Sumner Redstone, who built a media empire from his family’s chain of drive-ins, died. He’s 97.
ViacomCBS Inc., which he led for decades, recalled Redstone for his “unparalleled pastime to win,” his intellectual interest, and his overall determination toward the company.
Redstone built corporate competitive acquisitions, but many titles with his call focused on damaged ties with wives, actors and executives. In several interviews, he said he would never die.
His strong control over the National Amusements theatre channel, which controlled CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. through voting shares, passed on to his daughter Shari Redstone, who fought senior executives to merge the two entities that were split in 2006.
Sumner Redstone’s battles with his own circle of relatives were as dramatic as his corporate maneuvers. His son Brent Redstone once sued his father to break his media empire and then settled for a princely sum to give up his voting shares.
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Redstone, a thin guy with a strong Boston accent, married and divorced twice, first to Phyllis Gloria Raphael, mother of her children, Shari and Brent, and then to paula Fortunato teachers, a woguy 39 years her junior.
Under his leadership, Viacom has become one of the titans of the country’s media, featuring the pay-TV channels MTV and Comedy Central and the film studio Paramount Pictures. Redstone has told the interviewers that “content is king.”
In addition to being ruthless, Redstone was known for his damn determination. In 1979, he survived a fireplace at Boston’s Copley Plaza hotel by grabbing the windowsill of a third-floor window with his right arm still inside. He suffered third-degree burns on part of his body, his right wrist was almost cut off and he was told he would never walk again. But he nevertheless recovered and even played tennis by tying his racket to his wrist.
“I set out forever!” told Upstart Business Journal in 2009.
Born in 1923 in Boston, Redstone is the eldest son of Michael and Belle Rothstein, who replaced redstone’s surname.
Redstone graduated from Boston Latin School for the first time in 1940 and graduated from Harvard in less than 3 years. He was selected to paint on a World War II army intelligence team that deciphered Japanese army codes.
After 3 years in the military, he attended Harvard Law School and became a spouse at a Washington law firm. He surrendered to join his father’s drive-in company in 1954. Redstone turned it into a gigantic multi-screen movie theater chain called National Amusements Inc.
The personal corporation is the basis of his media empire and the source of all his family’s disputes.
He killed while trading the shares of Hollywood Studios and in 1987, the year he turned 64, he bought Viacom as a component of a hostile acquisition of $3.4 billion, the maximum of which he borrowed from founder Ralph Baruch as president.
Redstone then took over Paramount Pictures, a four-year procedure that ended with a friendly offer from Viacom for $10 billion in 1993. He collected the Blockbuster video rental chain for his then healthy flow of money, knowing then that renting video tapes collapsed.
Viacom then swallowed CBS Corp. for $34.5 billion in September 1999, and then the largest media merger until the AOL-Time Warner union intervened months later.
The deal reunited Redstone with CBS leader Mel Karmazin, another hard-voice executive with modest backgrounds. In June 2004, Karmazin was absent, later appropriate head of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. CBS and Viacom were divided into two public corporations in 2006.
Another victim of Redstone’s rise: Tom Cruise, whose couch on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and his Scientology club led Redstone to interrupt a deal with Cruise and his production company.
“We don’t believe that someone who commits artistic suicide and puts a price on the company’s profits is on the ground,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. The last two corrected things before the realization of “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol”.
In 2010, Redstone’s hand in the business has become undesirable. He directed a television screen with an organization of girls dressed in light clothing, the electric Barbarellas, in front of the internal protests. On the day of its broadcast, Judy McGrath, CEO of MTV Networks, resigned. He was then further outraged after journalist Peter Lauria uttered a voice message in which Redstone introduced himself to bribe him and reveal the story of his interference.
Redstone met his two sons. He bought his son Brent’s stake in National Amusements to settle a lawsuit in 2007. And after favoring their daughter Shari as their successor, they reached a bloodless area.
In May 2015, he issued a statement that after his death, his stakes in CBS and Viacom, through National Amusements, would be controlled through an acceptance of seven people as true. Acceptance as true is indexed as the administrators of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, his daughter Shari, his son Tyler Korff and 4 lawyers. It’s because of the advantages of his five grandchildren. Shari was the only one who opposed Dauman’s re-election to the Viacom board in February 2016, and Redstone expelled Dauman and board member George Abrams from acceptance as true in May amid legal disputes.
In 2015, his ex-wife Manuela Herzer sued Redstone after expelling her from her estate. The dress revealed a secluded life at her Beverly Park mansion that included common requests for sex and meat.
The lawsuit alleges that Redstone was hospitalized several times in 2014, leaving him with a feeding tube, catheter and severe speech problems. Herzer described him as a “living ghost.” An approved sentence dismissed the complaint, but Herzer continued to take legal action against Shari Redstone, alleging fraud.
Shari Redstone has been embroiled in a legal war to merge CBS and Viacom. In May 2018, she sued CBS for attempting to appropriate it in a series of maneuvers orchestrated through CBS CEO Les Moonves, who opposed the merger because it would be negative for non-Redstone CBS shareholders.
Their goal was to unite the corporations and then sell them or merge them with a third party.
Moonves shot across the board after the New Yorker reported allegations that he had assaulted several women. Moonves denied the reports.
CBS and Viacom agreed to merge in 2019, reversing the division Redstone had made thirteen years earlier. National Amusements unanimously approved the agreement, with Redstone among administrators voting in favor.