Shari Redstone

Shari Ellin Redstone (born April 14, 1954) is an American attorney and media executive who controlled a major portion of the U.S. media landscape through her family's holding company, National Amusements, Inc. (NAI), serving as its president and CEO since 2006. Through NAI's majority voting interest, she exerted significant influence over Paramount Global as its non-executive chairwoman from 2019 until the company's merger with Skydance Media in 2025, which ended her family's decades-long control of the entity.

Redstone, the daughter of the late Sumner Redstone, inherited and consolidated family control over media assets including Viacom and CBS following prolonged internal disputes, notably engineering the 2019 merger of Viacom and CBS to form ViacomCBS (later rebranded Paramount Global) amid shareholder opposition and legal challenges. Her tenure was marked by efforts to adapt traditional media to streaming competition, though Paramount faced declining linear TV revenues, substantial debt, and activist investor pressure, culminating in the Skydance deal that valued her stake at approximately $4.3 billion but drew lawsuits alleging favoritism toward non-voting shareholders.

Prior to her executive roles, Redstone practiced corporate law after earning a J.D. from Boston University School of Law in 1978 and an LL.M. in 1980, initially joining the family business in the 1990s to manage theater operations and advance into content oversight. Post-Paramount, she has shifted focus to philanthropy via the Redstone Family Foundation, emphasizing Jewish causes and women's leadership, and assumed the chairmanship of Israeli production studio Sipur in September 2025.