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.

Shari Redstone was born on April 14, 1954, in Washington, D.C., to Sumner Murray Redstone, a lawyer who would later build a media empire, and Phyllis Gloria Raphael, in a Jewish family. That same year, her father left a promising career at a Washington law firm to return to the Boston area and assume management of National Amusements, the drive-in theater chain founded by his father, Michael Redstone, in 1936.