Part IThe Story
On January 29, 2016, a geriatric psychiatrist named Stephen Read examined a ninety-two-year-old man who controlled, through a movie-theater company his father had founded in 1936, roughly eighty percent of the voting power of CBS and Viacom. Read had been retained by the lawyers for a woman named Manuela Herzer, who had until recently lived in the man's house and directed his medical care. She had then been expelled from both and written out of his estate planning. The examination covered familiar ground: shapes, colors, simple arithmetic. The man could name his great-grandchildren. He could not do the arithmetic. Then came a word to be spelled in reverse, five letters long: world.
The man had once, by his own account, competed in a national spelling bee and lost. He had graduated first in his class from Boston Latin School with what was reported to be the highest grade-point average in the institution's three-century history. He had been pulled out of Harvard during the war to work on what he would later call "the high-level Japanese diplomatic and military codes, the kind of which had never been cracked," before adding, scrupulously, "But keep the record straight, I was one of a large group." He had argued before the Supreme Court. At sixty-three, with borrowed money and his family's real estate behind him, he had won a hostile takeover of Viacom. Seven years later he outbid Barry Diller for Paramount Pictures. Five years after that he agreed to buy CBS, the company that had spun Viacom off as a syndication castoff in 1971.
"Mr. Redstone was able to start with 'D,'" Read told a Los Angeles courtroom that May, "but was unable to do the other letters, and in fact reverted to doing them forward."
One has to handle that sentence with care. Read was the plaintiff's witness, hired to find damage, and the judge, David Cowan, gave far more weight to what Sumner Redstone himself said he wanted, which was to be rid of Herzer. He dismissed her suit. Cowan also observed that it was "not in dispute that Redstone suffers from either mild or moderate dementia." Both things were true at once, and that was the condition of the empire in its final years: a man who could still want things, and could still get them, and could no longer reliably reverse five letters.
He could start with D. He could not go back. By no one's account, his own included, had he ever been much good at going back.
There was one more detail in Read's testimony, about how the old man passed his afternoons. It can wait.
By the Numbers
The Redstone Ledger
63Age at which he won control of Viacom, March 4, 1987
$3.4BPrice of the four-month hostile takeover of Viacom
$10.1BFinal bid for Paramount Communications, raised from $7.5B
$37.3BViacom's agreed price for CBS, its former parent, September 7, 1999
~10% / ~80%National Amusements' equity stake vs. voting power in Paramount Global
45%Portion of his body burned in the 1979 Copley Plaza fire
$43Weekly pay as a Ninth Circuit law clerk after Harvard Law, 1947
A Translation, Not an Erasure
The building was called Charlesbank Homes, a tenement in Boston's West End, a neighborhood of synagogues and immigrant shopkeepers that the city would later bulldoze in the name of urban renewal. The bathroom was down the hall and shared. Keach Hagey, whose biography The King of Content remains the most thoroughly reported account of the man, put the matter in a sentence that explains more of the next eighty years than any balance sheet: "Even after he became one of the richest people in America, he never stopped seeing himself as a person who grew up with the shared bathroom down the hall."
His father was born Max Rothstein on April 11, 1902, in Boston, to Galician Jewish parents from a shtetl called Kozova, in Austro-Hungarian land that is now Ukraine. Max left high school early. He bought a truck and won a hauling contract with the City of Boston, ushered at the Olympia in Scollay Square, and sold linoleum. Seventy years later, at a conference in a Beverly Hills hotel, his son would still be producing the image on demand: "I can remember him carrying rolls of linoleum on his back. He believed in hard work. He had to work hard, and I had to work hard." Max also distributed liquor during and after Prohibition. That trade brought him into proximity with Harry "Doc" Sagansky, a Boston gambling boss, and in 1934 the two opened a nightclub called the Mayfair. They bought a drive-in on Long Island too. Then they started a loan company, and in 1943 they took over the Boston Latin Quarter from Lou Walters, the father of Barbara Walters.
The money, according to Sagansky's son, was not the Rothsteins'. "It was my father's money," Robert Sage told Hagey. "The Redstones didn't put any money in it." Sumner liked to describe himself as self-made. He was not quite, and the gap between the phrase and the record is one of the small, permanent fissures in the story.
His mother, Belle Ostrovsky, was the American-born child of immigrants from Kyiv. She would set the clock back half an hour during his hour of piano practice so that the hour lasted ninety minutes. "She was a constant driving force in my life," he wrote, "and though I often resented her presence, I could never challenge her." Note the verb in that last clause. Could never. Few people afterward would be able to say the same.
In 1940, the year Sumner turned seventeen, the family stopped being the Rothsteins. The reason usually given is that the name invited association with Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish gambling boss, a reasonable concern for a family whose capital came from Doc Sagansky. Sumner credited his father with the decision. Friends of the family credited Sumner. The new name was not an Anglo invention borrowed from a Brahmin street sign. Rothstein means "red stone" in Yiddish, and Redstone was simply the old word carried across into English. It was a translation, not an erasure, and the boy who insisted on it would soon be translating Latin, Greek, and Japanese, and eventually movie theaters into real estate, real estate into collateral, and collateral into cable networks. He was a man of conversions.
Boston Latin was where the drive got its shape. "The competition was cruel, it seemed inhuman," he wrote. "Throughout high school I don't remember eating." He told one interviewer those years were "the most stressful time in my life," and he told Larry King in 2001 that "my competitive juices were stirred for the first time at Boston Latin School." He also told King, a breath earlier: "It's true I was born in a tenement, but I never felt deprived. I never felt disenfranchised. I felt like — just like anybody else."
He graduated first, in 1940, the year of the name.
The Codebreaker's Apprenticeship
Harvard took him on scholarship and disappointed him almost immediately. "There was no feeling of daily individual competition, no sense of intensity, no battle of intellects," he complained. "The rigor I expected from the educational world was nowhere present." College administrators, noting his Latin and Greek, steered him toward a Japanese course taught by Edwin O. Reischauer, the scholar who would later become the American ambassador to Japan. In 1943 Reischauer left Cambridge to build an Army Signal Corps program at Arlington Hall in Virginia, training Japanese translators and cryptanalysts, and Redstone followed him. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1944 and promoted to first lieutenant. He worked with the Signals Intelligence Service team decoding Japanese traffic. In his own retelling he worked the graveyard shift and attended Georgetown Law by day, where he finished first in his class. Harvard awarded his bachelor's degree with the class of 1944, in classics and government, on the strength of credits he had already banked.
Two details from the war years are worth holding onto, because they rhyme with later behavior. His final assignment was overseeing entertainment for Army hospitals, a job in which, according to one biographical account, his father's nightclub connections proved useful. He also used his access to buy surplus military goods, office supplies and tools, which he resold to department stores at a profit. At twenty-two, the codebreaker was already doing what he would do for the rest of his life: finding the asset nobody else was pricing correctly, and the relationship nobody else could call upon.
He transferred to Harvard Law and graduated in 1947. His third-year paper, still catalogued, is titled "Toward More Equitable Determination of Tax Liability by Averaging of Income." He married Phyllis Gloria Raphael on July 4, 1947. Then he went to San Francisco to clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for $43 a week, teaching labor law at night at the University of San Francisco.
In 1948 he joined the Tax Division of the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General Tom Clark. The timing deserves a moment. That May, the Supreme Court had decided United States v. Paramount Pictures, the antitrust case that forced the studios to divest their theater chains. The government was busy prying exhibition apart from production. Thirty-odd years later the young lawyer would spend a fortune knitting the two back together. A 2006 snapshot of National Amusements' encyclopedia entry noted, with a nearly audible shrug, that the company by then owned theaters Paramount had been forced to surrender under that very ruling, and was "ironically" connected to Paramount again through Viacom.
He followed his Justice Department supervisors into private practice in 1950 and became a partner in 1951 at Ford, Bergson, Adams, Borkland & Redstone. Bugsy Siegel tried to hire him; he declined. In 1954 he argued Holland v. United States, defending a married couple of hotel owners convicted of tax evasion after an unexplained jump in their net worth. He lost. The Court upheld the convictions. But his argument, that the government bore the burden of proof when it relied on unusual increases in net worth, later became Internal Revenue Service policy. He lost the case and won the rule, which is a very particular kind of victory, and one he would keep pursuing.
Then he quit. "When I found out that the law was just another business, and it was," he told Larry King, "I decided to go in business for myself." In his memoir the sentence is harder: "It's not a crusade for humanity, it's a business." The idealist had discovered the market and preferred owning it to serving it.
Three Drive-Ins, or Fourteen
How many drive-ins did his father own in 1954, the year Sumner left Washington to join Northeast Theater Corporation?
The answer depends on who is counting, and when, and why. Hagey's research puts the figure at fourteen, spread across five eastern states. One account of Michael Redstone's life says three. A business encyclopedia says twelve. The Boston Globe's obituary, writing about a slightly later period, says fifty-five. Sumner himself, on September 7, 1999, the day he announced a $37 billion acquisition of CBS, told Vanity Fair: "Not bad for a guy who started with three drive-ins." Two years later, on Larry King's set, the number had shrunk further: "At that time my father had a couple of drive-ins."
The empire grew, and the origin got smaller, which is how origins work when the man telling the story is also the man who owns the publisher. That comes later.
What is not in dispute is the division of labor. His younger brother Edward ran operations, and Sumner ran expansion. In 1959 the family reincorporated as National Amusements, Inc., specifically to raise money more easily. Sumner put in nearly $18,000 and took the title of vice president. In 1962 they bought a run-down indoor theater in Worcester, Massachusetts, and split it into two screens during renovation. It was a small architectural decision with a large afterlife. Redstone would claim the word multiplex as his coinage, and the suburban multiscreen box became the industry's standard configuration for decades. In 1964 he was elected president of the Theater Owners of America. When it merged with a rival group the next year, he became chairman of the new National Association of Theatre Owners. He made himself the exhibitors' spokesman before he had become anybody's mogul.
He became chief executive in 1967. National Amusements then had ninety-three screens, fifty-two of them at drive-ins and forty-one indoors. Within a decade it had nearly 250.
The decisive move was not about screens at all. "He was a brilliant exhibitor and tough as nails," recalled Dan Fellman, the former head of domestic distribution at Warner Bros. "Most exhibitors lease their theaters from shopping centers. Sumner bought land and built them." The drive-in business would die, eventually, from two causes Redstone named himself. The multiplex offered comfortable suburban viewing, and the land beneath a drive-in became worth more than any projector could earn on it. "We learned a lot from that experience; owning your own land is a good thing," he told King, and then he said the sentence that explains everything that happened after 1987: "Had we not been big landowners, I doubt that we could have raised the money to acquire Viacom."
The dirt under the screens was the bank.
In 1977 he saw Star Wars. The legend, which he told often enough that the Television Academy titled a clip "on the legend of leaving a screening of Star Wars to buy shares of 20th Century Fox," holds that he directed National Amusements to buy five percent of the distributor. The shares cost about $8. He sold them for about $60 after Marvin Davis bought the studio. He took a stake in Columbia Pictures and sold it to Coca-Cola for a profit reported at $48 million. He did well in Orion and Paramount too. In 2025 Barry Diller wrote in his memoir, Who Knew, that Redstone had regularly bribed the former Paramount chief Frank Yablans, with the knowledge of Gulf+Western chairman Charlie Bluhdorn. The claim arrived long after Redstone could answer it, and it sits in the record as an allegation and nothing more. It does fit one pattern, though: Redstone always wanted to know what was happening inside the studios before anyone else did.
By 1981 he was fifty-eight, with 250 screens and a trading account full of Hollywood. In the hierarchy that mattered, he was still a second-tier player. The alphas owned the films, and he owned the rooms where they were shown. "Redstone wanted that power," the New York Times wrote after his death. "The glamour, too." He maintained to Larry King that he was "not a stargazer," that running a studio was "strictly a business." In his memoir he wrote, of his teenage summers working the concession stand at his father's Sunrise Drive-In in Valley Stream, New York's first, five hundred cars, opened in 1938: "When I began working in a small concession stand in a drive-in theater, I fell in love with motion pictures. I was in awe of the magic of stories on film and the powerful craft of storytelling."
Both statements are his, and he never reconciled them.
The Ledge
On March 29, 1979, a fire broke out at the Copley Plaza hotel in Boston, set, according to later accounts, by a disgruntled teenage busboy. Sumner Redstone, fifty-five, prosperous, and still unknown outside the trade, was in a room on the third floor. "I made the classic mistake," he said. "Opened the door. Fire swept in."
He opened his autobiography with what came next. The prologue is titled "The Fire This Time":
— Sumner Redstone, A Passion to Win (2001)I was kneeling on a tiny ledge, barely big enough to put one foot on. I was three floors up. If I jump, I'm dead. Flames were shooting out of the window head-high and I crouched there, hanging onto the windowsill, my fingers cupped, my right hand and arm in the fire and burning.
The first window was stuck. He tried a second one. "The heat and flames roaring out of the room burned off my pajamas and peeled away my skin," he wrote. "My legs had been burned to the arteries, now my arm was charring." A ladder from a fire truck eventually reached him. The burns covered roughly forty-five percent of his body, and his right wrist was nearly severed. There were five operations and more than sixty hours of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Every time the bandages came off, he was dosed with morphine. Recovery took a year. He was told he might never walk normally again.
He went back to the tennis court instead. The right hand healed into what one writer called "a gnarled hook," and he had the racket strapped to it. "I only think about it when I'm hitting a tennis ball," he said in 1989, "and say how damn lucky I am." Dennis Stanfill, the studio executive, credited his survival to "sheer will." Redstone did not disagree. "The fire brought home something I believed long before," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Great successes are built on failures and calamities and frustrations, not on small successes."
It would be easy to stop there with the hero's version. The record also contains a wry counter-reading, and it is too good to omit. Variety's reviewer of the memoir observed: "As for the fire, what will to live, what tenacity, you may think. And if you don't think so, he's happy to drive the point home." On Larry King's set, on the book tour for a memoir whose prologue is the fire, Redstone said: "I actually never speak about it until I'm asked, although Simon and Schuster thought it was important to the story."
Simon & Schuster was his company.
Still, the image holds whatever spin was put on it, because the body kept the record: the cupped fingers, the right hand left in the flame because letting go meant a three-story fall, the grip that outlasted the pain. "Iron grip" would become the stock phrase obituary writers reached for when describing how he ran his companies. It was a cliché, and in his case it was also a medical history.
Betting His Life
Viacom existed because of a regulation. In 1971 the Federal Communications Commission barred the television networks from syndicating their own programs, and CBS spun off a company to sell reruns of Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-O, and I Love Lucy. By the mid-1980s that orphan had accumulated a peculiar set of assets: the pay channels Showtime and The Movie Channel, plus MTV Networks, bought in 1985 for $550 million from Steve Ross's Warner Communications, which brought with it MTV and Nickelodeon. It owned television stations. It held syndication rights to The Cosby Show.
Redstone began buying the stock in 1985, he said, as a hedge against slowing growth in exhibition. When Viacom's management, led by Terry Elkes, moved to take the company private in a leveraged buyout, Redstone bid against them. The fight lasted four months. On March 4, 1987, he won voting control for $3.4 billion. Most of it was borrowed, with roughly $400 million in equity from National Amusements and the family's land standing behind the debt. He was sixty-three, an age at which, as one British profile put it, "most of his contemporaries had hung up their suits and headed for the putting green." Ralph Baruch, Viacom's founding chairman, was pushed aside. Redstone fired Elkes with what Variety's reviewer would later call "visceral pleasure."
Michael Milken's firm helped finance the deal. Twenty-five years later, sharing a stage with Milken in front of a standing-room crowd, Redstone was still sore that Milken had charged him "an extra quarter-percent interest." "I've been paying for it ever since," Milken said. The grudge had outlived a prison sentence and two decades of bull markets, and it was over a quarter point.
The bankers wanted him to sell MTV and Nickelodeon to pay down the debt. Critics thought a channel built on music videos was a fad. Redstone refused, and within a generation MTV and Nickelodeon became the financial engines of the company.
His father had opposed the whole thing. "My father, he always thought I was taking too big of a risk on Viacom," Redstone recalled in 2012. "He said, 'You're betting your life on Viacom.' I told him that I wanted to."
Michael Redstone, born Max Rothstein, the linoleum peddler and nightclub owner who had built a theater chain on a gambling boss's money and named it for the northeast, died in Bal Harbour, Florida, on April 4, 1987, thirty-one days after his son won Viacom.
"Unfortunately," Sumner said, "he never lived to see the success of Viacom."
My $2 Billion Ex-Friend
Paramount Communications was the renamed remnant of Gulf+Western, Charlie Bluhdorn's conglomerate, and its prize was a studio with a library of some nine hundred films. Its chairman, Martin Davis, was by Redstone's account an insecure negotiating partner. In the memoir Redstone recalls Davis fretting that "they'll build a big statue of you in the middle of Central Park and I'll be forgotten." Redstone answered: "No, they'll build statues of both of us and I will be looking up to you in admiration." Variety noted that Redstone "said what was needed to close the deal," and added that "the park has luckily remained clear of mogul statuary."
A friendly merger was announced in September 1993. Asked what it felt like to be running the world's fifth-largest entertainment company, Redstone punched the air. "We will be number one, not number five or number two. Number one!" A business associate compared his manner in brainstorming sessions to "a mad dog, foaming at the mouth." He sometimes waved his cigar so energetically that he struck himself on the head, showering himself with ash and spittle. The New York Times reported that he once yelled so loudly that one of his teeth shot across the room.
Then Barry Diller, running QVC with John Malone's TCI behind him, entered with a hostile bid. What followed was the kind of public auction that now looks almost quaint in its theatricality. Redstone raised his offer at least three times, from $7.5 billion to $10.1 billion, and won on February 15, 1994. Analysts said he had overpaid by billions. He referred to Diller for years afterward as "my $2 billion ex-friend." In the same period he bought Blockbuster Entertainment from H. Wayne Huizenga, partly for its cash flow, which was then healthy.
The bill arrived in pieces. Viacom carried nearly $10 billion in debt. Redstone sold Madison Square Garden to Cablevision and the bulk of Simon & Schuster's educational publishing to Pearson for $4.6 billion. By 1997 Blockbuster, as he later testified under oath, was "going down the tubes and taking Viacom with it." He moved himself temporarily to Blockbuster's Dallas headquarters, took personal control, and went to Warner, Columbia, and Fox asking for price concessions on videocassettes. They refused. Out of those meetings came a different idea. Instead of paying a large wholesale price per tape and keeping every rental dollar, Blockbuster would split rental revenue with the studios. Blockbuster's share of the rental market went from about 27 percent to nearly 40. By 1998 Viacom's stock was approaching $60, above its 1995 high, and Forbes ran a piece titled "The Vindication of Sumner Redstone."
That spring Paramount's partnership with Fox on James Cameron's Titanic was on its way to earning Viacom more than $200 million. A Los Angeles Times reporter offered Redstone the romantic reading of the film, the creative genius prevailing over the unthinking corporate suits after going 100 percent over budget. He wasn't interested. "It's not a movie, it's history," he said of the phenomenon. Of the lesson: "Will it affect the way we think at Paramount? Not at all. If anybody else wants to go and make $200- and $300-million pictures, and they're looking for a partner on an equal basis, not a limited basis, forget Paramount."
He had a phrase for all of it, and he repeated it until it became his epitaph: Content is king. He claimed to have coined it "decades ago." Distribution pipes, in his view, were worth only what flowed through them, so he sold off Viacom's cable systems and kept the networks, the studio, and the library. The boy at the concession stand had grown up to buy the projector, the film, the studio that made it, and the cable channel that would rerun it on Nick at Nite. He still thought like an exhibitor, about what people would line up to see.
The Subsidiary Swallows the Parent
In 1999 the FCC loosened its rules to allow a single company to own two television stations in the same market. Mel Karmazin, the cost-cutting radio man who had merged Infinity Broadcasting into CBS and risen to run it, had been eyeing Viacom since 1997. The matchmaker was Gordon Crawford of Capital Research, a large shareholder in both companies, who persuaded Redstone that Karmazin was neither predator nor prey.
The courtship took place over three long lunches in Redstone's private dining room on the fifty-second floor of Viacom's Times Square headquarters, at a four-seat cherry-wood table set with roast chicken and beef fillet. Karmazin was so nervous he ate, by his own recollection, "two cookies." The real signal came when Redstone suggested moving the talks to Karmazin's apartment in Trump Tower so no one would see them together. "As long as we were still meeting at Viacom, he wasn't serious," Karmazin said. "But when he wanted to go to my apartment, I knew I had him."
On September 7, 1999, they announced that Viacom would buy CBS for $37.3 billion, at the time the largest media merger ever. The syndication castoff of 1971 was buying its parent. The two men performed their rivalry for the press as a running bit. "Mel's such a cheapskate, he invites me over to his house and doesn't offer me lunch," Redstone said. "Why should I give him lunch?" Karmazin replied. "Like he doesn't have enough money to pay for his own lunch." Redstone kept voting control, and Karmazin got operations. In 2003 Redstone told Forbes the two had "an extremely cooperative and friendly relationship now." Karmazin resigned in 2004.
In 2001 Redstone published his autobiography, A Passion to Win, written with Peter Knobler, through Simon & Schuster, the publishing house he owned. The first printing was 100,000 copies, and the book was sold in Blockbuster stores, which he also owned. Asked why he had written it, he told Larry King that Simon & Schuster had called his story "inspirational," and then delivered the line with a straight face: "So, I did what my executives told me to do, as I usually do." Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, later said the book was an influence on the show.
His life by then had moved west. His marriage to Phyllis ended in 1999 with a $3 billion divorce suit alleging adultery and cruelty, after he was seen in Paris with the producer Christine Peters and quoted saying he "wanted to spend the rest of his life with Christine." That did not happen. On April 6, 2003, he married Paula Fortunato, a schoolteacher and pastry chef thirty-nine years his junior who had not known who he was when they met on a blind date. They moved into a $14.5 million house in Beverly Park, bought from Sylvester Stallone, which became Viacom's de facto West Coast headquarters. "The Big Cheese is on the phone, as usual," his young wife told a visiting Forbes reporter, barefoot at the door. Inside, he kept tanks of tropical fish within view of his favorite chair in the den. From that chair he watched the CNBC stock ticker, compulsively by one account and "second by second" by his own.
The stock was the problem. Viacom had peaked at $76 in 2000 and was in the mid-$40s by 2003. In 2005 he decided the combined company was undervalued and split it in two. CBS took the network, Simon & Schuster, and the television studio, while a new Viacom took MTV Networks, BET, and Paramount Pictures. Les Moonves ran CBS, and Tom Freston, who had been at MTV since before it was MTV, ran Viacom. The two companies began trading separately on January 3, 2006. CBS stock surged and Viacom's languished.
In August 2006 Redstone publicly fired Tom Cruise from Paramount, reportedly without telling the head of Viacom first. On September 5, 2006, he fired the head of Viacom. Freston had built the global cable business, and Redstone had touted him as the man who would run the company after he retired. Redstone's stated reasons were insufficient aggression online, too little contact with investors, and a weak MTV upfront. He replaced Freston with Philippe Dauman, a director and former Viacom counsel who had been at his side through the Viacom and Paramount deals, and whom some called the son Sumner wished he'd had.
Hollywood noticed. By 2007, Vanity Fair reported, the gossip at the Ivy and the Palm described Redstone as "an isolated, mean-spirited old man." Paramount had bought DreamWorks SKG for about $1.6 billion, and relations with Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg had deteriorated into a cold war. Redstone's people blamed Geffen for the bad press. Geffen went on the record:
— David Geffen, to Vanity Fair, 2007I don't care for Sumner's behavior, and I have that in common with a great many people in the entertainment business. I don't like the way he treats people. Most of all, nobody is going to treat me or my partner in that manner and stay in business with us. Nobody.
That same year Vanity Fair described the eighty-two-year-old mogul's arrival in Southern California this way: he had a young wife, two studios, a network, and a gated house where "he spent his days tending tropical fish, taking phone calls, and shaving nude in his hot tub." The fish would remain in the story to the end. The rest did not last.
Everything in Trust
Michael Redstone had imagined National Amusements as a family enterprise that would pass jointly to his two sons. It did not. Spencer Burke, reviewing Hagey's book, put the son's career in a single sentence: he "spent a lifetime wresting ownership of his family's business away from his brother and his kids, his own grandchildren, his several wives and from any other family member who exhibited weakness, including his own son, Brent." Edward Redstone left the business. Years later Edward's son sued, and in 2007 the Los Angeles Times reported that the testimony and documents described "allegations of financial chicanery and personal betrayals worthy of a Charles Dickens novel." The suit claimed Sumner had cheated his two children and his nephew out of portions of their inheritances to secure control. In 2006 Brent, then fifty, sued his father and his sister, Shari, accusing them of freezing him out. His stake was bought out in a settlement.
The architecture underneath all of this was legal. As part of the settlement of his first divorce, Redstone's stock was placed in irrevocable trusts that would eventually go to his grandchildren. On March 1, 2010, he publicly confirmed that all of it would go to the five of them: Brandon, Kimberlee, and Tyler Korff, Shari's children, and Keryn and Lauren Redstone, Brent's. In 1998 he had told a reporter that his grandchildren, "along with Viacom, are the most important thing in my life." He meant both halves of that sentence and seemed to see no tension between them.
Shari Redstone was the child who stayed. She earned degrees from Boston University's law school, where her father had taught the institution's first course in entertainment law starting in 1982, and she ran the theaters. Under her, National Amusements was among the first chains to add food, drink, and luxury seating. A New York Times article on November 22, 2006, reported that her father was reconsidering her role. In 2007 they fought in public over governance and the future of the cinema chain. In a 2009 letter he said he wanted her to become chair of National Amusements, Viacom, and CBS when he died, but in a non-executive role: "I also want to make clear that Philippe will continue to be the CEO of Viacom and that I would want my trustees to take all steps to make sure that that continues as well."
In 2014 he tried to buy her twenty percent of National Amusements for $1 billion, on the condition that she give up any claim to lead his companies after his death. She refused. On September 29, 2014, he put his view in writing: "Recent dealings with my daughter, Shari, have caused me to believe even more strongly that she does not have the requisite business judgment and abilities to serve as Chair of Viacom or CBS."
Fourteen months later, on December 11, 2015, he signed a different letter to the same daughter, apologizing for a rift so deep he had threatened to bar her from his funeral and from visiting him in the hospital: "This letter expresses my true feelings, and I am under no duress or coercion when signing it. I wish to put our family back as we were before Sydney and Manuela, and restore our family relationship to what it was then. This is very important to me."
What lay between those two letters is the subject of the next section. Before that comes a quieter episode that undercut the triumphalist version of his story. In 2008, as the credit markets seized, the debt that had always financed his wagers came due at the worst possible moment. Redstone and Shari sold $400 million of nonvoting shares in National Amusements. In October 2009 the company sold nearly $1 billion of its CBS and Viacom stock and agreed to sell thirty-five theaters to Rave Motion Pictures. Redstone sold his roughly 89 percent stake in Midway Games, a bet that one account tallies as a $500 million loss. To protect the wager his father had warned him about, he sold some of the theaters his father had built. He filed for divorce from Paula on October 17, 2008.
I'm Not Going to Die
In April 2009, before an overflow crowd at the Milken Institute, Larry King asked Redstone about mortality. "The people who fear dying are people who are going to die," Redstone said. "I'm not going to die." He swam fifty minutes a day, usually nude, in one of the pools on his estate. "I eat and drink every antioxidant known to man," he said, listing goji berries, Green Machine smoothies, and tomato juice. "I feel better than I did when I was 20, in every facet."
What followed over the next six years was a long public contest between that sentence and his body.
In July 2010, at eighty-seven, Redstone left a voicemail for Peter Lauria, a reporter who had written about Redstone's push to get airtime on MTV for a girl group called the Electric Barbarellas. He wanted the name of Lauria's source inside MTV. "We're not going to kill" the source, he assured Lauria. "We just want to talk to him." He added that Lauria would be "well rewarded and well protected." Lauria declined and played the tape on the Today show. A Viacom spokesman confirmed the voice and called it a mistake. An anonymous Viacom source told the New York Post something closer to the truth: "Sumner wants to be consequential. Sumner is really proud of what he did. This guy is loving it. He likes people to know he's still alive."
Monuments arrived meanwhile. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 30, 2012. On June 1, 2012, Paramount renamed the Administration Building on its lot the Sumner Redstone Building. That May, at the Milken conference, he explained his method in three short sentences: "You have to be in control of your destiny. You can't work for anyone else. It's not about money, it's about winning."
In December 2013, Kim Masters of the Hollywood Reporter went to Beverly Park for what turned out to be his last interview. Redstone was immaculate in a suit and tie and seated in a taupe armchair. Male aides had to move him from one chair to another. Sydney Holland, his live-in girlfriend, kept jumping up to dab saliva from his lapels. Before Masters could ask a question he announced, "I should tell you what happened last night," and recited the names of the stars he had seen at a dinner for Jerry Bruckheimer. He reached for an actress on a CBS show and called her "Marjorie — what's her last name?" He repeated certain ideas loudly: exercise and antioxidants, education is the key, Viacom is the greatest media company in the world. And, Masters noted, luck had nothing to do with his success. Asked about succession a few weeks later, he exploded: "I will not discuss succession. You know why? I'm not going to die."
In May 2014, at CBS's annual meeting in Los Angeles, a curtain was drawn so the audience would not see what happened next. Redstone had always been too proud to use a wheelchair, so burly men carried him onto the stage and set him in a chair beside the other directors. That September he was hospitalized for aspiration pneumonia, his second such episode that year, after inhaling food into his lungs. It left him dependent on a feeding tube and barely able to speak. Viacom and CBS together paid him about $24 million for 2014. Asked how the mogul looked, his old friend the producer Robert Evans was reported to have said: "Well, you should see him in person, he looks even worse."
On November 5, 2015, CBS's earnings call opened with a halting voice: "This is Sumner. Welcome to the CBS Corp. event." Eight days later, on Viacom's call, he managed eight words, slurred and faint: "Good morning everyone. Here's my wise friend, Philippe."
By then the house had changed hands more than once. Holland, forty-three, and Herzer, fifty, a former girlfriend who had stayed close, had been managing more and more of his life, and Herzer had become his designated health-care agent. Over the years he had given them tens of millions of dollars. In August 2015 he split with Holland. That October, with Shari's involvement, Herzer was put out of the house, removed as his health-care agent, and written out of his estate planning. In November Herzer sued, calling him "a living ghost."
On February 3, 2016, CBS announced that Redstone had resigned as executive chairman, with Moonves succeeding him. The next day Viacom named Dauman chairman. Shari cast the only dissenting vote.
On May 5, 2016, Redstone gave videotaped testimony. He needed an interpreter, and he answered some questions by pointing to letters on a board. Asked to identify Manuela Herzer, he found enough voice for a complete sentence: "Manuela is a fucking bitch." The judge credited his wishes.
Fifteen days later his lawyers notified Philippe Dauman and George Abrams, his longtime lawyer and confidant, that he had removed both men from the seven-person trust that would control his holdings after his death or incapacity, and from the board of National Amusements. Viacom's board said he was being "shamefully manipulated." His spokesman said the decision was his and that the board had ignored his invitation to explain its plans, noting that "Mr. Redstone has significant speech impairment and, for much of the past two years, has not relied on verbal statements at board meeting to make his opinion known." Dauman was pressing ahead with a plan to sell 49 percent of Paramount, and Redstone's camp said he wanted the studio kept whole. In June, Frederic Salerno, Viacom's lead independent director, released an open letter addressed to a man who could no longer read it in the ordinary sense:
— Frederic Salerno, Viacom lead independent director, open letter to Sumner Redstone, June 2016I am making my letter public in the hope that those around you will read it to you and that you can see the complexity of the issues confronting us.
Salerno introduced himself as "a director you have elected to the Viacom board 22 times." He described a recent outing: "Last week they staged a drive for you, with Shari, to the Paramount studio for a brief visit in which you didn't get out of your car."
So the man who had raised his bid three times to win the lot was driven past his own name on the administration building and did not get out of the car.
By 2018, according to the Wall Street Journal, he communicated partly through an iPad wired to buttons that played his recorded voice saying three things: "yes," "no," and "f--- you."
Reverted to Doing Them Forward
The rest happened in courtrooms and boardrooms, and Shari won nearly all of it. Dauman was out at Viacom by the end of the summer of 2016. In 2018 the CBS board, led by Moonves, tried to dilute the family's voting control. Shari fought the move in Delaware, and Moonves left CBS that year amid a cascade of sexual-misconduct allegations. On December 4, 2019, CBS and Viacom, the two halves Sumner had separated thirteen years earlier because he believed they would be worth more apart, were merged again as ViacomCBS. In 2022 the company renamed itself Paramount Global. "Perhaps his most remarkable achievement," the University of Michigan's Erik Gordon said, "was producing a person even tougher than himself in Shari." James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams' Unscripted tells the late saga in four "Seasons" and thirty-three "Episodes." The Wall Street Journal's review described the story as a mash-up of King Lear and Weekend at Bernie's, "with Redstone starring in both title roles."
In January 2019 the family settled with Herzer, who agreed to repay $3.25 million of the gifts. Sumner Redstone died at his home in Los Angeles on August 11, 2020, at ninety-seven, of natural causes, and was buried at Sharon Memorial Park in Massachusetts. His father's Dedham Drive-In, the first in the state, had opened on August 11, 1948, seventy-two years to the day earlier. "Through it all," Shari said, "we shared a great love for one another." Bloomberg estimated his fortune at $1.9 billion. In 2019 Forbes had ranked him 413th. The seventh Mission: Impossible film is dedicated to his memory.
In 2024 David Ellison's Skydance agreed to buy National Amusements for $2.4 billion and merge Paramount into itself. The deal closed on August 7, 2025, and the holding company founded as Northeast Theater Corporation in 1936 ceased to exist. On the day of the closing, Paramount's new president said the theater chain was for sale. On June 11, 2026, Paramount announced that thirteen U.S. Showcase Cinemas locations would go to the Belgian operator Kinepolis in a deal reported at $30 million. Kinepolis said it would keep the name.
I keep returning to the courtroom in May 2016 and the psychiatrist's testimony, because there was one more thing Stephen Read told Judge Cowan, about how a man who had once said "patience is a virtue that I do not respect" now spent his afternoons. One of his primary activities, Read said, was betting on sports.
"He typically does not know who is playing," Read testified. "The bets are arranged so Mr. Redstone always wins. The games are pre-recorded and Mr. Redstone is persuaded to bet on the winning team."
He had not figured out the ruse.
"He has an almost unblemished record of betting."
Part IIThe Playbook
Redstone is a hard figure to learn from. His methods were brilliant and his late decline was disgraceful, and the two are tangled together. The same instincts that won Viacom also produced the trust litigation, and the grip that kept him on the ledge in 1979 later kept him from letting go of anything at all. The principles below come from the evidence of his career, the deals, the structures, and the fights. Several are cautionary: they show what concentrated control is worth, and what it costs when no one plans for its end.
The principles
- 1.Own the dirt under the screen.
- 2.Separate the votes from the dollars.
- 3.Buy what flows through the pipe.
- 4.Treat the law as an operating system.
- 5.Arrive late, with your tuition already paid.
- 6.Overpay for the irreplaceable, then sell the furniture.
- 7.Never sell the strange young asset to pay the debt.
- 8.When the business is burning, move into the building.
- 9.Write the legend before someone else does.
- 10.Keep score in public, and know what the scoreboard costs.
- 11.Design for your own incapacity.
Principle 1
Own the dirt under the screen
Most exhibitors in Redstone's era leased their theaters from shopping-center landlords. Redstone bought the land and built on it, a habit Dan Fellman of Warner Bros. singled out decades later as what set him apart. The choice looked conservative because it tied up capital that rivals put into more screens. It turned out to be the most aggressive thing he ever did, because it quietly built a second balance sheet underneath the first.
The proof came twice. When the drive-ins died, killed by the suburban multiplex and by the rising value of the ground they sat on, National Amusements did not just absorb the loss. It sold the land to developers. Then, in 1987, the land became collateral. "Had we not been big landowners," Redstone told Larry King, "I doubt that we could have raised the money to acquire Viacom." A movie-theater chain cannot borrow $3.4 billion against ticket sales. It can borrow against real estate.
The general point is that the operating business and the asset beneath it are different things. Operators naturally optimize the first. The ones who end up with the option to make a large move are the ones who quietly accumulate the second.
Tactic: When you choose between leasing and owning a core input, model the asset's value as future collateral for a move you cannot yet see, not only as operating cost.
Principle 2
Separate the votes from the dollars
When Redstone died, National Amusements held about 10 percent of Paramount Global's equity and nearly 80 percent of its voting power. That gap, built through dual-class shares and kept intact through repeated sales of nonvoting stock, was the whole logic of the empire. In 2008, when the credit crisis forced him to raise money, he sold $400 million of nonvoting shares in National Amusements. He gave up economics and never gave up control.
The structure let him make wagers that a widely held company never could: the Viacom takeover at sixty-three, a Paramount bid raised three times, a $37 billion acquisition of a former parent. It also protected him from outsiders right up until the threat came from inside the governance he had built himself.
R
The Control Architecture
Each mechanism protected the empire from one threat and created exposure to another.
| Mechanism | What it protected | Where it bent | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dual-class voting via National Amusements | Control of CBS and Viacom on a minority of equity | CBS board's 2018 attempt to dilute family votes | Held |
| Owned real estate under theaters | Collateral for the 1987 Viacom buyout | Theaters sold off in 2009 to service debt | Partial |
| Irrevocable trusts from first divorce | Stock destined for five grandchildren | Constrained his own later maneuvering | Partial |
| Seven-person voting trust with Dauman and Abrams | Professional control after death or incapacity | Trustees removed May 20, 2016; litigated | Broke |
| Health-care agent designation | Decisions about his body and care | Herzer's removal and lawsuit, 2015–2016 | Broke |
Tactic: If you are going to concentrate control, sell economics before you sell votes, and assume the most dangerous challenge to your structure will come from someone you appointed.
Principle 3
Buy what flows through the pipe
"Content is king" became a slogan, and slogans hide their reasoning. Redstone's reasoning was an exhibitor's. He had spent decades as a distributor, watching the studios set terms because they owned the thing the audience came to see. When he crossed into media, he kept the networks, the studio, and the library, sold off Viacom's cable systems, and told the Television Academy he had "gotten out of cable operation" in order to become "the number one software-driven media company in the world."
His Blockbuster rescue was the same principle applied in reverse. A retailer without leverage over its supply was dying. By tying rental income to studio revenue, he turned the suppliers into partners with an interest in his outcome.
The principle has a limit, and his later years exposed it. Content is king only while the pipes compete to carry it. Once the pipe owners began making their own content, the slogan aged quickly. By 2019 he had fallen to 413th on the Forbes list.
Tactic: Before you buy distribution, ask whether you would rather own what the audience is waiting for; then reassess that answer every few years, because the kingdom changes.
Principle 4
Treat the law as an operating system
Redstone was a tax lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court and lost Holland v. United States, yet watched his argument about the government's burden of proof become IRS policy. That combination of losing the case and winning the rule shaped how he used litigation for the next sixty years. The New York Times called the law "his everyweapon." He threatened lawsuits during negotiations to gain leverage, and he often followed through. He sued Time Warner when it kept Showtime off Manhattan cable. He then described John Malone and Jerry Levin as "among my closest friends."
The lesson is not "sue people." It is that someone fluent in the rules can see moves that other players cannot see. The trust instruments, the voting structures, the irrevocable trusts drawn up as part of a divorce settlement: all of his control was legal engineering. So, eventually, was the war over it.
Tactic: Put someone fluent in the governing rules in the room for strategy, not just for review, because the best structural moves are invisible to people who only read the business plan.
Principle 5
Arrive late, with your tuition already paid
Redstone was sixty-three when he won Viacom. The British press called it "a surprisingly long time." It was not a delay so much as a long apprenticeship that paid for itself. Through the 1970s and early 1980s he traded studio stocks from his seat as an exhibitor. Fox went from about $8 to about $60, and Columbia produced a reported $48 million profit. Each position taught him how studios made money, and each profit added capital.
T
The Ladder
Each rung was financed, in part, by the one beneath it.
1936
Michael Redstone founds Northeast Theater Corporation.
1954
Sumner leaves his law partnership to join the family business.
1967
Becomes CEO; 93 screens, growing to nearly 250 within a decade.
1977
Buys five percent of 20th Century Fox after seeing Star Wars.
1979
Survives the Copley Plaza fire.
1987
Wins Viacom in a $3.4 billion hostile takeover on March 4.
1994
Wins Paramount at $10.1 billion; acquires Blockbuster.
1999
Agrees to buy CBS for $37.3 billion.
2006
Split into CBS and Viacom takes effect; fires Tom Freston.
2016
Steps down as chairman of CBS and Viacom.
2019
CBS and Viacom re-merge as ViacomCBS.
2025
National Amusements is absorbed into Paramount Skydance.
His position on the edge of the industry was an advantage. As a buyer of films, he saw each studio's product cycle, its hits and misses, and its dependence on exhibitors. He had been looking at Hollywood's financials from the outside for a decade before he bought in.
Tactic: If you cannot yet afford to own the thing you covet, take small positions in it from an adjacent seat, so your eventual entry is financed by the lessons rather than by hope.
Principle 6
Overpay for the irreplaceable, then sell the furniture
Analysts said Redstone overpaid for Paramount by billions, and he probably did. Diller's competing bid pushed the price from $7.5 billion to $10.1 billion, which explains the "$2 billion ex-friend" line. Viacom took on nearly $10 billion of debt. The rescue did not come from operating cleverness. It came from disposal: Madison Square Garden to Cablevision, and the educational side of Simon & Schuster to Pearson for $4.6 billion. By 1998 the stock was approaching $60.
The underlying logic is that an asset which cannot be replaced, such as a century-old studio with a deep library, carries a scarcity premium no spreadsheet captures. The non-core assets bundled with it usually have ready buyers at fair prices. Paying up for the bundle and then selling the pieces you don't need can turn an overpayment into a fair price for the core.
Tactic: When you are bidding for a one-of-a-kind asset, plan the post-close divestitures before you raise your bid, so you know exactly how much of the premium the furniture can repay.
Principle 7
Never sell the strange young asset to pay the debt
After the Viacom takeover, the bankers wanted Redstone to sell MTV and Nickelodeon to service the debt. A music-video channel and a children's network looked like the most expendable parts of a heavily leveraged company. He refused, expanded MTV into Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Russia, and within a generation those channels were, as the Los Angeles Times put it, "Viacom's financial engines."
Under financial stress, creditors and advisers instinctively sell whatever is easiest to value and least understood, and young, strange assets fit that description. Those are often the only assets in the portfolio with long growth ahead of them. Redstone's protection against that pressure was control. He could ignore the bankers because nobody could outvote him.
Tactic: When you must raise cash under pressure, sell the mature, well-understood assets first, and treat any buyer's eagerness for your youngest property as evidence of its value.
Principle 8
When the business is burning, move into the building
In 1997, with Blockbuster "going down the tubes and taking Viacom with it," Redstone did not hire a turnaround firm or send a memo. He relocated temporarily to Blockbuster's Dallas headquarters and met the studio chiefs himself. They refused his first request, for lower cassette prices. What came out of those meetings was a structural change, revenue sharing, that moved Blockbuster's market share from about 27 percent to nearly 40.
Two lessons sit inside this. The first is presence: a controlling owner in the room changes what counterparties believe is possible. The second is that a refusal often contains the real deal. When the studios rejected his price request, he looked for an arrangement that served both sides and found one.
Tactic: When a core business is in crisis, go there in person, make the obvious request, and treat the counterparty's refusal as the start of the actual negotiation.
Principle 9
Write the legend before someone else does
Redstone published A Passion to Win through his own publishing house, printed 100,000 copies, and sold them in his own video stores. He opened it with the fire. He made the drive-in origin smaller with each retelling, down to "a couple of drive-ins" on Larry King's show, so the climb would look steeper. He said he was self-made, despite the gambling boss's money. Variety's reviewer found it self-adulating, and it was. It also worked. The memoir became the template for how people told his story, and decades later it helped inspire Succession.
A founder's narrative is an operating asset. It shapes how counterparties price your resolve, how employees read your intentions, and how the press frames your setbacks. Redstone's fire story told every negotiator across the table that this man does not let go, and that was worth more in a takeover fight than another hundred million in financing. The cost is that when the narrative outlives the body, the gap between legend and fact becomes the story. Unscripted is in large part a book about that gap.
Tactic: Tell your origin story deliberately and early, but keep it true enough that the record cannot later be used to take it apart.
Principle 10
Keep score in public, and know what the scoreboard costs
Redstone watched his stock price "second by second." He split CBS and Viacom in 2005 because he thought the market undervalued the combination, and he cited "lack of contact with investors" among his reasons for firing Tom Freston. His insistence on keeping score was a discipline. It kept the operators accountable and the strategy tied to something measurable. It also produced a long list of departed lieutenants and a reputation, by 2007, for treating people in ways that drove away Spielberg and Geffen.
L
The Lieutenants
Redstone's operating executives rarely left on their own terms.
| Executive | Role | How it ended | Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Terry Elkes | Viacom CEO | Pushed out after the 1987 takeover | Ousted |
| Mel Karmazin | President and COO after CBS deal | Resigned 2004 after public friction | Resigned |
| Sherry Lansing and Jonathan Dolgen | Paramount leadership | Replaced 2004 | Replaced |
| Tom Freston | Viacom CEO, MTV builder, touted heir | Fired September 5, 2006 | Ousted |
| Philippe Dauman | Viacom CEO and chairman | Removed from trust and NAI board May 20, 2016 | Ousted |
The costs show up in the 2006 split. Viacom languished afterward, and thirteen years later the family put the two companies back together. A public score rewards short-term moves, and a controlling owner with no one to answer to can make those moves faster than his judgment can check them.
Tactic: Use the market's verdict to hold operators accountable, but require a second opinion before you act on it, from someone you cannot fire.
Principle 11
Design for your own incapacity
"I will not discuss succession," Redstone said in January 2014. "You know why? I'm not going to die." Within a year he was on a feeding tube. Within two, his health-care decisions had been in the hands of two former companions, his daughter, and then the courts. In 2014 he called Shari unfit to chair his companies; in December 2015 he signed a letter begging to restore the family "as we were." The voting trust he designed to put professionals in charge after his death became the battlefield. He was not wrong about his own stamina, which was remarkable, but he was wrong about what a body eventually does. As Burke wrote, the lesson of Hagey's book is that "every control mechanism has its limits."
The cruel irony is that the more completely one person controls an enterprise, the more the enterprise depends on that person's health, and the more urgently people around him are tempted to take that control for themselves. Redstone built a structure that could not be taken from outside, and refused to build the one thing that would have protected it from inside: a transition he believed in, put in place while he could still speak.
Tactic: Write your incapacity plan, naming a successor, a health-care agent, and trustees whose interests you have tested, while you are fully competent, and revisit it every year you remain so.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Sumner Redstone, interview with CNBC, 2012Patience is a virtue that I do not respect. If you're patient, you'll never go anywhere. It takes impatience to drive you to succeed.
— Sumner Redstone, Television Academy Foundation interview, November 16, 2000I believe that the only philosophy of life that's compatible with sanity is optimism. And the other thing I believe, and I've taught to my kids from day one: success is not built on success; it's built on failure. Frustration. Sometimes even calamity — and how we deal with it.
— Sumner Redstone, commencement address, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2002Remember, true opportunity never knocks. I have found that I have to go looking for opportunity — and if I don't find it, I have to create it.
— Sumner Redstone, Larry King Weekend, CNN, June 10, 2001Dollars have nothing to do with this, and you know that. Most really successful people are not driven by the lure of the dollar, they are driven by a drive to achieve, to be the best at what they do, to be No. 1.
— Sumner Redstone, to Larry King at the Milken Institute, April 2009The people who fear dying are people who are going to die. I'm not going to die.
Maxims
- The land is the bank. Own the ground beneath your operations, because one day it will finance a move your income never could.
- Sell dollars, keep votes. When you must raise capital, give up economics before you give up control.
- Own what they line up for. Distribution is only as valuable as what flows through it, so buy the thing the audience is waiting to see.
- Lose the case, win the rule. Sometimes the precedent you set matters more than the verdict you get.
- Late is not too late. A long apprenticeship on the edge of an industry can pay for your entry into its center.
- Pay up for what cannot be replaced. Then sell everything around it that can.
- Protect the strange young asset. The property creditors most want you to sell is often the one with the longest future.
- Go to the fire. When a business is collapsing, the owner's physical presence changes what counterparties believe is possible.
- Tell your story, but keep it checkable. A legend that the record contradicts eventually becomes the case against you.
- Plan the ending while you can still speak. Control that outlasts your capacity belongs to whoever is standing nearest.
