Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory—our weekly digest of the best work being produced at Puck.

It was another fantastic week: Tara Palmeri captured the post-midterm anxiety-laced gossip in D.C.; Matt Belloni revealed Ari Emanuel’s new beef; Teddy Schleifer detailed the G.O.P.’s unrequited love for Peter Thiel; Julia Ioffe introduced us to Putin’s own Kardashian; Bill Cohan uncovered Trump’s business ankle bracelet; and Eriq Gardner previewed Tim Cook’s legal battle.

I usually start with Mike Allen’s Axios AM and then Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman’s Punchbowl to get a flavor of Washington, before totally un-meticulously scrolling through various apps on my phone—The Times, WaPo, the Journal, Bloomberg, The Information, The FT—and then returning to my inbox for Substackers that I might have missed, such as Casey Newton or Eric Newcomer, or Oliver Darcy’s Reliable Sources newsletter. I read The Ankler and Semafor too. By some point in that screentime journey, though, one of the kids is usually rousing and my work inbox is filling up while other early rising Puck partners are Slacking—a new wavelength has beckoned.

On this particular morning, however, I was particularly bleary-eyed. I had tried to extend my bedtime the night before to watch the election results, flipping between MSNBC and a Wolf Blitzer-less CNN as the results came in. By that moment, the various data points were coalescing together to illuminate the new political narrative: the red tsunami had become a somewhat impotent red trickle; more gridlock ensued, and tens of millions of dollars would be dumped into the Georgia runoff grudge match between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock.

But the political indecision belied a news cycle in turbodrive. Wall Street prefers stalemates—it makes for predictability, and the financial markets were adjusting in pre-trading hours. The day prior, Disney had become the latest large cap media company to revise its guidance downward. Now, despite the remaining vote counting, the ’24 news cycle had effectively commenced—the Biden message artists were claiming Pyrrhic victory and questions alighted about Trump’s announcement. There was a lot to behold.

But the most interesting bit of news would come to me some time later. Friends and sources were sending links about the story that, to my mind, had become the most fascinating tale of the day: the seemingly imminent dissolution of FTX, the cryptocurrency trading platform, and the reckoning of its wild-haired manchild founder and C.E.O., Sam Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried, or S.B.F. as he’s known by everyone, has cameoed in a fair amount of Puck coverage in our fourteen months of existence, particularly in the work of Teddy Schleifer and Bill Cohan. He’s cut quite a figure as a wild-eyed, quixotic, undefinable apparent mega-genius who became a multi-billionaire before 30 and subsequently endeavored to devote himself to the philanthropic cause of effective altruism. Now, he had been felled by his biggest rival at Binance, the world’s largest crypto trading platform, or maybe just by his own hubris. His investors were marking their investments to zero. Investigations by regulators loomed. Some $32 billion in value appeared to have gone up in smoke in hours. Things move fast, as Ferris Bueller once said. But never this fast.

Shortly thereafter, assignments were made to Bill, Teddy, and Eriq Gardner, who will have an update on S.B.F.’s legal quagmire on Monday. But the whole imbroglio was a useful reminder, as if we need one, that appearances hardly fit with reality, a helpful eureka moment at Puck, where we always attempt to say the quiet part out loud. Indeed, S.B.F.’s self-immolation set off tremors impacting not merely the FTX investors, from Sequoia to Tom Brady, writing down their investments. It would also undo an entire thriving political and philanthropic operation and extinguish the hopes of the Democratic party that S.B.F. could become the George Soros of his generation. In The S.B.F. Pandemic, Teddy assesses the political carnage and second order of magnitude consequences.

But if you read anything this weekend, I behoove you to spend time with Teddy’s other fantastic piece, The Achilles Thiel, which details the Republican party’s lusting after Peter Thiel, an unrequited courtship that made both sides suspicious of one another, and articulates the schism between the way they do things in the Valley and the District. Just as Teddy revealed the left’s shock that S.B.F. could no longer become a high-altitude sugar daddy, he also depicted a similar frustration on the right, especially in an era of nearly centimillion-dollar runoffs. It’s a story for our time, and precisely the sort of work you can expect to find at Puck.

Have a great weekend,

Jon