Shari’s side of the story

With the $8 billion sale of Paramount Global to David Ellison’s Skydance complete, Shari Redstone has shared her side of the story in a New York Times interview, detailing executive exits, her doubts about Ellison, and the Trump settlement that cleared the way. Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw break down Redstone’s postmortem.

Tattletale? A recent New York Times interview clarified two mysteries: Shari Redstone asked several Paramount board members to resign, claiming they hindered company activity, and she temporarily pulled out of the Ellison deal last summer because David Ellison altered the terms to reduce her payout. “She thought he was on the up and up, and was being forthcoming with her,” says Belloni. And then she began to have some doubts about him, which is interesting, because we heard him described by many as a ruthless deal maker in the mold of his father. This would track with her feeling like she was sold a bill of goods, and then it changed. Then she called him on it, and then they came back to the table and got the deal done.”

Greater good? Redstone framed Paramount’s $16 million Trump settlement as a pragmatic move to safeguard shareholders and finalize the deal, even while acknowledging the lawsuit’s $20 billion stakes and insisting CBS had done nothing wrong. “She was very supportive of paying what needed to be paid to settle this,” Belloni notes. “She said: ‘I always believed it was in Paramount's best interest to settle. We may not like the world we live in, but a board has to do what's in the best interest of shareholders.’ I think that a lot of people might disagree with that, especially if you own assets like CBS and CBS News… The impact of this settlement is still being felt, but it does get into her understanding of the price of getting this transaction closed.”

Conditional love? The former Paramount owner also expressed disappointment with 60 Minutes’ criticisms of her, and suggested that CBS News had made its own missteps. “There was that really telling moment where she felt that the Trump suit was frivolous and there was nothing really wrong with the Kamala Harris interview,” Shaw explains. “But as soon as CBS News did some reporting about Israel and Gaza that she didn't like, she was all for sticking it to them. [She] saw that maybe the Trump suit would be useful in making them moderate their coverage or change their coverage.”