Sumner Redstone is so desperate for cash, he might not even be a billionaire any more. So he's decided his daughter will take the fall, and is embarrassing her with a huge public fight this morning.

The Times, Wall Street Journal, Post — everyone has some kind of story about the infighting, because basically Americans love to watch the rich lose all their money, and then claw at yell viciously at one another, just like people in trailer parks and shacks, and everywhere else really. And also because, oh yeah, crazy Sumner Redstone controls Viacom and CBS.

The story is, Redstone blew his money on crazy investments like Midway Games, which just absolutely hemorrhages money making videogames you've mostly never heard of, plus Mortal Kombat. He also last year donated $105 million to three hospitals, suddenly, after giving no charity, to anyone, ever. And now he has to pay for it all, by selling stocks, because his lenders are literally forcing him to.

Redstone is a stubborn old bastard bastard and refused to sell any Viacom or CBS shares to meet these obligations. Except then eventually he got desperate and was all, "OK, maybe I'll sell a little CBS, fine."

Redstone is still desperate. He can't raise enough money just selling a little CBS stock. So he's going to sell off huge chunks of the company his daughter Shari runs, a movie theater chain, which is basically innocent in this whole mess. Shari, obviously, it totally pissed, and voted against the plan in a meeting of a board committee, but lost.

So now Sumner Redstone might vote his daughter off the board, according to the Times, and presumably out of her job running the movie theater chain, because his lenders are nervous having the CEO of the movie theater chain OPPOSED to the plan to sell off chunks of said movie theater chain. And also if he dies, she becomes chairman of Viacom and CBS, which would make the lenders even more nervous.

In the meantime, Redstone doesn't have to pay $800 million due today, because his lenders are sufficiently impressed with his plan to screw over his own daughter that they're extending his deadline indefinitely while negotiations continue. Or so says the Post.

It's a beautiful Christmas fairytale, really, staged for the whole world in newspaper and tabloid columns.