These days, conventional wisdom in Hollywood and on Wall Street is that Shari Redstone isn’t a seller of Paramount Global—at least not right now, and for good reason. Paramount’s stock is up for the year but down from a peak in February. Despite the media company’s extraordinary assets—the top linear network in CBS and its still-mighty news division, Top Gun studio Paramount Pictures, the Taylor Sheridan universe, and a large library of I.P.—Paramount’s market capitalization remains mired at about $14 billion, which is less than the value of CBS Corp. when Redstone first said she wanted to merge the companies years ago. (Those questioning the industrial logic of the merger can also peruse my partner Bill Cohan’s oeuvre.) 

Anyway, long story short, it’s hard to imagine that Redstone would have endured her various burdens to recombine the companies—winning her way back into her father Sumner’s heart, evicting his girlfriends, peacing-out Les Moonves, sunsetting Philippe Dauman, paying out Joe Ianniello, etc. etc.—only to sell them off for parts. Sure, Shari likely gets advice from bankers about the value of, say, the film studio to a company like Netflix, but she has resisted. As my partner Matt Belloni recently noted, Redstone and her C.E.O. Bob Bakish also rebuffed a gesture from a David Nevins-led group to buy Showtime. Bakish insists that Showtime is more valuable as a matrixed asset within the parentco than as a one-time windfall, even if it’s $3 billion.