Philippe Dauman Succeeds Sumner Redstone as Viacom Chairman

With the ailing 92-year-old Sumner M. Redstone in his final act as a media titan, the two rivals jousting over the future of his $40 billion entertainment empire repeatedly crisscrossed the country in the last several months to visit his mansion in a gated Beverly Hills enclave.

Shari Redstone, the ostracized daughter who had been restricted from visiting until mid-October, celebrated the holidays with her father, played games and discussed the media business. Mr. Redstone’s grandchildren and two small great-grandchildren also visited. When not together, the father and daughter communicated via FaceTime, sometimes several times a day.

Philippe P. Dauman, the chief executive of Viacom who formed a close bond with Mr. Redstone decades ago when he was a young corporate lawyer, also frequented the estate. The two discussed business, watched basketball and talked about films Mr. Redstone had recently screened.
The backdrop to those visits was an epic fight for money, power and love from Mr. Redstone, the controlling shareholder in Viacom and CBS. It was a story line that some Hollywood executives deemed too implausible for a movie or television series.

On Thursday, Mr. Dauman won that initial battle for control when Viacom’s board of directors named him executive chairman, succeeding Mr. Redstone. Yet Ms. Redstone has made her wishes clear. She was the sole Viacom director to vote against Mr. Dauman’s nomination, and is opposed to having Mr. Dauman remain in charge.

And so, the real fight has only just begun.

“Shari is going to continue to advocate for what she believes to be in the best interests of Viacom shareholders,” Nancy Sterling, a spokeswoman for Ms. Redstone, said in a statement.

Though he is now simply chairman emeritus at Viacom and CBS, where he also ceded his role as executive chairman, Mr. Redstone continues to hold about 80 percent of the voting stock in the two companies through National Amusements, the private theater chain company started by his father. He legendarily survived a fire in a Boston hotel when he was 55 years old, grasping onto a window ledge while sustaining serious burns. In the following decades, he emerged as one of the most tenacious moguls in the entertainment industry. His personal life also made headlines, with two marriages, a string of girlfriends and feuds with both his daughter and his now-estranged son.

Upon Mr. Redstone’s death, his stake in National Amusements is to be held by an irrevocable trust created to benefit his five grandchildren. Voting control of that trust is to be passed on to seven trustees, among whom alliances are now being formed. The trust could support the two succession plans enacted this week by the boards of Viacom and CBS, but it also could act like an activist shareholder, contesting those decisions, installing a new board and leadership team or even making moves to sell the company.

Ms. Redstone will have her own constituency on the trust, starting with herself and her adult son Tyler Korff. Leonard L. Lewin, the divorce lawyer for Shari’s mother, Mr. Redstone’s wife of 52 years, is also a trustee. But Mr. Dauman is also a member of the trust, as is George S. Abrams, a Boston lawyer and a longtime Viacom director.