Sumner Murray Redstone (né Rothstein; May 27, 1923 – August 11, 2020) was an American billionaire businessman and media magnate. He was the founder and chairman of the second incarnation of Viacom, chairman of CBS Corporation (the two companies merged in 2019, a year before Redstone's death), and the majority owner and chairman of the National Amusements theater chain.
Until his death, Redstone was a majority voting shareholder of the media conglomerate ViacomCBS, the parent company of the Paramount Pictures film studio, the CBS television network, and various cable networks.
According to Forbes, as of April 2020, he was worth US$2.6 billion.
Redstone was formerly the executive chairman of both CBS and Viacom. In February 2016, at age 92, Redstone resigned both chairmanships following a court-ordered examination by a geriatric psychiatrist. He was ultimately succeeded by Les Moonves at CBS and Philippe Dauman at Viacom.
Redstone was born Sumner Murray Rothstein in 1923 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Belle (née Ostrovsky) and Michael Rothstein. Sumner was a second-generation Bostonian; his father Michael was born in Boston in 1902 to Galician Jewish parents originally from Kozova, a shtetl in Austro-Hungarian land now in Ukraine. His mother Bella was also an American-born child of Jewish immigrants; her parents emigrated to the U.S. from Kyiv early in the 20th century. Redstone had a younger brother named Edward Stanton Redstone.
In 1940, at Sumner's behest, his father changed the family surname from "Rothstein" to "Redstone"; although Sumner credited his father for the name change, friends of the family attribute it more to Sumner. "Red stone" is the translation of the Yiddish name Rothstein. Michael Rothstein owned Northeast Theater Corporation in Dedham, Massachusetts, the forerunner of National Amusements, and the Boston branch of the Latin Quarter Nightclub. As a teenager, Sumner had summer jobs at his father's theaters but "had higher aspirations than the then-still-somewhat-déclassé world of theaters," wrote Keach Hagey.
Redstone attended the Boston Latin School, from which he graduated in 1940 first in his class, and was accepted to Harvard College on scholarship. Among his coursework at Harvard was a Japanese course taught by Professor Edwin O. Reischauer, recommended to him by college administrators based on his study of Latin and Greek in high school. In 1943, Reischauer left Harvard to establish a United States Army Signal Corps training program at Arlington Hall for Japanese translators and cryptanalysts, positions in need during World War II; Redstone would be among Reischauer's students following the professor to Arlington Hall.
Enlisting in the United States Army, Redstone became a second lieutenant in 1944 before being promoted to first lieutenant. He worked with a team at the Signals Intelligence Service that decoded Japanese messages. Despite leaving Harvard for the military, Redstone had completed enough credits that Harvard granted his Bachelor of Arts in the class of 1944 with a concentration in classics and government. After his military service, he attended Georgetown University Law Center before transferring to Harvard Law School and receiving his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1947.
After completing law school, Redstone moved to San Francisco to become a clerk with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a job that then paid $43 per week. While employed by the Ninth Circuit, Redstone also taught labor law courses in the evenings at University of San Francisco School of Law. Beginning in 1948, Redstone joined the United States Department of Justice Tax Division as a staff attorney with the appellate tax division, in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. when the government was actively combating anti-competitive practices among Paramount Pictures and other major film studios.
After two years with the Justice Department, Redstone followed his supervisors to private practice in 1950. Then in 1951, Redstone became a partner of the firm Ford, Bergson, Adams, Borkland, & Redstone with two of his former Justice Department supervisors Herbert Bergson and Herbert Borkland, along with former Deputy Attorney General Peyton Ford. In the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Holland v. United States, Redstone represented the plaintiffs, a married couple of hotel owners convicted of tax evasion following a sudden rise in their net worth. Although the court would uphold their conviction, Redstone's argument that the government had the burden of proof in proving tax evasion in unusual increases in net worth would later become Internal Revenue Service policy.
Northeast Theatre Corporation (later National Amusements)
In 1954, he joined his father's theater chain Northeast Theatre Corporation, which then had fourteen drive-in theaters in five eastern states. The Redstone family re-incorporated Northeast Theatre Corporation and their other businesses as National Amusements in 1959 to access more money to finance expansion; Redstone would invest nearly $18,000 in stock and be named vice president. In 1964, Redstone was elected president of the Theater Owners of America, which would merge with a rival group to form the National Association of Theatre Owners, for which Redstone became chairman in 1965.
Redstone became CEO of National Amusements in 1967. The company had 93 theater screens (52 drive-ins and 41 indoor) when Redstone took office; within 10 years, National Amusements had nearly 250 screens. After watching the first Star Wars film in 1977, Redstone directed National Amusements to buy a five percent stake in 20th Century Fox, distributor of Star Wars. Having bought Fox for $8 a share, National Amusements sold Fox at $60 after Marvin Davis bought the company. National Amusements' other investments in Columbia Pictures, Orion Pictures, and Paramount Pictures also had large returns on investment in the early 1980s.
In 2025, Barry Diller stated that Redstone regularly bribed former Paramount CEO Frank Yablans, with former Paramount chairman Charlie Bluhdorn having knowledge of this.
As a hedge against slow growth in movie theaters, Redstone began buying stock in Viacom International in 1985. Viacom spun off from CBS in 1971 after the FCC ruled at the time that television networks could not syndicate their own programs. Viacom initially syndicated CBS network shows such as Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-O, and I Love Lucy.
Viacom also owned MTV Networks (formerly known as Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment), which owned MTV and Nickelodeon. In addition, other properties included pay television networks Showtime and The Movie Channel. Viacom acquired MTV Networks in 1985 for $550 million from Steve Ross' Warner Communications.
After a four-month hostile takeover, Redstone won voting control of Viacom for $3.4 billion on March 4, 1987.
Redstone's next acquisition was Paramount Communications (previously Gulf+Western), parent of Paramount Pictures, in 1994. Engaging in a bidding war with QVC president Barry Diller and TCI president John Malone, Redstone had to raise his bid at least three times from $7.5 billion to $10.1 billion. Some analysts at the time estimated that Redstone overpaid by billions, and Viacom would accrue nearly $10 billion in debt after acquiring Paramount. However, the sale of certain assets such as Madison Square Garden to Cablevision and Simon & Schuster for $4.6 billion to Pearson PLC would eventually help Viacom improve financially, with its stock price in 1998 approaching $60, breaking its 1995 record high. Under Redstone's leadership, Paramount produced such popular, award-winning films as Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, and Mission: Impossible.