It’s no surprise, really, that Shari Redstone, the heir to a shrinking family fortune and the controlling shareholder of Paramount Global, turned to Byron Trott, the founder of BDT & MSD Partners, to advise her on what she hopes will be the sale of National Amusements Inc., her family’s private holding company. Shari and her three children will need a lot of hand-holding through the vicissitudes of what promises to be a challenging sale process. “That’s where I come in,” the secretive Trott told Bruce Feiler for his 2013 book, The Secrets of Happy Families. “I’m here to give them the skills to keep their families together.” 

In addition to advising Shari on the sale of NAI, Trott and his firm also provided her some rescue financing in 2023, in the form of a $125 million preferred stock investment, to give Shari the cash needed to make amortization payments on NAI’s loan from Wells Fargo. NAI has another $37 million payment due to Wells Fargo, in March, and still has around $500 million in debt, in addition to the $125 million preferred. So Trott is not only an adviser to Shari, he’s also a preferred investor in NAI, and is technically owed a whole bunch of money. That’s an awkward situation for sure, and one that could put Trott and his firm in the driver’s seat at NAI, if for some reason the sale process falls through and Shari defaults on the NAI borrowings. Sure, it’s a long-shot scenario—even less likely than the sale of NAI or Paramount Global itself—but it could still happen.