Heir Mail # 28
Heir Mail # 28
All Shari Redstone, in honor of Succession's return. (And a disclosure.)
Hello! You’re reading Heir Mail, the only newsletter to come from me (hi) setting a Google Alert for the word “heiress” and then just writing about whatever pops up. (Eh, sorta.)
This week, this month actually, I didn’t look at the alert, because I could not afford to get distracted. (As you might guess because Heir Mail hasn’t come out since August, I got distracted.)
Last time around, I said I owed y’all — by which I meant me; I only ever really do this for me — a deeper dive into Shari Redstone, and by god I meant it.
I was spurred way back then by a NYPost story about ViacomCBS, the media conglomerate Shari chairs, looking to partner their Paramount+ with some other lesser-than-Netflix streaming service, a journey which had apparently started with NBCUniversal’s Peacock but had begun “looking for other suitors,” as the Post said. (I made a great joke about calling the potential merger CockMount+ in the footnotes and everyone liked it and no one was upset!) Really, though, it’s because Succession is coming back in October, and I get very “It’s gonna be a Mamma Mia” about Shari’s biographical overlap with Shiv Roy.1
Shari on the cover of Forbes, which this poster calls “aspirational and inspirational.” | @heavenlytouchhair’s Instagram
Shari is not Shiv, though; she’s her own person. Real, for one thing, and with much more traditional hair and a little Bostonian speech impediment that honestly, does make me unusually sympathetic to her. She’s a real life study in having an extremely powerful dad, and we’re going to spend this whole newsletter on her, her family, their company, their money, and their power.
To get a better sense of who she actually is, I listened to a couple of podcast interviews — including one from 2017 with (my Vox colleague) Peter Kafka at Code Conference2, and another from 2019 with the CEO of an investment bank who kicks off the interview with a Winston Churchill quote, Jesus Christ — and read a bunch of old articles, and good god there’s a lot to go over.
So let’s start with the important stuff:
Estimated net worth: According to our closest friends, Celebrity Net Worth, Shari is worth $500 million dollars. Forbes put her father Sumner’s net worth $2.6 billion before his 2020 death. All of his stock went to a trust for his grandchildren.
(Today is my birthday, so as a present send this to someone and tell them to subscribe.)
I. The Business — No Wait, The Family?
Most heiresses don’t inherit power in a meaningful way — it’s really what the “-ess” has done to the equation, historically. Shari Redstone is not one those materially disempowered daughters of wealth. She’s one of the most influential, world-determining people I’ve written about here. She’d also probably laugh at least a little at the idea that her current position had been handed to her, and she wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Her father, Sumner, was the quintessential old fuck who won’t die, first in a hotel fire in Boston in the 70s (when he was already 55, climbing out onto a window’s ledge), and then for decades afterwards, holding onto his position despite what a judge in a 2016 suit about his competency called “mild or moderate dementia.” That particular lawsuit came right from Shari, though he was also sued at points by her older brother Brent, as both fought him bitterly for control of the business. He passed away in 2020, at 97.
Daaaa-aaaad. | © copyright John Mathew Smith 2001 via Wikimedia Commons
When I think of the Redstones, I think of Viacom and CBS, but the name that encompasses both companies is National Amusements (beautifully forgettable, brain smooth). Sumner was the chairman of all of these entities at various points, including when Viacom and CBS first merged, from 2000 to 2006 — or, to myself and other older millennials, the era of TRL (in high school, between MTV, Comedy Central, and VH1, Sumner truly owned me, ick). In some ways, CBS and Viacom are two dollies that the Redstone family and other powerful entities have variously ripped apart and forcefully made to kiss over the years; it’s been messy, like suing your dad over his mental state. Still, National Amusements brought in $25.36 billion dollars last year.
Sumner is credited — including by Shari, in both pod interviews — with coining the phrase “content is king!” 3 and bringing the company into the IP business, but National Amusements was actually started by his father, Michael Redstone, back in 1936, under another name as a much smaller concern.
Michael owned a trucking company and a nightclub, and worked as an usher, before starting a chain of movie theaters that eventually became National Amusements. According to Wikipedia with *no* citation, the patriarch changed the family name from Rothstein to Redstone (that part’s for sure) at his son Sumner’s request (that bit might be apocryphal).
It was Sumner who really made the movie theater chain into something, joining the business when he was 31, following stints in the army and with the US Attorney’s office. The Times refers to him as “old-school” and “expletive-spraying” CEO, taking over from his dad in 1967 and charging into the making stuff business; absorbing Viacom in 1987, winning a bidding war for Paramount in 1994, buying CBS — which had originally spun Viacom off way back in the ‘70s — in 2000. The company also owns interests in video games, slot machines, and still movie theaters, including the one I went to as a kid (I love you, Showcase Cinemas in Lowell, MA; sorry about that time I hit a girl’s new Camaro in your parking lot). Dude loved to own, basically peed on everything.
It was just six after buying CBS that Viacom and CBS split and some family troubles ramped up. That year4, Shari’s older brother Brent sued Sumner, accusing their father of favoring his daughter, and demanding that National Amusements be broken up so his 1/6th could be liquidated (that’s some Connor-ass shit, Kendall at best).
Brent’s lawsuit resulted in a permanent estrangement, but Shari’s battles with her father were more complicated and never-truly-ending. Starting, possibly, with working National Amusements at all.
II. Shari, on Her Own and in the Fold
In her interview with her friend and media banker Aryeh Bourkoff for Kindred Media, Shari says (after being asked directly “was this your plan?”) that joining the family business was never her plan. She says she went to law school, became a criminal defense attorney5, went for masters in social work, worked at a center of traumatized children, and generally avoided the family business as best she could.
But after she got divorced — and more on that below — she needed a “part-time job” (I swear to god she says that) so she came into the business to work at her parent’s parent company. Luxury movie theaters? She says they pretty much invented that. By 2000, she was President of National Amusements.
If you’re going to read one story I link in here, I highly suggest it be this 2009 Boston Magazine article about Shari, which starts with her going to a fancy new Showcase Cinema de LUX and telling a bunch of puffy Irish alderman what a visionary her grandpa was, neglecting to mention her dad. It sheds an incredible amount of light on the father-daughter dynamic:
Though Shari was once Sumner’s favored child and heir apparent, the two have engaged in an epic, if sometimes juvenile, struggle for power in recent years. She has challenged him over his salary and charitable giving, while he has blasted her as being unqualified and ungrateful. At one point, the two were communicating only by fax.
It’s hard to say exactly when the tension started, but it was bad by 2007, when Sumner wrote a public letter saying that he had given his children their stock and they’d built nothing. The year prior he’d said he was closer with his younger current wife than his daughter which: obscenely weird comparison? He’d been mad about Shari sniping at his salary and the way he did his charitable giving, and his cronies didn’t take to her (Les Moonves “restructured his contract to shield himself from Shari’s influence,” and we are compelled to favor a woman sex pest Les wanted to avoid).
In 2008, when the recession hit, it was revealed that the company had taken a pair of $800 million loans based on the strength of its stock. When the economy tanked (and so did the stock), Sumner blamed the loans on Shari’s movie theater expansion.
According to Luke O’Brien for Boston, this is partially true — but dear old dad was also buying up stock Midway, in the video game company that created Mortal Kombat, and losing money hand over fist. He’d use NA as a piggy bank, making it clear that he was really in charge, and even put Shari on the Midway board. Sumner ended up selling his interest in Midway for $100,000 to lighten his tax burden, and getting sued by the company for fiduciary breach. His relationship with Shari wouldn’t recover for years.
It was a tragedy, O’Brien writes, summing it up in a sentence I desperately envy: “This is the man, widely regarded as a cruel money freak, who once hung a tender birthday poem from his daughter on his office wall.”
It would, eventually, get better. But, while there’s no mention of it in this story, it’s possible that there was… someone else still around in 2009 that was bugging her, with regards to her dad?
III. The Semi-Mysterious Ex-Husband Situation, or, The Family Continued
This newsletter believes that woman are a lot more than their partners, but it also loves love. It also loves divorce, affairs, bad exes, and general romantic mess (it’s a Scorpio written by a Libra, so, you know, whatever that means). Shari, currently, is single, at least according to the absence of information most legitimate places and the staunch assurance of whosedatedwho.com, which kindly made this little graphic:
Look at banner, Michael! | screenshot from whosdatedwho.com
Shari was married once, though, to an extremely important Hasidic Rebbe, lawyer, spiritual and political advisor. His name is Yitzhak Aharon “Ira” Korff; he went to every college and remains almost unimaginably powerful in the Hasidic community6, and no slouch in the rest of the world7. There are seemingly no pictures of the two of them together, at least that I could easily find.
Grand Rabbi/ex-husband. In his study, I assume. | Wikimedia Commons
He was also — hello family business — the president of National Amusements at one point. Sure, sometimes you’re part of a rabbinical dynasty, a medium-sized city’s spiritual leader, and also in charge of early ‘90s MTV!
Ira remained president of National Amusements until two years after their divorce. And he continued to advise Sumner until 2009.
Oh also, Shari and Ira were married from 1980 to 1992 and had three children together, and yet despite all of that, the information about their marriage online is very factual and tight-lipped — even her Wikipedia says “Redstone married and divorced Rabbi Ira A. Korff.” Like, damn, it was 12 years, three human beings created, and Ira was in with her dad for another 15!
But this trying-to-make-each-other-into-footnotes energy, I do relish it. His Wikipedia is similarly curt about her existence, and his past life in the NA fold. Enough said I guess!
V. The Business, For Real (But Also Still The Family, Duh)
After the Midway debacle, Shari and Sumner eventually did find their way back to each other (“Thank god we’re back together,” she says to Aryeh in 2019). Sure, Sumner had said she wasn’t fit to run National Amusements, but it seems like that was all part of the game with him. Normal father-daughter stuff.
Sumner was still heavily involved in the business until he passed, iconically utilizing an iPad that could say “fuck you” when speech failed him, according to CNBC. Shari wasn’t fully empowered until slightly before his death, becoming chair of the combining board in August 2019. It was a moment of huge triumph for her.
Variety's #PowerofWomen Class of 2017, with Shari on the bottom right in the blue suit (next to Blake Lively and below Tina Knowles) | @metrosocietyph’s Instagram
But today, ViacomCBS isn’t doing so hot. Charlie Gasparino, a man who does not impress me personally, wrote a takedown for the New York Post in late August. He argues that ViacomCBS is too big to sell but not big enough to compete against Netflix, Apple, Comcast, and Disney. He also included a couplet that almost makes me go full “hire more female prison guards.”
Redstone presumably knows all of this because she has LionTree’s high profile, media-savvy media banker Aryeh Bourkoff on speed dial. Or she knows this because she learned something from her late father.
With such expertise to fall back on, Shari certainly should know something else: She only has herself to blame.
What a reasonable breakdown of knowledge source and blame! No red flags! [And yes, that’s the same Aryeh who interviewed her!]
Gasparino’s not wrong about the problems of scale, however. That problem became clear following the tepid reaction to Paramount+. ViacomCBS’s stock shot up in advance of the service’s launch in March 2021, fell precipitously afterwards, and never recovered.
Ouch. | RobinHood
Remember the Super Bowl ad for the service with Beavis, Butthead, and Patrick Stewart on a mountaintop? Maybe not.
Every media company needs to express its value by gathering all of their characters in a single location and stunning the viewer with their breadth. “This company makes all these things I love,” you’re supposed to say. This the premise of Space Jam 2, and Disney World, and that old NBC ad where Tina Fey sings and dances with Matt Lauer. Even more these days, it’s only method of flexing that exists. Shari, who repeatedly repeats her father’s maxim — “content is king” — on podcasts, has long believed ViacomCBS is competitive on this razzle-dazzle level. (“People love our brands” she says so often that it starts to sound like a sentence.)
As goofy as the mountaintop ad is, I would be remiss not to admit that the holdings of ViacomCBS are also dear to me. Not through Paramount+ (I use a friend’s login to watch The Good Fight), but I have written/talked/tweeted arguably too much about my intense love for their free streaming platform, PlutoTV.
There’s so much to the company strategy — VR nonsense and eSports and shows made for other platforms (like Jack Ryan and Made for Love) and her nominally-unrelated VC media firm, AdvancIt, which: a whole other thing. But Shari’s plan, if you believe her word from two full years ago, remains the content. Media, for an ugly business that doesn’t actually care about feelings, can’t help but be strangely personal. This is a company that owns things I truly adore (like all the old Comedy Central shows, and Stephen Colbert, and again, The Good Fight) and wildly popular things I couldn’t imagine caring about (NFL rights, current Nickelodeon, Young Sheldon). I will be the first to admit I don’t get business, but I do get having a home team, and I understand her possibly-doomed loyalty here. As a dummy, I would think this was a good bet.
After thinking about this for a month, I bought precisely one share of ViacomCBS stock for $40 just yesterday. Consider this my disclosure! It’s down since I got it. That seems right!
So that’s the business concern. In her interviews, Shari talks a great deal about improving the culture at the conglomerate. How is it to work for this often-maligned daughter of privilege? GlassDoor reviews aren’t super clarifying here (the constant question: who writes these reviews, and why?), but they seem in sum to show a company struggling a bit with the merger, and with outdated managerial styles (my personal favorite is called “Toxic Dinosaur Swamp”). There are a surprising amount of compliments about the culture, however. Maybe that’s the result of twisted arms, or maybe it’s working. Maybe the woman who clashed with Les Moonves and struggled against a withholding dad really does want things to be better.
If you know for real what it’s like at ViacomCBS, or know someone who does, I’d love to hear more.
In the end, in general, I have more questions than answers about this very unknowable person: Like, does Shari Redstone watch The Good Fight? Does she talk to her brother? What does she think of concussions in the NFL? Did she listen to the episode of Even the Rich, produced by AdvancIt-owned Wondery, about the Murdochs? How did she make up with her dad? Was she mad when he kept her ex-husband around? Would she consider buying AMC, as Gasparino suggests, or being absorbed by Amazon? What would it look like if she got a haircut like Shiv? Does she ever wish she was born into a different family, with different rules and ways of showing love?
Well, if you know for real what it’s like to be Shari Redstone, or know someone who does, I’d love to hear more.
This links to a video and the body language IS fascinating, and yes, I watched it again to observe Shari loll and spin in her chair, with her little Massachusetts “Rs” and lack thereof.
And the word “multiplex.”
Also in 2006, Sumner was sued by his nephew Michael (getting that grandparent name, nice), but the old man shot back, saying in a public statement that he’d rescued the kid from a mental institution and this was the thanks he got. Sumner had been sued by Michael’s father Edward way back in 1971 for edging him out of NA, so, the family tradition lives on. (Plus: Michael’s sister Ruth Ann joined a cult in the 1970s and “turned up dead in 1987 in Japan.”)
Brent, it should be noted, was once a Boston prosecutor; this family is never not fighting.
In part because I don’t have a lot of great insight into the Hasidic community, and I literally cannot imagine this. Sorry, I am dumb, but ask me whatever about Shari’s performative Pats’ fandom.
He’s been the Chaplain of the City of Boston since 1975, and a lot more things.