Sumner Murray Redstone is majority owner and Chairman of the Board of the National Amusements theater chain. Through National Amusements, he is majority owner of Midway Games, Viacom and CBS Corporation. Sumner was born to Jewish parents Michael and Belle Rothstein in 1923; his family's name was changed from Rothstein to Redstone (the literal translation of the surname from German to English) in 1940, when Sumner was 17. His father, Michael Rothstein, was the owner of the Northeast Theater Corporation in Dedham, Massachusetts--the forerunner of National Amusements.

Redstone attended the prestigious Boston Latin School, where he graduated first in his class. He then attended Harvard College, where he completed his B.A. in three years. Later, Redstone served in World War II, serving with the team that decoded Japanese messages for the United States Army. Upon completion of his Army service, he worked in Washington, D.C. and attended Georgetown University Law School. He chose to transfer into Harvard Law School and received his LL.B., later amended to a Juris Doctor from that institution.

After completing law school, Redstone worked primarily in Washington, D.C., working at first for the U.S. Department of Justice in San Francisco and then going into private practice. However, after a few years in practice, he chose to join his father's theater chain.

As National Amusements grew Redstone believed that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms. There would always exist channels of distribution (albeit in varied forms), but content was always going to be necessary (his famous quote is "content is king!"). He then made investments in Columbia Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Orion Pictures, and Paramount Pictures (the latter of the 4 of which Redstone's Viacom would buy in the 1990s-see below), all of which turned over huge profits when he chose to sell the stock in the early 1980s.

In 1999 he was divorced from his first wife of 55 years, Phyllis Gloria Raphael. He is the father of Shari Redstone and Brent Redstone. Three years after his divorce, he married Paula Fortunato, a former primary school teacher who is forty years his junior.