Sumner Redstone
Sumner M. Redstone (born May 27, 1923) is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Viacom. He was born Sumner Murray Rothstein, is Jewish, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts.
He attended the prestigious Boston Latin school and graduated at the top of his class, which won him a position at Harvard College. He completed his B.A. in three years when the Board of Overseers of Harvard conferred him his degree. Afterward, he served in World War II, decoding Japanese messages for the United States Army. Upon completion of his Army service, he worked in Washington, D.C. and attended Georgetown University Law School. He chose to transfer into Harvard Law School and received his LL.B from that institution.
After completing law school, he working primarily in Washington, D.C., working at first for the U.S. Department of Justice and then going into private practice. However, after a few years in practice, he chose to make a bold leap into his father's theater chain management operation, what is now known as National Amusements. He left the legal world behind because he felt that law was more of a profession and not so much an instrument to spark social change.
As Sumner built up National Amusements into a pioneer in theater juggernaut, he understood that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms. There would always exist channels of distribution (albeit in varied forms), but content was always going to be necessary (his famous quote is "content is king!"). He then made investments in Columbia Pictures, Twentieth-Century Fox, Orion Pictures, and Paramount Pictures, all of which turned over huge profits when he chose to sell the stock in the early 1980s.
Looking for a new business to develop, he set his sights on Viacom International, a company that was a spin-off of CBS in 1971 after the FCC ruled that television networks could not syndicate programs they produced. Viacom made a lot of money from syndicating other programs, including most of Carsey-Werner Productions' shows (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and A Different World), as well as syndicating shows for other companies (Columbia Pictures Television's All In The Family was one notable example). Viacom also owned MTV Networks (formerly known as Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment), which owned MTV and Nickelodeon.
After a hostile takeover, Sumner won the voting control of Viacom and led a series of acquisitions to make Viacom one of the top players in modern media (aside from General Electric's NBC-Universal, News Corporation (parent of Fox), Time Warner, Sony, and Disney).
Redstone's next acquisition came in the form of the purchase of Paramount Pictures in 1993, which he fought over with Barry Diller (former board member of Vivendi Universal and President of IAC/InterActiveCorp) and John Malone (president of TCI/Liberty Media), where he had to raise his bid three times. Some say that Redstone overpaid, but after he shed certain assets (the Madison Square Garden properties to Chuck Dolan's Cablevision and Simon & Schuster's educational publishing units to Pearson plc for almost $4 billion), Redstone turned Paramount's expenditure into a monster profit.
The Paramount acquisition was only the tip of the iceberg. Redstone purchased Blockbuster Entertainment, which included Aaron Spelling's production company and a huge library of films, much of which has been merged into Paramount Pictures. Blockbuster tanked after management issues, but has now been spun off into its own independent entity.
The final acquisition came in the form of Viacom's former parent, CBS. Former Viacom President & COO Mel Karmazin (who was then the President of CBS) proposed a merger to Redstone on favorable terms and after the merger completed in 2000, Viacom had some of the most diversified businesses imaginable. Viacom had assets in the form of broadcast networks (CBS and UPN), cable television networks (MTV, Nickelodeon, MTV2, Comedy Central, BET, Nick at Nite, Noggin/The-N, TV Land, CMT, and Spike TV), pay television (Showtime and The Movie Channel), radio (Infinity Broadcasting, which produces Howard Stern and Don Imus' radio shows), outdoor advertising, music publishing (Famous Music), motion pictures (Paramount Pictures), and television production (Spelling Entertainment, Paramount Television, and Big Ticket Entertainment), among others.
Redstone has made arrangements to step down from Viacom in 2006, mainly due to concerns about his age. After Mel Karmazin resigned in 2004, two heir apparents were named: Co-President & Co-COO Leslie Moonves (who was #2 to Karmazin at CBS; he was the former head of Warner Bros. Television and before that, Lorimar Television) and Co-President & Co-COO Tom Freston (who has been President & CEO of MTV Networks since 1987 and had been with the company since the formation of MTV Networks' precursor company, Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment).
Currently, Redstone owns seventy percent of the voting stock of Viacom. Viacom, in actuality, is a subsidiary of National Amusements, of which he owns the majority voting stock.
His biography, A Passion To Win was relased in 2001 (which was co-written by Peter Knobler) and published by Viacom's Simon & Schuster book publishing company. This book details everything from Sumner's life as a young boy in Boston, to the difficult takeover of Viacom, and the problems he overcame in purchasing and managing both Blockbuster Video and Paramount Pictures. There is also coverage of the legendary CBS merger (Viacom was a spin-off company of CBS to syndicate its programs, and the subsidiary bought the parent almost 30 years later!)
In 2002 he was ranked #32 on Forbes magazine's list of the hundred richest people in the world, with an estimated worth of $8.1 billion.
External links
- Biography from Viacom (http://www.viacom.com/sumner.tin)
- Who's Who in Motion Pictures (http://www.quigleypublishing.com/MPalmanac/MP_listing_03.html)
- Forbes 400 listing (http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/54/2003/LIR.jhtml?passListId=54&passYear=2003&passListType=Person&uniqueId=KJHY&datatype=Person)
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