Good morning,

It was an incredible week here: Bill Cohan uncovered the poison pill in Shari Redstone’s deal; Matt Belloni assessed the putative Zaslav-Paramount combination; Julia Alexander offered a forensic accounting of the latter’s assets; and Dylan Byers investigated the strategic logic at play, while also fleshing out the latest dish at The Washington Post. Teddy Schleifer profiled the tech prince who may be the heir to Adelson, Peter Hamby offered a sanguine Biden assessment, and Tina Nguyen previewed the next round of horrors in the House. Baratunde Thurston weighs in on the Harvard mess. And the great Lauren Sherman chronicled two fashion demises.

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

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan assesses Bill Ackman’s Harvard endgame, and explains what Gerry Cardinale’s lawyers must be discovering in the NAI financial docs.
and…
Baratunde Thurston offers his assessment of the Harvard quagmire.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers consults his local Zazologists on the WBD-Paramount chatter, and previews Will Lewis’s headaches at The Washington Post.
and…
Matt Belloni weighs in on Paramount’s artificial M&A market.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni digs into the second-order effects of the Netflix data dump.
and…
Julia Alexander rummages through the Paramount assets.
and…
Scott Mendelson hands down the 10 Commandments of the movie business in ’24, while Jonathan Handel offers his final reflections on the strike carnage.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer explains how Jan Koum became an heir to Sheldon Adelson.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri explores Chris Christie’s ego and Joe Manchin’s next act.
and…
Julia Ioffe presages the fate of Ukraine funding.
and…
Peter Hamby considers a bottom-up view of Biden’s reelection prospects, while Abby Livingston and Tina Nguyen enumerate the hassles in the House.

PODCASTS:
Matt Belloni talks Paramount-WBD possibilities with analyst Rich Greenfield on The Town.
and…
Tara Palmeri walks us through the Colorado Supreme Court ruling removing Trump from the state’s primary on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Peter Hamby and Julia Ioffe explore Bibi’s options 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.

I’ve often used this space to discuss the sort of interregnum era that we seem to be inhabiting—a bridge, as Biden might put it. But now the manifest destiny seems, in many cases, to be coming to fruition on the other side of New Year’s Day. And, naturally, this has become the preoccupation of my partners here at Puck.

As Iowa beckons, so do innumerable attendant anxieties, which animated much of the recent work from my colleagues in Washington. In The Great G.O.P. Donor Resignation, Teddy Schleifer reports from the inner sanctum of the bundling class, a veritable panic room of fear and rage about their impotence in the face of Trump. And in Kingdom Koum, Teddy charts the rise of the mega-billionaire WhatsApp co-founder who may become his generation’s version of Sheldon Adelson.

Meanwhile, in Christie’s Intervention & Manchin’s Pageant Daughter, Tara Palmeri reports on the fear and loathing coming out of New Hampshire. Why won’t Chris Christie accede to demands among donors and fellow Republicans to bow out and throw his support to Haley? (Have you ever met the man…?) And can No Labels, the rabble-rousing fever dream of the quixotic .001 percent, find a more credible candidate than Joe Manchin? (Alas…) Tina Nguyen is already gathering the murmurs about the headaches awaiting House Republicans on the other side of the holiday break as they attempt to pass a budget and financially support two wars without coming to blows among themselves. Spike your eggnog before reading The G.O.P. Hardliners Who Stole Christmas.

My partner Lauren Sherman is a wonder to behold. Perhaps her greatest gift is her ability to both be required reading within the fashion industry, and to make the industry compelling to the legions who want nothing to do with it. Lauren authored two brilliant pieces this week that effortlessly captured the despondent fatigue and gory demise of the once-ballyhooed direct-to-consumer revolution. A Bridge Too Farfetch captures the teetering relationship between ambitions and business models, while Matches on Fire & The Great Fashion Correction of ’23 suggests that we all should have known better. (Indeed, we should have…)

Lastly, the recent news that longtime Puck protagonist David Zaslav was sniffing around Paramount Global unleashed a torrent of enthusiasm within some quarters. Bill Cohan, a former M&A banker, found a poison pill in the Redstone parentco’s documents folder, which he elegantly described in his story Shari’s Double-Trigger Deal Cooler. In Zazmount Global, Dylan Byers provided diligence on the industrial logic of the deal. And in Warners, Paramount, and the Allure of Mutual Desperation, Matt Belloni perfectly captured the staged choreography of dealmaking theater. Indeed, these are stories of our era, and they’re all crescendoing at the same moment. We’ll be following them in real time, which is precisely what you should expect from Puck.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and have a great weekend,
Jon