Greetings and welcome back to The Stratosphere.

Today, fresh reporting on three storylines from the worlds of sports, politics and business. Mentioned below the fold: besties Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks; Bezos rivals Josh Harris and Steve Apostolopoulos; Ro Khanna and Nikki Haley; and FTX executive Ryan Salame, who along with his lawyer Jason Linder, is worth keeping a close eye on.

As always, my inbox is open—shoot me a reply to introduce yourself or share a juicy tip.

But something has never added up to me about the star-chasing. Bezos, after all, has essentially thrown away the typical playbook for purchasing a sports team. He is definitely interested in making an offer, as I reported last week, but has so far refrained from formally committing, perhaps letting Harris and Canadian real estate mogul Steve Apostolopoulos, who each offered $6 billion, serve as stalking horses for what insiders expect would be an easily-financed, conversation-ending bid. Jeff Bezos has the biggest pile of chips at the table. Why would he need Matthew McConnaughey, exactly?

The answer is that he doesn’t. In fact, I’ve recently learned that Jay-Z was never a part of Bezos’s campaign, at least not in any formal capacity, despite earlier reporting that the two would “put in an official joint bid to purchase the team in January.” It’s possible that the general topic came up in conversation at their two-hour Los Angeles dinner, as chronicled by paparazzi last November, but the mini-mogul was at no point involved in any prospective bid, I’m informed. I’m similarly told that McConaughey, a longtime friend of Snyder’s who had been reportedly “joining” the Bezos campaign, has been talking for months to potential Commanders buyers—including Bezos—but he has never been committed to Bezos, specifically. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him show up as part of the Harris or Apostolopoulos bids when all is said and done.

Bezos, after all, is already a celebrity in his own right—a tech whiz management guru and e-commerce-revolutionizing gazillionaire who could inject fresh thinking into the NFL owners’ meetings and mark up the equity value of the other 31 teams by coming in well over $6 billion. Sure, he’d likely be resisted by members of the NFL country club crowd, but it’s inevitable that a new generation of owners or heirs will slowly reconstitute the league as the old guard either dies or looks to cash in on decades of extraordinary unrealized gains. It all comes down to money.

Of course, there would be downsides for the league, too: As the founder, executive chairman, and largest individual shareholder in Amazon, Bezos’s presence would create an immediate, sure-to-be-lawyered conflict of interest between the NFL and his company, which is currently paying in the neighborhood of $1 billion for the rights to Thursday Night Football. The media spectacle of his ownership might also cause shudders around a league that is desperately seeking to lower the temperature surrounding the Commanders, whose current owner has been a constant source of controversy.

That is all to say that a Bezos bid would be a referendum on Bezos himself. The composition of ownership groups typically matters: The NFL wants more diversity in its ranks, which is one reason that mostly white male billionaires go in search of non-white, non-male partners before submitting bids. Sometimes, the person fronting the bid literally needs the money that comes from partners and co-investors. Bezos could liquidate $6 billion without flinching.

In the end, all this is mostly a distraction from the key factor that will determine the team’s next owner: whether Bezos wants it badly enough. In speaking with sources around the league this week, the refrain I kept hearing is that if Bezos really wants the Commanders, the team is his. He can make a game-over bid with relative financial ease, one that Snyder—for all his grudges—would really have to struggle to reject.

That’s why, at this hour, everyone in league circles is very much on edge about what Bezos is going to do. Other bidders are nervous. Rumors are flying wildly. Bezos has successfully cultivated a sense of mystery among my sources—no one, at the end of the day, really knows his next move.

Haley already has a major Silicon Valley figure in her corner, I’ve learned. Chamath Palihapitiya, the former Facebook executive turned SPAC impresario who has gotten more and more involved in mega-donordom over the last few cycles, is likely to spend some of his time and money mobilizing for Haley. Palihapitiya, nominally a Democrat, gave $1 million to Chuck Schumer’s super PAC to help the party keep the Senate in October, and a quarter-million to back Biden in 2020. But the hyper vocal political chameleon also went so far as to say on his podcast earlier this year that he would “absolutely” support Haley against the president.

Over the last few years, however, Palihapitiya has gotten much more involved with conservative politics: He donated $100,000 to the failed effort to recall Gavin Newsom in California, and put a quarter-million behind Francis Suarez, the crypto-enthusiast Republican mayor of Miami. So this is not idle talk. Indeed, I am told by two sources familiar with his planning that Palihapitiya has been in negotiations this year to host a fundraiser for Haley in the Bay Area. Palihapitiya and Haley’s schedules got crossed due to travel, and Chamath had to postpone, but the event is back in scheduling and is likely to eventually happen. Haley, I’m told, is planning to make her first fundraising trip to the Bay Area in the next month or two.

On his popular “All In” podcast, Palihapitiya recently deemed Haley a “moderate, reasonable person” with lots of accomplishments on everything from climate to getting other corporations to invest in South Carolina during her governorship. “How do you, as a brown woman, get elected to governor of South Carolina, and do a lot of really good stuff? That’s kind of tough. I think she deserves a close look,” he said, before effectively reminding folks that he was an anti-Trump Democrat. “And she’s the only one that didn’t kowtow to Trump,” he added. “She was able to play the game, manipulate him, get him to be on her side, and then still told him to go pound sand. That’s pretty cool.”

Chamath’s political evolution places him alongside a number of centrist-adjacent Silicon Valley political elites. His support for Haley aside, Chamath was also among the business moderates who I’m told toasted Ro Khanna, the liberal Silicon Valley congressman with an eclectic group of Bernie-Elon crossover supporters, at a recent event hosted by DeSantis-backer David Sacks at the Sacks home in Pacific Heights. Sacks and Khanna, both of whom have been attacked by their respective partisans for spending time with one another, spoke to the crowd about the importance of innovation and the necessity of uncommon alliances with the other side. I hear the event pulled in just under $200,000 for Khanna, with a good mix of Republicans and Democrats in attendance.

Meanwhile, another ‘24 aspirant soon landing in Silicon Valley is Tim Scott, who I’m told is planning a fundraising trip to the Bay Area over the next few months, too. The South Carolina senator is the favorite of tech billionaire Larry Ellison (although Ellison lives in Hawaii these days) and Scott’s team has recently been reaching out to many Bay Area donors to gather support. Scott is well-positioned to win over a lot of the Romney Republicans who raised money for the governor in Silicon Valley ten to fifteen years ago. But, of course, the G.O.P. fundraising universe has gone topsy-turvy since Romney lost in 2012.

The people who matter now are very, very different. A few so-far undecided fundraisers whom I expect to become top targets include Trevor Traina, the entrepreneur, San Francisco socialite and former Trump ambassador to Austria; tech C.E.O. Jarrett Streebin, a rare industry executive who supported Trump in 2020; veterans of the G.O.P. fundraising game like former TPG executive Dick Boyce or billionaire Tom Siebel; and a bunch of anti-Trump folks like Bill Oberndorf, John Chambers, and Mary Meeker. You can throw at-times Trump supporters Doug Leone, Palmer Luckey and Margaret Chai Maloney on the top bundler list, too. If you see any of their names on a fundraiser invite, you should take it as a sign of a campaign’s credibility (and then forward it to me).

But six weeks later, where the hell is CC-2? Prosecutors have been asking around about how Salame operated, as I’ve reported, which suggests that he could be a target, or at least a subject, of the investigation. At the same time, it was very conspicuous to lawyers following the case that prosecutors didn’t detail more specific acts of fraud by Salame, a courtesy they did not extend to Singh.

Meanwhile, Salame, guided by his lawyer Jason Linder at Mayer Brown, has kept a very low profile as of late. While word of Singh’s negotiations with prosecutors previously leaked to the media in the weeks before S.B.F.’s indictment, back in December, Linder appears to have done a better job keeping his client out of the limelight, with almost no reporting emerging about Salame’s status. (Linder didn’t return a request for comment.) Salame hasn’t been charged with anything or formally accused of any wrongdoing, of course. But from the indictment alone, it seems unlikely to me and lawyers following the case that federal investigators haven’t had talks with him about cooperating, whether initiated by the D.O.J. or Linder. What strikes these people as unlikely is that Salame is just sitting by the phone in his native Berkshires, tending to his restaurant empire and doing nothing at all.