Page 58 - Forbes - Asia (December 2019 - January 2020)

Viacom and CBS, saying she and her
T H E S E N I O R R E D STO N E
H E R E P O R T E D LY SA I D, “ YO U R
U N T I L YO U H AV E
says. “He wanted me to go on the boards
when I just got divorced, and I said no,
because I was trying to take care of my
kids and balance working. . . . This was
all my dad’s pushing.”
After she joined National Amuse-
ments as vice president of corporate
strategy in 1994, she expanded the com-
pany globally, opening theaters in Rus-
sia and Latin America. She pioneered
a concept still in vogue today—intro-
ducing gourmet food, lounges and valet
parking at theaters in Los Angeles and
elsewhere. The senior Redstone was so
pleased, he reportedly said, “Your life is
not complete until you have met Shari.”
The sunshine of his approval did not
last long. The patriarch, who frequently
boasted of his immortality—he famous-
ly clung to a third-story window ledge
during a fire at the Copley Plaza hotel
in Boston, which left burns over almost
half of his body—was also famous for
refusing to surrender power, dispens-
56 | FORBES ASIA DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020
Sumner and Shari Redstone
WA S S O P L E A S E D,
L I F E I S N OT CO M P L E T E
M E T S H A R I .”
ing with a long string of well-regarded
executives, from Frank Biondi to Mel
Karmazin to Tom Freston.
Sumner and Shari began to clash
over succession, corporate governance
and the future of the theater business.
A major point of contention was her fa-
ther’s investment in Midway Games, a
company that later filed for bankruptcy.
The tension erupted publicly in 2007,
after Shari voted to block a $105 million
charitable gift that her father wanted to
make to hospital systems in Massachu-
setts and California. In a letter to the
trustees of the National Amusements
Trust, Sumner wrote that his daugh-
ter “does not have the requisite business
judgment and abilities to serve as chair-
man of the three companies,” according
to a lawsuit later filed by one of Sum-
ner’s former companions.
In a letter sent to Forbes five months
later, he publicly blasted her for mak-
ing an effort to succeed him as chair of
brother, Brent, had made “little or no
contribution” to building the media em-
pire. “While my daughter talks of good
governance, she apparently ignores the
cardinal rule of good governance that
the boards of two public companies, Vi-
acom and CBS, should select my suc-
cessor,” he wrote.
Brent had sued his father in 2006 for
shutting him out of big deals—includ-
ing the decision to split Viacom into
two companies—and for self-dealing.
Shari took Sumner’s side, and the com-
pany issued a statement accusing her
brother of “abusing the court system in
an attempt to extract a financial settle-
ment in a family dispute.” Brent sued
for access to his one-sixth interest in the
company and walked away with $240
million. (Attempts to reach him at his
home in Colorado were unsuccessful.)
That left Shari Redstone with a 20%
stake in National Amusements, which
had morphed into a holding compa-
ny for Viacom and CBS. It was com-
plex. She had defended her father and
publicly rebuked her brother when he
sued for his rightful stake in the hold-
ing company. She forgave and protected
Sumner even after he denigrated her to
Viacom executives. But the elder Red-
stone had taken a shine to two other
executives, Philippe Dauman and Les
Moonves. The battle to succeed Red-
stone was about to get even trickier.
To Sumner, Dauman was like anoth-
er son. The Columbia-educated lawyer
earned Sumner’s confidence while hun-
kered down in a one-bedroom room at
the Carlyle Hotel in New York plotting
his hostile bidding war for Viacom. Na-
tional Amusements outmaneuvered a
management-led buyout team in 1987,
acquiring the company’s assets, includ-
ing MTV Networks, Showtime, The
Movie Channel and Nickelodeon.
Dauman was named chief executive
of Viacom at a time when cable television
was at its peak. Viacom’s MTV was argu-
ably the most influential cultural force of MARK SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
that generation, Nickelodeon became the
dominant channel for kids with fare like
SpongeBob SquarePants, and Comedy