Good morning, It was, as always, yet another fabulous week: Matt Belloni explored a brewing Hollywood blood feud; Kim Masters deciphered Ari Emanuel’s latest volte face; Eriq Gardner identified a $70 million CAA headache; Dylan Byers dug into an NBC-MSNBC custody battle; Lauren Sherman detailed Bernard Arnault’s tariff pickle; Sarah Shapiro unfurled a Uniqlo head scratcher; and Rachel Strugatz narrated an Ulta feel-good story. Also, Bill Cohan dissected Carlos Watson’s prison break; John Ourand broadcast a Steinbrenner battle; Julia Alexander explained the NFL’s war on Christmas; Marion Maneker ran the numbers on the Hong Kong auctions; and Julie Davich spotlighted Noah Davis’s posthumous market. Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell captured the Hill’s Liberation Day blues; Julia Ioffe investigated Pete Hegseth’s P.R. shop; John Heilemann surveyed the Elon damage in Wisconsin; Abby Livingston scouted the ’28 combine; and Peter Hamby checked the bellwethers in Florida and Wisconsin. Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

Lauren Sherman chronicles Radhika-gate and enumerates the challenges facing both LVMH and Kering. and… Rachel Strugatz relays the new hot beauty investment du jour. meanwhile… Sarah Shapiro inspects a Uniqlo snafu and presents the week in shopping.

Marion Maneker chats with Guillaume Cerutti and parses the Sotheby’s and Christie’s results from Hong Kong. and… Julie Davich charts the rise of the Noah Davis market.

Matt Belloni reports from the front lines of the theatrical window wars. and… Kim Masters scrutinizes Ari Emanuel’s new entourage. meanwhile… Eriq Gardner gathers the latest details on the CAA-Range beef.

Bill Cohan recounts how Carlos Watson appealed to Trump’s sensitive side.

Dylan Byers investigates NBC’s custody battle with MSNBC over Kornacki. and… John Ourand reveals an R.S.N. carriage détente. meanwhile… Julia Alexander ponders the NBA’s streaming strategy.

Leigh Ann Caldwell tracks the Liberation Day fallout on the Hill. and… Julia Ioffe monitors the Pete Hegseth vanity campaign. meanwhile… Peter Hamby checks the crosstabs on Elon; John Heilemann assesses the Elon fallout; and Abby Livingston polls the ’28 Democratic field.

Dylan and Julia Alexander analyze Mark Zuckerberg’s UFC interest on The Grill Room. and… Legendary college football analyst Gary Danielson joins John on The Varsity. and… Lauren and Marisa Meltzer review Gwyneth Paltrow’s P.R. blitz on Fashion People. and… Heilemann swaps notes with D.C. power couple Susan Glasser and Peter Baker on Impolitic. and… Matt and Brillstein C.E.O. Jon Liebman discuss the shifting dynamics of the representation business on The Town. and… Julia Ioffe and Peter contemplate Trump’s isolationism on The Powers That Be.

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Late last week, Puck’s ever-active general Slack channel lit up with a surprising Friday evening news dump. Carlos Watson, the disgraced founder of Ozy Media, who had late been preparing to serve a nearly 10-year prison sentence and service a nearly $100 million fine for conspiracy to commit securities fraud, had become the latest beneficiary of the Trump pardon machine. He’d received the golden ticket previously bestowed on fellow white-collar ne’er-do-wells such as Michael Milken, Charles Kushner, Steve Bannon, and Paul Manafort—quite a crew. Watson’s antics were particularly memorable, though. As you might recall, back in 2021, during a due diligence phone call with bankers from Goldman Sachs, Ozy’s C.O.O. impersonated a YouTube executive in an effort to validate the company’s claimed viewership numbers. Alas, the meeting and its aftermath was memorialized in a remarkable Times column, which solidified the impression that many in the media industry had already formed about Ozy: It was an irrelevant vanity project that seemed compelling only to investors. Watson, after all, was a second-time entrepreneur with degrees from Harvard and Stanford and a potent ego-ambition engine who knew how to play the fundraising game. But some things really are too good to be true. Anyway, Watson actually conjures a fair amount of nostalgia for me personally. Years ago, in the earliest months of Puck’s journey, he was the subject of one of our most memorable pieces. At the time, amid Ozy’s unravelling, Watson had reached out to my partner Bill Cohan to tell his side of the story. What happened next, of course, was stranger than fiction—a true misadventure in crisis management, delinquent meetings, touchy lawyers and, believe it or not, an infamous turkey club sandwich. We titled the piece Carlos Watson Has a Cold, an homage to the legendary 1966 Gay Talese piece about Frank Sinatra for Esquire. I’m not sure that more than a handful of people got the reference, but it sure gave me and Bill a chuckle. More importantly, however, the story helped hone our identity, both in terms of the type of company we wanted to become and the type of journalism we wanted to produce. I reread Carlos Watson Has a Cold shortly after Watson’s pardon was announced, and I’m pleased to say that it holds up and then some. I behoove you to read to the end to behold the greatest kicker I’ve read in decades in the business. Meanwhile, I’d also steer you to Bill’s latest master stroke on Watson, and what his emancipation suggests about Trump’s relationship with Wall Street and the financial services community. Carlos Watson’s Prison Break is enlightening on a number of levels, particularly its reflections on the art of reinvention—in politics and finance, alike. This is indeed one of the great stories of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read in Puck.

Have a great weekend, Jon

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