Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, your Saturday review of all the best new work at Puck.

It was a jam-packed week: Matt Belloni pondered YouTube’s Oscars challenge and chewed over the latest Zaz-Ellison-Netflix machinations with Bill Cohan; Kim Masters surveyed Hollywood’s latest anxieties about the deal; and Eriq Gardner foreshadowed the industry’s most pressing A.I. issues. Meanwhile, Julia Alexander bought the cable dip; John Ourand previewed the NBA’s manifest destiny; Dylan Byers followed Semafor’s Middle East roadmap; Lauren Sherman scooped Versace’s new designer; Rachel Strugatz explored some beauty M&A fantasies; Sarah Shapiro monitored the Nike turnaround; Ian Krietzberg evaluated Bob Iger’s Sora strategy; and Marion Maneker spotlighted the anti-Sotheby’s.

In Washington, Julia Ioffe reported on the Jared Kushner vibe shift; Peter Hamby revealed the biggest obstacle to J.D. Vance’s presidential dreams; and Leigh Ann Caldwell chatted up a pair of House leaders about their dueling plans for dominance in ’26.

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

Lauren Sherman celebrates the Leena Nair age at Chanel, reveals Versace’s new creative director, and catches up on the Saks Global anxieties.
and…
Rachel Strugatz conjures Selena Gomez’s beauty dilemma.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro channel-checks Nike’s reboot.

Marion Maneker scrutinizes the action in the middle of the auction market.

Matt Belloni inspects the YouTube–Oscars deal and interrogates Paramount investor Gerry Cardinale about the WBD sweepstakes.
and…
Kim Masters takes the pulse of the creative community on Netflix’s play for Warner Bros.
and…
Eriq Gardner translates Disney’s Sora wager.

Ian Krietzberg goes further on Bob Iger’s A.I. gamble.

Jeff Toobin recalls when Al Gore moved on from the dangling chad.
and…
Jeanne Malle recounts the year in coffee table books.
meanwhile…
Paulina Prosnitz gets up close with Ben Radcliffe.

Dylan Byers details Semafor’s Arabian ambitions.

John Ourand identifies Adam Silver’s next market frontier.
and…
Julia Alexander studies the cable industry’s dead cat bounce.

Bill Cohan mediates the deal fallout between the Ellisons and Zaz.

Leigh Ann Caldwell previews the midterm battle between Rep. Suzan DelBene and Rep. Richard Hudson.
and…
Peter Hamby finds the fault in J.D. Vance’s stars.
and…
Julia Ioffe explains how Jared Kushner won over natsec D.C.

Dylan and Orchestra C.E.O. Jonathan Rosen (and yours truly) discuss the latest findings from the Puck Private Conversation on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand and NBA-ologist Brian Windhorst dissect the league’s post-$76 billion-payday future on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and Argent C.E.O. Sali Christeson illuminate the world of corpcore on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson reflect on Trump’s political challenges on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and RedBird founder Gerry Cardinale debate the best course for WBD on The Town.
and…
Peter and Julia Alexander examine Netflix’s Barstool era on The Powers That Be.

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On Sunday afternoon, just past lunch time, I found myself circling an exurban parking lot somewhere in Mountainside, New Jersey—an unspectacular crumb on the map, about half an hour from Summit or Montclair, for those of you with a compass point moored to the suburbs of Manhattan. I’d just dropped off my older son at a basketball tournament, somewhere between a Maaco and a Tesla dealership, and was frantically trying to find a parking spot before the Garden State Warriors tipped off. In New Jersey, where parking is a relentless war of attrition, this wasn’t a given.

My search was interrupted by a call from my partner Bill Cohan, who has been breathlessly covering the saga of the Warner Bros. Discovery sales process—the competing bids from Netflix and the Ellisons; the machinations among the dealmakers; and the financial implications of the various outcomes. I’d been trading texts and notes with Bill all morning after reading the first draft of his searing exposé on the latest twist in this telenovela. After ingesting Paramount Skydance’s tender offer filing and speaking to sources working on the deal, he’d gotten to the very heart of the matter: Netflix had won the bidding process not only because its offer was financially superior (at least in the WBD board’s estimation), but also because of a serious communication challenge that had emerged with the dealmakers at PSKY.

Through his conversations with insiders about the 265-page document, Bill had discovered impediments large and small. The WBD board, it seemed, had grown leery of how their counterparts at Paramount had responded to the press leak regarding three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds joining the PSKY bid—all of whom, by the way, were cross-conditioned, meaning that they could drop out and collapse the financing without consequences. Moreover, the WBD side was increasingly skeptical that Larry Ellison, then the world’s second-wealthiest man, was personally guaranteeing the equity in his son’s offer—just as Elon Musk had backstopped his own bid for Twitter.  “Maybe Dad’s looking up and basically saying, You don’t get to be worth $350 billion by doing crazy things,” one source told Bill. “Maybe Dad’s looking up and saying, I’m not sure I’m willing to bet $40 billion behind my kid.”

To wit, page 185 of the tender offer filing explained the contours of Larry’s “limited liability.” Long story short, if any one of the cross-conditioned equity investors dropped out, and the deal fell apart, WBD could only go after Larry for $2.8 billion—not the full $40.7 billion. In the deal world, this was breathtaking stuff, and it explained, to some degree, how Netflix had managed to swoop in. (Other reasons were revealed in WBD’s 14D-9 filing, not to get too technical here…)

Everyone in the industry knows that Bill is just about the best-sourced finance reporter in history. I’ve joked from time to time that the net worth of his subscribers is equivalent to the G.D.P. of a Gulf state. And while he was fact-checking his article, Bill had tapped into the anxieties at the highest levels of the deal. After rolling calls, it became clear that he was about to break news not only to the subscribers of Dry Powder, his private email, but also to people working on the deal. He laid it all out to me as I circled the lot and eventually, blessedly, found a spot. I could only smile as I signed off, thinking of the various bonds between fathers and sons. Here I was, rushing into a youth basketball game while Larry was putting up billions—perhaps not quite enough of them—to cement his firstborn’s status as Hollywood mogul.

Ellison Irrevocable Trust Issues, Bill’s masterstroke, is one of my favorite recent pieces of Puck journalism, filled with insight, humanity, and the sort of exacting financial detail that could only be conveyed by a true domain expert. It also quickly shook up the deal flow, and played a seminal role in Bill and our partner Matt Belloni’s symposium-style follow-up, Who Wants Warner Bros. More?, and in Matt’s excellent interview with Gerry Cardinale, the founder of RedBird Capital and longtime Ellison partner, on his excellent podcast, The Town. (Usual disclosure: Through a recent acquisition, WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav is a de minimis investor in Puck, and RedBird is a minority investor.) If you have a moment this weekend, I could not recommend Bill’s piece more strongly.

A couple days later, I was lucky enough to join my partner Dylan Byers and our friend Jonathan Rosen, the C.E.O. of Orchestra, for a breakfast event at the Hotel Chelsea—a million miles from a suburban parking lot. We had gathered industry executives to unveil the latest data set from our Puck Private Conversation series, powered by Orchestra, which focused on the impact of A.I. and new financial models, among other factors, on the industry, based on a reader survey. The results were compelling, and quite surprising. If you care about the fate of this industry, I’d encourage you to turn your attention to our conversation either on The Grill Room, Dylan’s podcast, or his piece, The 2025 Media State of the Union. Yes, yes, no one can see around the corner with perfect clarity, but both the event and Bill’s piece were the latest reminders that the industry expects us to predict it more accurately than anyone else.

Happy holidays,
Jon

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