Sumner Murray Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein; May 27, 1923) is an American businessman and is a media magnate. He is the majority owner and Chairman of the Board of the National Amusements theater chain. Through National Amusements, Sumner Redstone and his family are majority owners of CBS Corporation and Viacom (itself the parent company of MTV Networks, BET, and the film studio Paramount Pictures), and are equal partners in MovieTickets.com. According to Forbes as of March 2014 he is worth US $6.2 billion. in Boston, Massachusetts, to Belle (née Ostrovsky) and Michael Rothstein. In 1940, his father changed the family surname from "Rothstein" to "Redstone" Michael Rothstein owned Northeast Theater Corporation in Dedham, Massachusetts—the forerunner of National Amusements—and the Boston branch of the Latin Quarter Nightclub. where he completed the studies for his baccalaureate in three years. Later, Redstone served as First Lieutenant in the United States Army during World War II After this military service, he worked in Washington, D.C., and attended Georgetown University Law School. He transferred to Harvard Law School and received his LL.B. in 1947.). He invested in Columbia Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Orion Pictures, and Paramount Pictures (Redstone's Viacom would buy Paramount in the 1990s), all of which turned over huge profits when he chose to sell their stock in the early 1980s.
In 1979, he suffered severe burns in a fire at the Copley Plaza hotel, in Boston, but survived after thirty hours extensive surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Though he was warned that he might never be able to live a normal life, eight years later he was fit enough to insist on playing tennis nearly every day and to launch a hostile takeover of Viacom.
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