Viacom's Sumner Redstone: The Drive to Win

N E W   Y O R K, June 6 -- How do you become one of the 10 wealthiest people in the world, and the head of the second-largest media empire on the planet?

Equal parts toil and desire, says Sumner Redstone, billionaire CEO of entertainment conglomerate Viacom, who chronicles his rags-to-riches story in a recently published autobiography, A Passion to Win.

While not exactly a household name, it would be hard to watch TV and movies or read a book without coming in contact with Redstone's holdings. Among them are CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, Blockbuster Video and Simon & Schuster books.

But it's not about the money, says Redstone, who's worth about $14 billion. "I have never, never been motivated by the lure of the dollar," he told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America in an interview today. "My value system hasn't changed from then until now."

Something else is behind his drive to succeed, he explained: "I have an obsessive drive to win. It is the thrill of the deal. It's the feeling that you're going to succeed. You have to have a sense of optimism and a sense of self-confidence. And it's a competition. And I've been driven all my life to win, to prevail, to compete."

Read an Excerpt from Redstone's New Book

Unusual Route to the Top

It's that determination that has driven Redstone, 77, to the top of the corporate world. But his path to the top was a difficult and unusual one.

Redstone grew up during the depression, in a tenement of Jewish immigrants in Boston's West End. He excelled in school, finishing Harvard in three years and working in cryptography in World War Two, helping to crack Japanese codes. Redstone then graduated from Harvard Law School and became a successsful Washington lawyer, arguing cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.