Sumner M. Redstone

Age: 83

Board Afflilations: CBS Corporation Class B (CBS)

WHAT HE DOES
Sumner Redstone has built and runs two multibillion-dollar media conglomerates: Viacom and CBS.

WHAT HE’S KNOWN FOR
Redstone has a stake in almost every media sector. In 2006, he redivided Viacom into two entities. The faster-growing cluster of businesses, which retained the Viacom name, includes MTV Networks and Paramount Pictures. The slower-going entities emerged as CBS Corp., which includes its not-so-sluggish-anymore namesake network, as well as UPN, Simon & Schuster, and Showtime.

Redstone exhibits all the expected traits of a media baron. He is deeply proud; to Redstone, outperforming Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has always been a personal matter. “Not him! I don’t want to lose to him!” he recently barked to Vanity Fair. He is obsessive, living and dying by his companies’ stock prices. In 2007, he put his money where his mouth was by accepting a pay-for-performance salary, and analysts have long snickered over his chronic willingness to overpay.

Redstone is also smart, savvy, and fiercely decisive. He can slap together a winning bid overnight, as he did to wrest Paramount from Barry Diller in 1994 and then snatching up DreamWorks in 2006. Also in 2006, he raised eyebrows with a pair of high-profile ousters: He let Tom Cruise’s development contract lapse, insisting that his public proclamations of love and proselytizing had become a liability, and fired Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston for failing to nab MySpace, now owned by News Corp. Cruise’s development team trashed him, and Viacom’s stock dropped after Freston’s exit.

Redstone sent a message when he dropped the Toms: Though in his eighties, he is still very much in charge—and still very much a public figure, as he takes care to assert by supporting politicians like senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, and sitting front and center at the Oscars and the U.S. Open.

WHERE HE CAME FROM
Redstone grew up in Boston and has an undergraduate degree from Harvard, as well as an LL.B. from its law school. In 1967, he took over his family’s movie theater business, National Amusements, eventually building it into a $450 million company. The man who made “Content is king!” his mantra started buying stock in Viacom International, a conglomerate of television networks and radio stations, in the early 1980s. In 1987, Redstone’s National Amusements assembled a number of bank loans to buy out 83 percent of Viacom’s stock in a hostile takeover. Viacom’s $37 billion merger with CBS in 2000 cemented his mogul status.

WHERE HE’S GOING
The sometimes cantankerous Redstone has grown even more possessive of the company with age and has lately been even more vague about a successor. For years, he seemed poised to cede the throne to daughter Shari, who holds executive positions at several of his companies. But recently, Redstone has hinted that his wife, Paula Fortunato, is also in the running.

Still smarting from the missed chance at MySpace, Redstone is trying to hit his stride with Web entertainment. Overdrive, the online purveyor of MTV’s cable content, has failed to make a splash, as have most of Redstone’s internet properties. He’ll also have to work harder to integrate DreamWorks. The film studio is his most important recent acquisition, and a tug of war for creative control has gotten the Paramount-DreamWorks relationship off to a strained start. —Megan Angelo