The hard-driving media mogul who lived to win

Sumner Redstone 1923–2020

Sumner Redstone parlayed a family drive-in theater business into a vast media empire. A pugnacious entrepreneur who coined the phrase “content is king,” he used hostile takeovers and myriad lawsuits to amass holdings that included Viacom, CBS, Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster, and cable channels such as MTV and Nickelodeon. At his peak, Redstone held assets worth over $80 billion, a fortune he didn’t compile without ruffling feathers. With a hot temper and self-described “unlimited capacity for confrontation,” Redstone burned through top executives, dismissed Tom Cruise from his Paramount deal for erratic behavior, and clashed publicly with family members. As doggedly determined as he was ruthless, Redstone survived a 1979 fire at a Boston hotel by hanging from a third-floor window ledge as flames seared his flesh. He dismissed the notion that he’d been changed by the experience. “I have a passion to win,” he wrote, “and the will to win is the will to survive.” Sumner Rothstein was “raised in a Boston tenement” by a housekeeper mother and a father who sold linoleum from the back of a truck and “later owned a restaurant, nightclubs, and drive-in theaters,” said The Washington Post.

Fear of anti-Semitism led his father to change the family name to Redstone in 1940. A “studious overachiever” who ranked first in his high-school class, Redstone attended Harvard on a scholarship, earning a law degree and embarking on a “lucrative law practice.” Bored by the law, in 1954 he took a massive pay cut to work for his father’s theater business, scouring New England and “acquiring properties for the growing chain,” said The Hollywood Reporter. In the 1960s, the family pioneered the building of multiplex theaters, amassing more than 120 by the mid-’70s. Recognizing that home video and cable TV “would hurt the theater business,” he borrowed heavily and acquired Viacom in 1987, said the Los Angeles Times. He bought Paramount in 1994, and at age 77 acquired CBS in 2000 for $37 billion. His later years were marked by poor health and declining fortunes as “cable cord cutting eroded the value of Viacom.” After a former girlfriend alleged in a 2015 lawsuit that he’d lost his mental capacity—if not his daily appetite for steak and sex—he stepped down as chairman of Viacom and CBS but kept his controlling stake in the media group’s holding company. “I have no intention of ever retiring,” he said in 2009, “or of dying.”