For Shari Redstone, it was nothing personal. But the longer the negotiations went on, the more Redstone fell out of love with the idea of marrying her family’s legacy to David Ellison’s Skydance Media.
So on June 11, as board members of Paramount Global were about to hold a key meeting on the long-gestating deal to merge with Skydance, Redstone was out — even as those around her were still scrambling to get it done.
Earlier that morning, lawyers and bankers for both sides were up at dawn to finish last-minute paperwork in advance of the meeting, scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time via videoconference. Skydance leaders believed it would be the last hurdle to clinching an agreement. The economic terms of the deal had been hammered out and revised multiple times by the Paramount board’s special committee overseeing sale talks. After months of highly public negotiations and the turmoil of Paramount ousting CEO Bob Bakish in April, Ellison’s team thought an agreement to take control of the company that owns Paramount Pictures, CBS, Showtime, Nickelodeon, BET and Paramount+ was in hand.
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