The billionaire Sumner Redstone, chairman and chief executive officer of National Amusements, has died at the age of 97, ViacomCBS said on Wednesday. For nearly 30 years, the hard-charging media mogul led Viacom as executive chairman of the board following National Amusements’s acquisition of a controlling stake in the company in 1987. Redstone took his father’s movie theater chain and built it into an empire that included Paramount Pictures, CBS and MTV. He was one of the last old-school media moguls along with Rupert Murdoch and cable king John Malone. With his aggressive style and boundless energy, he built a company that produced some of the best-rated TV and top movies of the era, including The Big Bang Theory, Top Gun and Titanic. Redstone coined the phrase: “Content is king.”Redstone was unafraid of firing talent, whether executives or movie stars. In 2006 he severed ties with Tom Cruise, arguing that his personal life and behavior were costing money at the box office. Redstone displayed a particular penchant for forcing out top executives, including Viacom president Frank Biondi; Mel Karmazin, the chief of CBS; and Tom Freston, who was famously canned as chief executive of Viacom after losing a deal to acquire MySpace to Murdoch.“I have no intention of ever retiring, or of dying,” he told an interviewer in 2011. “I’m The Curious Case of Mr Redstone.”But as he entered his 90s, the state of Redstone’s physical and mental health set off an avalanche of corporate maneuvering that resulted in him stepping down in 2016 as executive chairman of both companies.

All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/aug/12/sumner-redstone-death-viacom-billionaire


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