Good morning,

It was another fantastic week here at Puck—Tara Palmeri got to the bottom of Kellyanne Conway’s next Trump pivot; Matt Belloni explained David Zaslav’s latest power move; Dylan Byers reported on CNN’s deja vu; Julia Ioffe investigated Putin’s Rockefeller laws; and William D. Cohan presaged the media deal of the century.

Check out these stories, along with the rest of our best work from the week, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan predicts the deal of the decade that will keep Netflix up at night.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer breaks the code on Pelosi’s Napa donorpalooza.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers pokes holes into Chris Licht’s “more with less” strategy.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri reports on the next steps for Beto and Kellyanne (and why Manchinema was so absurd).
and…
Julia Ioffe explains how the Griner saga will end.
and and…
Tina Nguyen reveals the emerging G.O.P. truther map.

PODCASTS:
Teddy Schleifer and I chat about the Nicole Shanahan-Elon-Sergey mess on a special Media Monday edition of The Powers That Be.
and…
Matt dissects the Batgirl wreckage on The Town.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

I’ll admit that I chortled under my breath. Preserve your optionality, to me, seemed like a delicious nugget of Machiavelli-meets-Dale Carnegie Wall Street argot, another brick in the verbal moat that many white board yammerers use to evidence their allegedly dinosaur-sized brains. But, alas, preserving one’s optionality isn’t actually a glib synonym for the more jejune formulation: keep your options open. Instead, years later, as I transitioned from the creative side of media to the business side back to somewhere in between, I have come to recognize that this term of art has a more profound definition: at its heart, it means to execute a strategy that sets up a few even bigger opportunities. And, by the way, that’s exactly what that fellow achieved to great effect in his bygone M&A spot. I hope he is currently reading this note while having his physique hosed down by Ari Emanuel on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean.

August is traditionally the dead zone on the business-political-deal-making calendar, and yet this year seems different. Across Puck’s various power corners, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by how various strategic initiatives appear to have, at least potentially, many layers beneath their surface. In Julia Ioffe’s latest masterpiece, Pelosi’s Last Cold War & The Griner Prisoner Dilemma, she dissects the various diplomatic strategies currently in place in order to free Griner from her unjust sentencing. Diplomats, of course, play the long game, and they also play three dimensional chess when negotiating with bad guys, like Putin. Please spend some time with this piece if you want to understand how negotiations work at the highest international order.

No one, of course, preserves their optionality better than David Zaslav, who built an extraordinary career by opportunistically seeking out M&A opportunities. These days, Zaz is working in the weeds to wring maximal profits from Warner Bros. Discovery, figuring out how he can unlock value for shareholders through operational efficiencies, cost-cutting, and some financial hatchet-wielding. The short term strategy is clear: Zaz needs to deliver $12 billion in 2023 EBITDA (revised down from $14 billion). But the longer term plays are almost endless. As Matt Belloni brilliantly notes, as ever, Zaslav is directing the entire entertainment industry away from the Netflix spend-and-spend-more strategy of the Content Wars decade. Zaz is a TV guy, but he’s also a generationally gifted financial engineer, in the Jack Welch mold, and it’s going to be interesting to see what cards he’s holding beside his famous vest.

But if you read one Puck piece this week, I behoove you to check out Bill Cohan’s terrific and endlessly thought-provoking work, The Next Media Deal of the Century, which articulates the industrial logic for a putative Warner Bros. Discovery-NBCU merger, which would create a formidable and enviable Netflix competitor. Perhaps that’s one of Zaz’s cards, or perhaps not, but it’s precisely the sort of story you can only find at Puck. Under the surface, it’s a busy August, which is exciting: we have a lot to look forward to in the fall.

Have a great weekend,
Jon