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Sumner Redstone, who built a media empire from his family’s drive-in movie chain, has died. He was 97.
Redstone built his operations through aggressive acquisitions, but many headlines with his name focused on his severing ties with wives, actors and executives. In multiple interviews, he said he’d never die.
His tight-fisted grip on the National Amusements theater chain, which controls both CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. through voting stock, has been passed down to his daughter Shari Redstone, who battled top executives to re-merge the two entities that split in 2006.
