It was supposed to be a golden retirement for 83-year-old Sumner Redstone, the Viacom chairman who was supposed to recede into the distance after splitting his company into Viacom, Inc. and CBS Corp.
at the beginning of this year. Viacom was supposed to be the nimbler of the two new entities, poised for more rapid new-media expansion than its broadcast-centric sibling. But that didn't happen,
either. Redstone has been anything but quiet since the split. A couple of weeks ago, the media mogul made news when he announced that Paramount was "firing" Tom Cruise. Then, at the beginning of this
week, he made news again when the Viacom board, led by Redstone, ousted Tom Freston as the company's CEO. Despite solid results, the stock is tanking--presumably due to a lack of a solid online media
presence, says Redstone, who spoke to the magazine. By the sound of it, Freston never really had a chance as Viacom CEO; things started to go bad for the company after News Corp. pulled off the
now-famous MySpace coup that sent its stock soaring. Says Redstone: "Philippe [Dauman, Freston's replacement] and Tom [Dooley, the new Viacom No. 2] and I have worked together a long time, and they
tell me that we never lost an acquisition that we wanted, especially not one that embarrassed us by ending up with a competitor." It appears that Freston, who at the time was head of Viacom unit MTV
Networks, was responsible for losing that bid--which proved to be a downward turning point for Viacom, which is now scrambling to catch up. "So we're going to be looking at more acquisitions,"
Redstone says. "We're not going to let something get away again that we want."
Read the whole story at BusinessWeek »
