Everyone likes a good Citizen Kane narrative. Because even though pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and succeeding by cutthroat capitalism is (or was), the American way, there is also that delightful pleasure in watching a media baron like Kane, or Howard Hughes, succumb to those very demons that drove him relentlessly to success in the first place.

Call it the law of American physics: What goes up, must come down in an extremely gruesome fashion, and end up smeared all over Page Six. So enter Sumner Redstone, whose massive earnings have earned him an empire of National Amusements (an apt title if there ever was one) that includes CBS, Paramount, MTV, and BET.

And who recently has succumbed to that modern aristocratic ailment of addictive stock-picking, and an even more aristocratic ailment of a failed marriage.

Many in the cadre of Redstone’s former Viacom associates see him as the victim of his own rapaciousness. He may have made billions as he pieced together a media giant, but now, they say, he is paying the price for gobbling up too many things, indiscriminately, including CBS, Paramount, and Midway Games. “He’s got a sort of addictive personality when it comes to buying stock,” says one former top-level Viacom executive.

As Rupert Murdoch, Sumner's chief rival in terms of media titans, begins to sniff ever closer with his New York Post to the subject of Redstone's liquidity, it is only natural that the 89-year old realizes it's time to wrap this story up and go for broke before the movie Hollywood inevitably makes about his life goes on for too long. So there's the divorce from his second wife, the continuing speculation that he will have to sell CBS and Viacom, and the fact that even money didn't keep Kane from crying out "Rosebud!" at the end.