After he was fired by Trump on The Celebrity Apprentice “Sunday night” (boo!), Penn Jillette got a call from his real bosses, Caesars Entertainment, who own the casino where Penn & Teller have headlined for ten years.
They asked him how much the prize money for his charity would have been, had he won Apprentice.
So he told them:
A quarter of a million dollars.
“They called up, and they said, ‘You really care about Opportunity Village, don’t you?'” Penn tells Zap2it.
The Las Vegas hotel and casino, which owns the Rio where Penn & Teller perform, then wrote a check for $250,000 to be given to the organization well in advance of “The Celebrity Apprentice” May finale. Penn had previously won $40,000 for his charity as the project manager during a task to create a show for Medieval Times.
“I’m thrilled to pieces,” Penn says. “So we’ll have the live finale, but I will have already given the full prize plus more to my charity. And [Caesars] didn’t have to do a big TV show about it.”