Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon compendium of Puck’s freshest reporting. First up today, Dylan Byers gathers the chatter inside 30 Rock following Rachel Maddow’s on-air cri de coeur protesting Joy Reid’s termination along with a slate of producers—the first talent mutiny of new MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler’s tenure, but surely not the last, as she grapples with the need to stabilize ratings with less-expensive talent. Plus, below the fold: Leigh Ann Caldwell chronicles Trump’s eleventh-hour screaming phone calls to get the House’s budget framework over the finish line. Bill Cohan examines Bill Ackman’s revised bid to turn Howard Hughes Corp. into his own Berkshire Hathaway. Rachel Strugatz explores how savvy marketing propelled Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl perfume brand to its spot as the world’s top-selling fragrance franchise. And for Inner Circle members, Marion Maneker presents his exclusive interview with Guillaume Cerutti, Christie’s former C.E.O. and new chairman of the board. Meanwhile, on the pods: Matt Belloni is joined by Mosaic talent manager Michael Lasker on The Town to take stock of the Oscars’ most buzzed-about films. And on The Powers That Be, Leigh Ann connects with Peter Hamby to measure the growing Republican resistance to Elon Musk’s DOGE bloodletting experiment.

MEDIA

On Monday, newly-appointed MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler formally put her stamp on the network with a slate of quickly executed programming changes. Rachel Maddow will return to her famously plum $25 million-a-year, Mondays-only gig; Jen Psaki, the network’s next great hope, will replace the beloved but ratings-challenged Alex Wagner; etcetera. But Maddow, for her part, took particular issue with the defenestration of host Joy Reid, and the firing of production team members. Rather than air her concerns constructively in private, she decided to put her new boss on public blast—and, as Dylan reports, the response inside the network to her latest chest-thumping was decidedly skeptical. Read Now

WASHINGTON

Representative Victoria Spartz, among the more chaotic and least predictable Republicans, had been a firm “no” on the House G.O.P. budget framework Tuesday night when she received a phone call from a fuming Donald Trump. After being berated as a fake Republican derailing the president’s agenda, she acquiesced. Meanwhile, the framework’s passage only exacerbated the deep rift between moderates and hardliners that has been on display over weeks of negotiation leading up to Tuesday night’s cloakroom drama. After all, the budget blueprint was written to appease the G.O.P.’s deficit hardliners—but it comes at the expense of the centrist Republicans in blue and purple districts to whom Johnson owes his razor-thin majority. Read Now

WALL STREET

Last week, Bill Ackman, the audacious hedge fund billionaire and scourge of Ivy League presidents everywhere, jumped on X Spaces to share his revised plan to further his ambition of becoming Gen X’s own Warren Buffett. In short, he wants to turn the Howard Hughes Corporation—a modest real estate company—into his own financial growth vehicle, following the Buffett–Berkshire Hathaway blueprint. While shareholders and the board essentially rebuffed his initial proposal, Ackman recently returned, offering to buy another $900 million of Howard Hughes stock at $90 per share, raising his and his affiliates’ stake to 48 percent. Is he on the cusp of realizing his fantasy of “permanent capital”? Read Now

FASHION

Even within the cutthroat beauty business, there is no subcategory more fiercely contested than women’s fragrance—which made it all the more surprising that the past year’s bestselling women’s fragrance franchise is not from one of the Big Three (Chanel, Dior, YSL Beauty), but rather Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl, the citrusy-sweet perfume that comes bottled in a mini stiletto heel. Incredibly, according to Circana consumer data, Good Girl isn’t just the top perfume brand in the U.S.; it was also the bestselling women’s franchise in the world last year, supplanting Chanel’s Chance. Herewith, Rachel shares an inside look at how Puig, the brand’s Spanish owner, leveraged social media and savvy marketing to dethrone a legend. Read Now

ART

Guillaume Cerutti, the stoic French executive, began his tenure at Christie’s at a moment of extraordinary change for the auction house. Upon his appointment as C.E.O. in 2016, Cerutti immediately set about reorganizing the company, scaling up luxury sales, and instilling financial discipline within his team. He also guided the house through the severe disruption of the auction business during the pandemic, while accelerating online sales in the process. Now, as Cerutti exits the C.E.O. role to become chairman of the board at Christie’s, Marion sits down with him for an exclusive interview to discuss his transformative tenure, how the auction world has evolved, and his new job overseeing the Pinault Collection. Read Now

HOLLYWOOD

Matt is joined by Mosaic talent manager and Oscar enthusiast Michael Lasker to parse through the award season chatter and find a gambling edge on the Academy Awards. Matt and Michael discuss the wide-open races in the top categories—including best picture—as well as how many Oscars Emilia Pérez might win following Karla Sofía Gascón’s Twitter controversy, Adrien Brody vs. Timothée Chalamet, and the potential upset chances for Fernanda Torres and Jeremy Strong. Listen Now

WASHINGTON

Leigh Ann Caldwell joins Peter to break down the political fallout of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting bloodbath. While Democrats are wary of Musk slashing government spending, Leigh Ann reveals that Republicans, too, are privately voicing concerns to the Trump administration. Leigh Ann also explores a brewing showdown in Congress, where Democrats might protest the House budget resolution by allowing a government shutdown in the coming weeks. Listen Now

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