the show’s crew, in an event that has since been internally referred to as “Black Thursday.” The axed staff included Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on a notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.Scott Pelley, who had been one of the show’s rotating faces for 22 years, was canned Wednesday after he openly questioned Bilton’s appointment during a contentious all-staff meeting earlier this week. At the same meeting, Bilton suggested that more layoffs could be on the horizon.The show’s remaining correspondents have since begun to question their own futures at the decorated program: Correspondents Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, and Jon Wertheim reportedly held an hourlong meeting Wednesday on the matter, according to Status. Stahl’s contract has already expired, and it is not clear if it will be renewed. Three sources that spoke to the outlet shared that Whitaker is considering his options and might leave of his own accord. Anderson Cooper already left by his own volition last month.Bilton is by no means the show’s typical hire, and many critics of the hiring decision have questioned what qualifies him to run 60 Minutes at all. Bilton has previously worked as a tech columnist, writing for Vanity Fair and The New York Times. He seemingly left the news industry during the latter half of the last decade in order to pursue screenwriting in Hollywood, and has since worked on scripts and produced projects for major studios, including Lionsgate, Netflix, and Disney.It is not publicly known how much the program’s highly respected, longtime showrunner Bill Owens made before he was forced out in April 2025 for refusing to bend to Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit. Trump sued 60 Minutes over its sit-down interview with Kamala Harris prior to Election Day 2024, claiming that the program had essentially “defrauded” the American public due to a minor editing decision. Legal experts condemned the suit at the time as meritless, yet CBS’s parent company, Paramount, nonetheless agreed to pay Trump $16 million in order to settle the case out of court.