Media mogul Sumner Redstone’s daughter, Shari Redstone, is quickly taking control and positioning herself as the natural successor to her father. Shari, the youngest child of the media magnate, was estranged from her father for years, but is now on a mission to consolidate power, Vanity Fair writes.
Redstone’s primary task in her campaign: facilitating the remerger of CBS and Viacom, the two public media companies that the Redstones control by virtue of their nearly 80 percent stake in the Class A voting stock of each one. Due to the merger fervor, CBS’s stock price has dropped from $70 to $49, but Redstone doesn’t seem fazed. She has added her friends and connections to the board of Viacom and threatened to do the same at CBS if the board doesn’t agree to recombining with Viacom. She handpicked Bob Bakish to be the Viacom CEO and has been trying to force CBS to give him a meaningful role at the combined company. She has also stacked the board of the family trust to make sure she has four of its seven votes. The trust will control the family’s CBS and Viacom shares after Sumner’s eventual death. Her father split the companies 12 years ago, but Shari has hired independent directors, bankers, and lawyers to hash out a deal to get them back together.
Still, Shari Redstone’s ascension is just one chapter in a long saga of the Redstone family drama and its future once its patriarch is gone. There are a number of lawsuits going on, and it is difficult to decipher the truth among the many stories coming from Sumner’s various girlfriends, paramours, nurses and other employees.
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