Drive-in theatre owner built media empire
Mogul was known for swashbuckling deals, creating ViacomCBS
Sumner Redstone, the New England cinema operator who became a billionaire media mogul late in life after buying Viacom Inc., Paramount Pictures and CBS Corp., has died. He was 97.
Redstone died Tuesday afternoon at his home in Los Angeles. His holding company, National Amusements Inc., confirmed the death in a statement Wednesday. No cause was provided.
Even in a business known for larger-than-life personalities, the six-foot-tall, red-headed Redstone stood out. His swashbuckling, billion-dollar takeover battles garnered headlines in the financial press. And his power struggles, love life and seemingly mercurial decisions, such as publicly firing action star Tom Cruise, made him the subject of endless industry gossip and tabloid stories.
“Sumner Redstone was a brilliant visionary, operator and dealmaker, who single-handedly transformed a family-owned drive-in theatre company into a global media portfolio,” ViacomCBS Inc. chief executive officer Bob Bakish said in a statement.
He leaves an empire that includes media giant ViacomCBS and its library of pop-culture titles stretching from “Rugrats” to “Titanic.” Redstone had a net worth of $1.9 billion (U.S.), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He controlled his assets through the closely held National Amusements.
In May 2015, Redstone said that upon his death, his ownership in that company will pass to a family trust, whose trustees include his daughter Shari Redstone and her son, Tyler Korff.
Shari Redstone has been playing an increasingly active role for the past few years. She engineered the ouster of longtime Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and gained the upper hand at CBS after CEO Les Moonves resigned following allegations of sexual misconduct. Her strategy led to the December 2019 merger of the two companies, a deal she pushed for to help them compete in the digital-media age.
“My father led an extraordinary life that not only shaped entertainment as we know it today, but created an incredible family legacy,” Redstone said in a statement Wednesday. “Through it all, we shared a great love for one another and he was a wonderful father, grandfather and great-grandfather. I am so proud to be his daughter and I will miss him always.” Sumner Murray Rothstein was born in Boston on May 27, 1923, to Michael and Belle Ostrovsky Rothstein. His father changed the family name to Redstone in 1939, three years after he built the first drive-in movie theatre in New York State.
After graduating first in his class at the Boston Latin School, Redstone earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and joined a military-intelligence unit to crack Japanese codes during the Second World War. He received a law degree from Harvard in 1947, the year he married Phyllis Raphael, the daughter of a local department-store owner.
Redstone worked as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco before moving to Washington, where he argued tax cases at the appellate level for the U.S. attorney general. He then joined a private law firm as a partner.
He returned to Boston in 1954 to join his father and younger brother Edward in their drivein theatre venture. Eventually, he bought full control.
As the theatres prospered, Redstone began to invest in movie companies. He bought and sold stakes in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Columbia Pictures and MGM.
He had accumulated about 8.7 per cent of Viacom, owner of MTV and Nickelodeon. In1986, an investment group that included members of Viacom’s board proposed to take the company private at a price Redstone deemed “entirely too low,” as he wrote in his 2001 autobiography, “A Passion to Win.”
Redstone mounted a counteroffer and ultimately persuaded banks to lend two-thirds of the $3.2 billion purchase price, allowing him to win a bidding war against financier Carl Icahn and a Viacom management group. When the deal was done, National Amusements owned 83 per cent of Viacom’s voting stock. At the age of 63, he became a full-fledged media mogul.
His reign as a media executive officially ended in February 2016, at age 92, when he resigned as chair at both CBS and Viacom. Still, even in his diminished state, Redstone, and his equally strong-willed daughter Shari showed they remained in charge.
The Redstone family will hold a private funeral, with a memorial to be determined once the coronavirus pandemic wanes.