Redstone on the Rocks

Sumner Redstone is the latest billionaire threatened with mere ordinary richness. Last week’s market turmoil nearly toppled the controlling shareholder in Viacom and CBS, who was forced to sell off large chunks of his holdings in order to back a $1.6 billion loan to expand his family’s movie-theater chain. Now Martin Peers suggests in The Wall Street Journal that Redstone—and Viacom and CBS—would be better off if he just sold off his stakes. “That might allow the 85-year-old media mogul to get out of the financial hole he has dug for himself,” Peers writes. “A new control shareholder could also provide some fresh ideas—something lacking at Mr. Redstone’s empire in recent years.”