Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, your weekend reminder of the best new work emanating from my partners at Puck.

It was an utterly fabulous week: Bill Cohan visited Sam Bankman-Fried in the clink; Matt Belloni previewed Netflix’s new compensation war and John Ourand revealed the streamer’s NFL designs; Julia Alexander assessed a streaming casualty; Dylan Byers unearthed a Zaz contradiction; Lauren Sherman dug into Ari Emanuel’s fashion empire discontent; Marion Maneker explored a $364 million auction hack; and Tina Nguyen captured the latest M.T.G.-Mike Johnson contretemps.

🎟️ Also, a quick programming note: Sign up here if you’re interested in joining Peacock and Puck for an evening in celebration of Peacock’s hit series TheTraitors. The event will be held Tuesday, May 14, at 5 p.m. in Manhattan, and feature a screening plus an exclusive conversation between our very own Julia Alexander and TheTraitors’ host and producer, Alan Cumming. Hope to see you there!

ART WORLD:
Marion Maneker sifts through $364 million in irrevocable bids.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan peeks behind Shari Redstone’s Door No. 3, and chats with Sam Bankman-Fried about his new life behind bars.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni captures the first shots in the Netflix comp wars and Apple’s come-to-Jesus moment on theatrical.
and…
Julia Alexander envisions the next streamer extinction event.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer ranks the newest class of Valley megadonors.
and…
Baratunde Thurston digs into the next generation of A.I. web tools.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers details Zaz’s NBA snafu and Kim Godwin’s departure.
and…
Eriq Gardner previews Carlos Watson’s trial.
and…
John Ourand unveils Netflix’s new NFL dalliance.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri reveals a strange twist in the Trump-TikTok relationship.
and…
Tina Nguyen enters the Mike Johnson rubber room.
and…
Julia Ioffe teaches some Columbiaology 101.
and…
Peter Hamby debunks Biden’s campus crisis.

PODCASTS:
Matt and Peacock president Kelly Campbell track the streamer’s ascent on The Town.
and…
Lauren and High Sport’s Alissa Zachary dissect the stretch-pants craze and trade Khaite life lessons on Fashion People.
and…
Tara and former McConnell acolyte Josh Holmes predict the Senate map on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Peter and Julia Ioffe discuss Putin’s coronation on The Powers That Be.

Meanwhile, I 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.

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I’d been eager to speak with Bill, who’d left his apartment that morning for an unusual reporting journey—to visit Sam Bankman-Fried at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. A couple months ago, of course, S.B.F. was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of two counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money-laundering. Bill was going to be the first journalist to share S.B.F.’s prison experience with the world.

After I picked up the phone, Bill launched into an eloquent monologue depicting his experience—the jarring reality of entering the dangerous prison, the shock of seeing the eerily thin S.B.F. in the visiting quarters, and the various details of their conversation. Bill recounted some of the more poignant moments of their chat, everything from Sam’s regrets about promoting his former girlfriend Caroline Ellison to run Alameda to the grim realities of prison life: the bad food and the tedium and the chilling specter of spending one’s days around violent criminals. He also told Bill, somewhat hilariously, that a few fellow prisoners had asked him for financial advice.

Was he chastened, I asked Bill? After all, here was a young man, once the richest person under 30, who had been accused of stealing $8 billion—a guy who had brought extraordinary ignominy on his family and former colleagues, among others. Bill acknowledged that Sam had a slightly more complex assessment of his own misdeeds. At that point, however, I had to hang up to attend my panel, counting down the hours till a draft would arrive in my inbox.

Sam He Is: An Exclusive Prison Chat With S.B.F., Bill’s powerful piece, is a startling and evocative portrait of our culture’s most famous prisoner. It captures S.B.F. in a moment of vulnerability, and perhaps willful delusion, regarding both his past and future. But Bill also reports that Sam remains steadfast about his innocence and spends an hour a day on the phone with his counsel, working through the contours of his appeal. S.B.F. will never be as ubiquitous behind bars as he was while running FTX, but it’s safe to assume that he’s not going to vanish from the spotlight anytime soon.

If you need a little mirth, however, I’d turn your attention to a piece by my partner John Ourand entitled Netflix’s NFL Christmas Miracle. Mere hours after we published Bill’s extraordinary story, John broke the news that Netflix was bidding on a pair of Christmas Day NFL games. That may seem like a relatively bite-sized deal, but it’s also laden with subtext. Not only will this mark Netflix’s maiden voyage into professional football, it might also reprice the market for individual games. And, of course, it’s a harbinger of where both media and live sports are headed—irrevocably, with fits and starts, toward streaming. As you well know, that’s one of the great stories of our time, and exactly what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon