Welcome back to Dry Powder, I’m Bill Cohan.

When Paramount Global decided, earlier this week, to pause the sale of BET, it again underscored Shari’s greatest existential problem: whether there is any buyer out there for her struggling franken-asset. In today’s issue, lessons from the BET episode, the latest on David Solomon’s bad press, and how Trump’s indictments are being received on Wall Street.

The problem seems to be that Paramount Global is asking around $3 billion for the business, or roughly 9x its 2022 EBITDA of $325 million. Perry, balking at the purchase price, reportedly offered $2 billion. And I can’t say I blame him. Nine times EBITDA for a falling knife sounds pretty pricey to me, especially when Paramount Global just sold Simon & Schuster to KKR for 6x EBITDA. There’s not much difference, really, from a buyer’s perspective, between KKR and Tyler Perry. They are both “financial buyers” looking to pay a fair but not an aggressive price for a business. You could argue, in fact, that S&S’s prospects are brighter than BET’s, given the ongoing decline of linear TV, and so perhaps Tyler should be paying less than 6x EBITDA for BET. And that’s probably why Paramount Global is acting like it will keep BET now instead of trying to sell it. On the other hand, if BET is really becoming just another wasting media asset, Paramount Global would be wise to sell it at any reasonable price and use the proceeds to pay down more of its $13.5 billion of net debt.

The equity story for Paramount Global continues to get more and more difficult to digest. It’s a company whose value is slowly sinking into the West. The stock is down 14 percent so far in 2023 and down 43 percent in the past year. The company now has a market value of $9.75 billion—a number that Sumner Redstone could never have fathomed. (Viacom and CBS were each worth around twice as much before his daughter merged them; CBS alone was worth $35 billion in 2014.) The stock price can’t be making our friend Warren Buffett that happy either. Buffett is the largest economic shareholder in Paramount Global while Shari Redstone is its largest voting shareholder. So what she does and says is what goes at Paramount.

What complicates the calculus here for Buffett, the Redstones and the other suffering Paramount shareholders is that there may be no exit here, à huis clos, as Jean-Paul Sartre may have written. As I noted earlier in August, it’s not the least bit clear to me who would want to buy Paramount from the Buffett/Redstone partnership. Possibly, if Paramount gets cheap enough, Jeff Bezos and Amazon might swoop in and pick it off. At around a $20 billion market capitalization (equity plus net debt), Paramount would be immaterial to Amazon’s $1.4 trillion market value and might make a nice fit with the likes of MGM. But, again, I don’t see a compelling strategic need for this deal, or for any deal involving Paramount Global, at least in the current acutely challenged media environment.

And that’s why, too, Disney is probably going to continue to suffer, with the same increasingly desperate need as Paramount Global to solve its linear TV and streaming problems. In fact, Disney is just a much bigger version of Paramount (excepting the theme parks), just as once upon a time Lehman Brothers was just a bigger version of Bear Stearns. Same problems; similar existential outcome. (Thanks, Jean-Paul.)

If Paramount isn’t selling BET because it’s haggling with Tyler Perry over price, that doesn’t bode particularly well for Disney when it comes to offloading ABC, or finding a strategic partner for ESPN. Ironically, while prices are going down for ABC and ESPN, Disney probably will have to pay up to get the one-third stake in Hulu owned by Comcast that it has pledged to buy next year. That’ll probably end up costing Disney $10 billion, which is why I keep suggesting the idea that Disney swap an ownership stake in ESPN for Comcast’s one-third stake in Hulu. But that decision is beyond my pay grade (unless of course Iger would like to chat with me about it).

In any event, for companies like Paramount, Disney, and to a lesser extent Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast, the macroeconomic environment just gets more and more challenging. And the two companies bearing the brunt of it now are Paramount and Disney. The first of those two to sell out, and I mean sell the whole company, will be the winner, even if it’s for a price that would have been inconceivable in a different, more flush, era.

Pretty much every media outlet with a dog in this hunt has now weighed in on the Solomon saga by this point: Insider, The Messenger, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg, Semafor, The New York Times and New York magazine. And, of course, yours truly, at Puck. What’s left to be said on the subject, to be honest? The truth is that David Solomon isn’t going anywhere. The Financial Times is now reporting that Solomon has the support of the Goldman board and will be discussing him at its next meeting.

Yes, a bunch of former partners have a bone to pick with Solomon, as do, apparently, a bunch of current employees, most likely because they were irked by their 2022 bonuses, which suffered because of the non-investment banking and trading parts of the firm. But if the FT is right—and my reporting bears out that conclusion—the board supports him, and that’s pretty much the only group that matters as far as David Solomon’s future is concerned.

We’ll see what happens. If the board wanted to put an end to all the media sturm und drang it would simply issue a statement in support of David. That, frankly, is long overdue. I can almost understand its reluctance to do so: Nobody wants to look like the Disney board, which came out in support of Bob Chapek in June 2022 only to fire him in November 2022. One thing the Chapek situation proved is that boards of directors can change their minds if they have to. And the same thing could happen at Goldman, of course, where David serves at the pleasure of the board.

As for Waldron, I’ve never met him. But he doesn’t strike me as the Gary Cohn type. He strikes me as a loyal deputy, who will be content to be No. 2 until either it’s his time to step up to the top job or to move on. After all, he and Solomon have been joined at the hip since their days together at Bear Stearns. That’s a long time of bonding. Gary Cohn and Lloyd Blankfein did not have that same kind of history together when Gary tried to take over when Lloyd was out successfully battling cancer. That was a ballsy move on Gary’s part and an ill-advised one, for sure. And a very different set of circumstances than those that are confronting Solomon and Waldron.

I know Waldron is well respected, especially by the Wall Street analyst community, leading me to conclude that his elevation to the corner office would be well received, at least among one particular and important Wall Street constituency. That’s a fact that the Goldman board can tuck away in its back pocket if needed, should things continue to spiral out of control for David. As I say, I am not feeling that the current grumbling will lead to a volcanic explosion at 200 West Street, unless the business takes a dramatic turn for the worse. But I have got to believe that the Goldman second quarter was the one in which David decided to take the hit and that the third quarter will be much better.

Anyway, Steve was not particularly keen to comment about the Trump indictments. Instead, he offered up a truism that is impossible to argue with: getting indicted is something to be avoided at all costs. Hard to disagree with Steve on that observation. And I think that pretty much sums up the view of Wall Street when it comes to Donald Trump and his legal troubles. No one wants to be indicted. Period. Let alone four times. Let alone for crimes that could put Trump in prison for the rest of his natural life.

But my sense is that is where the Wall Street consensus ends. From there, it’s anyone’s guess about what happens next. Are the cases sufficiently substantive to hold up in court? Will Trump manage to delay the trials until after the 2024 election? And, if he wins the election, will he order his new Justice Department to drop the federal cases against him and then pressure the state prosecutors not to prosecute a sitting president? Or does the Fourteenth Amendment bar Trump from serving as president? The amendment supposedly excludes from public office “any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against the sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies,” according to constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe and former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, writing in The Atlantic on Friday.

The cases certainly seem substantive to me and, like Schwarzman, I certainly wouldn’t want to be facing four criminal indictments. But we all know Trump has a way of slithering out of every tough corner he has ever been in. And the consensus on Wall Street, at least among the people I talk to, is that he’ll probably figure out a way to slither out of these corners too, or at least to delay the court process for a sufficiently long time so that he won’t be sitting in jail come November 2024.

I still think the best idea for how to get out of this mess came from another private-equity titan, David Rubenstein, who suggested that Biden offer to pardon Trump, in exchange for Trump agreeing not to run for public office anywhere ever again, plus a commitment from Biden to step down as president after one term, blowing wide open both sides of the political landscape in 2024. I thought Rubenstein’s suggestion was wise, if only because we are in desperate need of new, younger political blood in both political parties and we also need to put the reprehensible Trump era behind us. I’m sorry if the price to do that is that Biden has to sacrifice himself on the altar. But he’d be a hero forever to me and many, many others if he did it and would enshrine himself in the history books forever.

When I reported Rubenstein’s suggestion a few weeks ago, I was—no surprise—pilloried on Twitter, or X, mostly by people on the left who want to see Trump fry for his behavior. They found appalling the suggestion that he be pardoned so we can get beyond the Trump era. “How about drawing and quartering on PPV [Pay-per-view]?” one of my X correspondents wrote. “Biggest crowd ever.” Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to watch Trump get tried and convicted and sent away to prison for the rest of his days. But I would hate even more to see him wriggle out of his legal purgatory or find a way to delay the trials until he is president again and then order his Justice Department to drop the cases. Wouldn’t that be the worst outcome? And isn’t that more and more likely?

I’d prefer Biden strike a deal with Trump now, or soon, while his fear about his fate is likely at the highest. I know it’s dramatic. And I know it’s a longshot. And nearly unprecedented. But the worst outcome—Trump returning as president in January 2025—is looking increasingly possible, if not likely. I’m not sure the country, in its current fragile state, can handle four more years of Donald, unleashed. Can you imagine who would go work for him in his second administration?