Author(s): Keach Hagey

Business

Sumner Murray Redstone, once feared as the "mad genius" of media who would dump his CEOs for mere wobbles in his companies' stock price, had built one of the world's greatest media empires through a series of audacious takeovers constructed to ensure that he always maintained control. Today, as the majority owner of the family theater chain National Amusements, he controls roughly 80 percent of the voting shares of both Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp., a $36 billion media empire encompassing MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, BET, VH1, Paramount Pictures, CBS, Showtime, Simon & Schuster, and the Showcase Cinemas and Cinema de Lux movie chains. He spent decades performing meticulous estate planning so that his control would extend beyond the grave (which he loved telling reporters he would never lie in), constructing trusts designed to make it impossible for his heirs to sell his companies after he dies. "Unless they start doing terribly," he told the Wall Street Journal in 2012, "which they will not." Sumner's confidence at the time was not misplaced. His life up to that point had been a story of exceeding expectations-starting as the son of a liquor wholesaler with underworld connections in the immigrant tenements of Boston's West End to Harvard Law School and a federal clerkship, from the president of his father's regional drive-in movie theater chain to the owner of Viacom, from a cerebral lawyer who shopped at Filene's Basement to the owner of a coveted Hollywood studio, and ultimately, after the Viacom-CBS merger (the biggest media deal up to that point in U.S. history) to the controlling shareholder of one of the largest media empires in the world. Most famously, he had survived a hotel fire by hanging out a window while flames singed his wrist to the bone, an experience that left him with a gnarled claw for a hand, burns over 45 percent of his body, and a steely resolve to never be beaten at anything. That resolve made him the most feared negotiator in all of media. The credo that he coined and repeated for decades-"content is king"-turned out to be truer in the digital world than he could have ever guessed. Book jacket.