Greetings from all of us at Puck. In today’s edition of The Stratosphere, I’m revisiting three of the most fascinating storylines that I’ve been exploring here over the last few months: the Pelosi succession drama, the Phoenix Suns sweepstakes, and the latest in the G.O.P. game of chicken in Arizona.

Mentioned in this email: Eleni Kounalakis, Christine Pelosi, Navid Mahmoodzadegan, Ramona Shelburne, David Geffen, Laurene Powell Jobs, Peter Thiel, Blake Masters, “the Old Broken Crow Mitchell McConnell,” and many more.

But first, a few news and notes from around town…

• Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook billionaire and one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, can be enigmatic about his level of interest in campaigns. He candidly told me that it is still “TBD” on whether he’ll remain very active in political fundraising in the 2024 election. According to Moskovitz, the expected value of political donations in that cycle “depends heavily on who is running and how close the outcome turns out to be.”

• Yuri Milner, Silicon Valley’s most prominent Russia-born investor and a V.C. whose early career received significant backing from a Kremlin-connected fund, formally renounced his Russian citizenship this summer. Milner, who was originally slow to speak publicly about the Russian invasion, disclosed the news on Twitter the day after the Russian military attacked Kyiv. Coincidence?

• Sheryl Sandberg sent $3 million to the ACLU to fight abortion restrictions. No, that check size doesn’t exactly make her “one of the foremost philanthropists fighting the curtailment of abortion rights across the United States” as WaPo declares, but consider it an opening salvo as she tries to rediscover her place in the political and philanthropic firmament. As I’ve previously reported, there are plenty of people in the progressive establishment who are leery about Sandberg’s charity, given her Facebook baggage.

• Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital donated $1 million to beat back an effort, sponsored by Lyft, to raise taxes on California’s richest residents. The former Time magazine journalist and Democratic donor has an op-ed in the Financial Times today that goes beyond that, offering a revealing look into his concerns about tax increases and his center-left politics more broadly.

Yes, the cult of Pelosi persists, but times are a-changin’ in House leadership, as my Puck partner Tara Palmeri has previously noted. If Democrats lose the House—which, to be sure, is no longer quite the foregone conclusion it was a few months ago—Pelosi is widely expected to resign her seat early next year, triggering the spectacle of a special election in San Francisco, to say nothing of the leadership race in Washington. It’s a great unspoken plot twist looming over the midterms.

I’ve written before that much of the succession conversation in San Francisco political circles centers on Christine Pelosi, a Democratic National Committeewoman and literal Pelosi heir, and Scott Wiener, the city’s tech-friendly, six-foot-seven state senator. But there is one other wild-card name that has been generating some buzz among plugged-in politicos: Eleni Kounalakis, the state’s lieutenant governor. Kounalakis has an elite pedigree of her own—she is the daughter of a real-estate titan in Sacramento, where she worked alongside her father before getting into politics. Over the years she became a significant Democratic bundler, frequently hosting candidates and other contributors at her place in Pacific Heights, a posture that helped her become Barack Obama’s ambassador to Hungary. In 2018, in her first bid for office, she was elected independently to serve as Gavin Newsom’s No. 2.

These days, Kounalakis is using her heft to fundraise for Prop 1, the effort to enshrine the right to an abortion in California’s state constitution. The ballot initiative is expected to pass, but Eleni wants to send a message by having it pass by a huge margin, so she has been working the phones and Zooms with the many Bay Area philanthropists in her Rolodex, telling them privately that she is donating $100,000 from her own wallet and asking them to match it, I’m told.

The conventional wisdom posits that Eleni is principally interested in succeeding Newsom, who is term-limited after 2026. That would be the safe path, for sure, and it is the one that people close to her currently expect her to take. In fact, Eleni herself has talked publicly about her desire to break the glass ceiling and become the state’s first female governor. Plus, wouldn’t being one of 435 congresspeople, and a back-bencher no less, be a step down from being the possible next governor of one of the world’s largest economies? Nevertheless, there is some real and growing insider chatter, including among people who used to work for her, that Eleni might take a shot at running for Pelosi’s seat should it open early next year.

To be clear, I am not reporting that Eleni is interested in Pelosi’s seat; her most likely next move is to succeed Newsom. But that hasn’t stopped insiders from observing that 2026 is a long way away, whereas any successor to Pelosi is likely to immediately have a big profile. The Pelosi seat hasn’t come up in 30 years, and you’d think that Eleni would at least look at it. After all, she would be a formidable candidate, with statewide name I.D. and a soft touch with executives in both Hollywood and Silicon Valley after years of raising money alongside them. Eleni is one of the listed hosts of Kamala Harris’s fundraising trip to the Bay Area next week, and there she was Friday during the Pelosi confab, shaking hands with donors with status-connoting stars on their nametags in the VIP reception in the hotel’s “Gold Room.”

Shortly before Pelosi introduced Jill Biden to the 65-or-so tables of candidates, local electeds, and contributors crammed into the Fairmont’s grand ballroom, Pelosi gave perfunctory shout-outs to local dignitaries, friends and family, I’m told. That included recognizing both Christine and Eleni, who, in her own way, considers Pelosi to be an almost mother-like figure, too. Could those two be on a collision course?

Despite Shaq blaming Jeff Bezos for big-footing him out of a putative deal—an only-in-TMZ subplot triggered by a stray, aggregation-gone-wild on-air comment from Ramona Shelburne on ESPN a few weeks back—there is no actual reporting to suggest that Bezos himself is interested in the Suns. A Bezos spokesperson didn’t comment, but I would be surprised to see him make any sort of bid.

A more likely suitor, as I wrote earlier this month, is Larry Ellison, who has tried four separate times to get his hands on an NBA franchise. His most recent attempt was in 2014, when Ellison tried to buy the Clippers with his deal partners—Oprah and David Geffen—but lost out to Steve Ballmer, whose $2 billion offer reset the market for franchise value. Geffen was the frontman of that bid—he confirmed the effort on the record at the time to ESPN, saying that he and Ellison had long harbored plans to buy a team together. “We’ve talked about this for a long time,” Geffen said.

But don’t expect that pair to make a joint bid this time around for the Suns: I am told by a source that Geffen has no current interest in trying to buy the franchise. Which, of course, casts some doubt on whether Ellison has a bid of his own in store. He’d have to put together his own group, similar to what he did in 2010 when he lost out on an attempt to buy the Warriors by himself. Ellison then declared it “unusual” that he lost that time around because he was the “highest bidder” … but in the victors’ retelling, they stole it from right beneath his nose. Can Ellison move fast this time around? Reps for Ellison didn’t return requests for comment.

Meanwhile, an oft-forgotten minority participant in that same Geffen-led 2014 bid for the Clips was Laurene Powell Jobs, who I wrote the other week could have a strong case to make as a potential buyer of the Suns. But over the last few weeks I’ve been hearing from sources who say that, actually, Powell Jobs isn’t terribly interested in making a splashy bid for the franchise. She is described to me as generally satisfied with her current level of involvement in professional basketball: A 20 percent-or-so ownership stake in Monumental Sports in partnership with her close friend, Ted Leonsis, the early AOL mogul. After all, there are only so many things that L.P.J. can spend her time on—she is a hoops fan, but her interests in other fields, like art and education, exceeds that. She already has a team, kinda, and I am getting the sense that she is unlikely to move heaven and earth to acquire a bigger stake in a different one.

For what it’s worth, the absence of L.P.J. and Geffen potentially enfeebles any potential Ellison bid. Unlike the NFL, which is still largely a Republican-led protectorate and a place where Colin Kaepernick can be penalized for expressing himself, the NBA ownership is quite different: younger, more socially conscious, and progressive. Will the owners welcome a bid from someone who threw Trump a big fundraiser, pitched him on hydroxychloroquine, and joined Trump allies on a call after Election Day to investigate how to challenge the 2020 results? Probably not—if there is another competitive bid.

At least Masters himself is now on television, after months in the dark, and at least now Trump is spending on his behalf, as Thiel friend Ann Coulter had urged, with a $1 million or so in new ad buy, furnished by his super PAC. But even Trump, who held a rally for Masters over the weekend, is unsatisfied with the G.O.P. cavalry for Masters, releasing a statement yesterday that castigated “the Old Broken Crow Mitchell McConnell” and his Senate Leadership Fund for spending money for Lisa Murkowski rather than for Masters. McConnell candidly said in a new interview that his allies hadn’t done so because of “resource allocation” issues with Thiel.

Masters is projecting confidence over something he can’t control: “I know a lot more people are going to get involved here in October,” he told Maria Bartiromo this week when asked about the arrival of more support from Thiel or McConnell. His best chance for big outside money might be to pray for the implosion of Don Bolduc, the G.O.P. Senate nominee in New Hampshire, who’s sucking up S.L.F. money even as other Republicans wonder whether it’s time to enter triage mode in that state. In the meantime, McConnell and Thiel are still playing the same game of chicken, perhaps hesitant to throw good money after bad. People forget that sometimes games of chicken end with neither car swerving—and the two vehicles crashing into one another, instead.