# Sumner Redstone **Sumner Redstone** (born Sumner Murray Rothstein, Boston, May 27, 1923 – August 11, 2020) built [[National Amusements]], his father's New England drive-in chain, into the holding company that controlled [[Viacom]], [[Paramount Pictures]] and [[CBS News]]. His maxim was "content is king." He graduated from Harvard, served in World War II as an Army codebreaker on Japanese traffic, and earned a Harvard law degree before joining the family business in 1954. He became CEO of National Amusements in 1967. ## The empire in three deals 1. **Viacom, 1987.** A $3.4 billion hostile takeover of the cable and syndication company that CBS had spun off in 1971. It made a theater owner a cable mogul. 2. **Paramount, 1994.** He won Paramount Communications for about $10 billion after a bidding war with Barry Diller's QVC. 3. **CBS, 1999–2000.** A merger of about $37 billion, then the largest media deal in history, which reunited the studio and the broadcast network. He split the company in two at the end of 2005 (CBS and a new Viacom), on the theory that "value" and "growth" assets should trade separately. His daughter reversed that in 2019. ## The control structure The empire's real asset was the voting structure. National Amusements held a controlling stake of supervoting shares in both companies, so one family controlled a network, a studio and dozens of cable channels with a minority of the economic value. That made the empire governable by one man, and later by whoever controlled him. ## The end - **2016.** A court-ordered psychiatric evaluation during litigation by a former companion. Redstone resigned as chairman at 92, and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was ousted in the ensuing control fight. - **2018.** [[Shari Redstone]] won the war with CBS chief [[Les Moonves]]. - **2019.** She re-merged the companies as ViacomCBS (later [[Paramount Global]]). After his death in 2020 his stake passed through trusts to her. In 2025 she sold it to [[David Ellison]]'s Skydance. So the supervoting structure Sumner built became the single asset a buyer had to acquire to take CBS, and the thing the [[FCC]] and a Trump lawsuit could bargain over (see [[Paramount Global]]). ## Related - [[National Amusements]] · [[Shari Redstone]] · [[Viacom]] · [[Paramount Global]] - [[Paramount Timeline]] · [[CBS Timeline]] · [[Les Moonves]]