Sumner Redstone: the media mogul who cheated death

Sumner Redstone, a legendary dealmaker and eccentric star of the film industry, said that he was never going to die. It’s one of the few things he was wrong about in his extraordinary career.

Sumner Redstone © Bill Greene/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
(Image credit: © Bill Greene/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The death of Sumner Redstone, “a ferocious dealmaker who elbowed his way into Hollywood”, robs the movie industry of one of its most eccentric and influential characters, says the Financial Times. Redstone, who built the Viacom-CBS empire and coined the phrase “content is king”, was one of the last great media moguls. A cantankerous man, who insisted well into his nineties that he was “never going to die”, he strove to fend off the grim reaper on a diet of “goji berries, tomato juice and fish”. At 97, death caught up with him.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.