S.B.F.’s Schmuck Insurance, a D.C. Scandal, a Hollywood Hero

Good morning,

Happy New Year’s Eve! Thanks for reading The Backstory, our weekly digest of the best work of the week at Puck.

It was another terrific week to conclude the year at Puck: Tara Palmeri got the real dish on the Santos scandal; Bill Cohan shed new light on how the sausage really got made at FTX; Dylan Byers reported on the Bloomberg media parlor games; Julia Alexander presaged where the streaming industry is headed in ’23 while Matt Belloni revealed the Hollywood hero of the year.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer digs into Jeff Bezos’s bid to buy the Washington Commanders.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni reveals his hero of the year.
and…
Julia Alexander predicts the various gyrations (besides simple M&A) that streaming will endure in ’23.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan offers a scintillating glimpse into the erstwhile crypto prince’s sordid mind in the latest installment of his series, The S.B.F. Chronicles.
and…
Eriq Gardner proffers a prediction about S.B.F.’s plea.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers gets to the heart of the recent Bloomberg media guessing game.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri has the real story on how George Santos pulled off his Mr. Ripley act.
and...
Tina Nguyen unearths the personal feud tearing MAGA apart.

PODCASTS:
Listen to The Town’s first annual Townies, the only awards that really matter in Hollywood.
and…
Dylan and I dig into the Bloomberg media speculation on The Powers That Be.

Meanwhile, I also 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.

A Year of Magical Thinking

Normally, I write the first draft of this weekly epistle from my desk in the back corner of Puck’s Chelsea office, proudly peering up from my Mac screen at all the silent stars who have helped grow our fledgling media company over the past fifteen months. Of course, it’s our journalists whom you come to read week after week, as you should, but their work is supported by the relentless energy, enthusiasm, and peerless intellect of an incredible team of operators, who manage everything from our brand marketing to our performance marketing, from our social media handles to our accounts payable. They are the hidden heroes of Puck, who help man the fort as our generationally talented team of journalists chase down their stories in the field.

This week, I’m writing from the melted snow caps of southern Vermont, a perfect place to hibernate during the final week of the year. I grew up playing sports, but was never much of a skier, and so I’ve become the lodge bunny of our family as my wife and kids tear it up on the mountains. I hardly mind. (Neither do they.) Indeed, it’s afforded me some precious time to think about what my incredible partners—our journalists, our operators, and our contributors of every stripe—have accomplished this year. Puck, after all, has crossed so many thresholds that I’ve subsequently lost count. Our community has reached 200,000 people, including more than our fair share of the most vibrant and impactful personages in the culture. Ten million people have read the work of my incredible colleagues—some 500-plus articles elegantly explicating the descent of Sam Bankman-Fried, unfurling the Elon Musk Twitter journey, detailing Putin’s shrinking empire, presaging the changing fortunes of the entertainment industry, gathering the inside conversation between the White House and Capitol Hill, seeing around corners at CNN and The Washington Post, and so, so much more.

Year’s end is typically teeming with catch-all best-of style lists composed by third party observers. This year, instead, we asked our team of authors to pick from among their own work, once again breaking down the fourth wall to let our community know what they were most proud of, what reportage had best aged or even seemed clairvoyant.

As the editor around here, I delighted and marveled in seeing what they had selected. I remember the editing and publication of each piece as if it had just occurred, and remain more proud of the work now than when it first hit your inbox or your social channels or when you discovered it on puck.news. I have laid out their selections below, in thematic order, and I hope that you might use the extra time afforded by the holiday to peruse and dig into the recent catalog of one or two of your favorite authors. At Puck, we remain laser focused on creating the biography of our age, a day at a time, and the work below reflects both our intent and, I hope, commitment to the mission.

The Best of Puck

It was unintentional, at least largely so, but one of the leitmotifs of the past year at Puck has been the transformation of the media industry—our industry—at nearly every level. The speed of the change, and its decidedly non-linear nature, have only made the story more complex. Matt Belloni’s brilliant piece from last January, The Triumph and Tragedy of Yellowstone, laid out the modern challenges facing cash-strapped media behemoths, who were under so much pressure to invest in streaming while increasing EBITDA that some might even contemplate selling off the streaming rights of their biggest shows in the process. His incredible analysis of Paramount’s predicament with Yellowstone not only explained the actions of a network rake in its progress, but also foreshadowed the subsequent post-Netflix-correction era, when such a plan might even seem like a good idea. In fact, as Julia Alexander noted in The Great Netflix Hit Factory Paradox, we are truly watching an industry discover its true north before our very eyes.

The necessity for media companies to achieve unprecedented scale may be the story of our time, impacting what and how we consume everything. But the collateral damage remains under-explored. For the past year, Dylan Byers has done a remarkable job covering the carnage at CNN: the Cuomo debacle, the Zucker ouster, the Tapper-led newsroom uprising against former WarnerMedia C.E.O. Jason Kilar, the Chris Licht surprise selection as Zucker’s successor, and all that followed. In A Licht in the Attic, Dylan reports on the challenges of replacing a legend, managing down costs at an elite cultural brand, reining in egos, and marshaling it all while the cameras are rolling.

In the past year, my friend and partner Julia Ioffe has become America’s most important voice on Putin’s senseless war in Ukraine. She’s discussed her reporting and analysis with Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, among others, providing exquisite, if unalterably sad and chilling, summations of the conflict. But perhaps her most powerful piece about the war was really a story about an antecedent that few other scholars or reporters fully appreciated. In About a Boy: The Roots of Putin’s Evil, certainly one of my favorite pieces of the year, Julia elegantly explains how Putin’s roughshod childhood in the post-war rubble of the dvor armed him with the cold-hearted and merciless character that he would display decades later as head of state. It’s an unparalleled feat of reporting. And it will soon be a limited series podcast, in partnership with Cadence 13.

Domestically, our political conversation revolved around the presumed ascent of Donald Trump, who was supposed to reassert himself from his Mar-a-Lago somnolence, post-raid (or whatever we’re supposed to call it), and continue his dominion of the Republican party. And yet it didn’t quite play out as planned. In Trump’s ’24 Foreplay, Tara Palmeri explains the funny things that happened on the way to Florida. Tina Nguyen re-emphasizes the change with a knowing and intimate profile of the state’s first couple that you simply couldn’t read anywhere else. Ronny & Nancy of Tallahassee also happened to be one of my favorite pieces of the year. The always extraordinary Peter Hamby revealed how much of our politics should not actually be a surprise in The Dark Truth Behind the SCOTUS Ruling. Baratunde Thurston, one of the most fearless voices of our time, gut-punched me with The Real Tragedy of Samuel Alito’s Logic.

When we set about creating Puck, we did so with the premise that journalists were influencers, and that they could provide the real story behind the story, the plot that only the real insiders knew, which we all insatiably craved. In No One is Taking a Knee on Sunday, legal savant Eriq Gardner revealed the complex machinations, and byzantine contractual challenges, behind Eminem’s desire to take a knee during the Super Bowl back in February. In the meantime, no one has covered the Musk car crash at Twitter better than Bill Cohan, whose experience as a former M&A banker allowed him to understand the vulnerabilities in the deal’s debt structure before anyone else in the media. In The Elon Financial Mindfuck, you’ll see Bill’s incredible prowess at work.

Last but certainly not least, Teddy Schleifer has been on a tear, of late, covering the vaporization of Sam Bankman-Fried. And I’ll admit that I’ve learned from Teddy’s reporting as much as anyone else at Puck, particularly his laser focus on the narrowing synapse between Silicon Valley and Washington, two of Puck’s chief erogenous zones. In Achilles Thiel, he carefully documents Peter Thiel’s curiosity with the big money donor world and also his reluctance to become the heir to Sheldon Adelson. Or, for a time, its counterbalance to a former donor heavy named S.B.F. It’s exactly the sort of story you can only find at Puck.

Happy New Year,
Jon