THB #526: Paramount - Hospice or Assisted Suicide?

“Do you wanna kill a snowman?,” seems to be the song Ms. Shari Redstone is singing these days. The exit of Bob Bakish for preferring the “other” proposal is pretty much the deepest cut we’re going to see from Redstone while she is still in charge.

Paramount Global seems to be down to the moment of decision. Would it prefer to have its head sliced off with a financial guillotine with an overall sale (for which there are not make takers) or will it choose to go live with its grandkids, even though it still will need round-the-clock nursing, and see if it can eek out a few more good days before the end.

Clearly, Big Bob Bakish sees his/Paramount’s best exit strategy to be a clean getaway, as the hospice route will take at least 5 years to pay him/Paramount off in a meaningful way.

But Ms Shari is being driven by a big, but slightly smaller insta-payday combined with the hope that those grandkids will make her lingering, silent stake in the business worth something more someday. And it doesn’t hurt that one of the grandkids is in a Forbes 50 family and his pops seems unlikely to let him fail miserably… and those pockets are the only ones deep enough in all of the offers to potentially bankroll growth.

So let’s take a quick look back at the rocky history of The Redstones of Paramount.