Sumner Redstone

Sumner Murray Redstone ( 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 (both companies were dissolved in 2019, a year before Redstone's death), and the majority owner and chairman of the National Amusements theater chain. Through National Amusements, Redstone, up until his death, was, and his family remains, majority voting shareholder of mass media conglomerate ViacomCBS (now known as Paramount Global) which is in turn, 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. Early life and education Redstone was born Sumner Murray Rothstein in 1923 in Boston to Belle (née Ostrovsky) and Michael Rothstein. Sumner is 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 immigrated to the U.S. from Kyiv early in the 20th century. 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.