Good morning,

I hope that you had a wonderful, restful Thanksgiving.

It was yet another incredible week at Puck: Eriq Gardner detailed the latest Murdoch legal headache; Bill Cohan chronicled Apollo C.E.O. Marc Rowan’s descent on Mar-a-Lago; Matt Belloni captured a Pitt-and-Clooney debacle; Scott Mendelson ran the Wicked comps; Dylan Byers probed a Politico-Punchbowl feud; Lauren Sherman scrutinized the latest frontrunner in the battle for the Chanel job; Rachel Strugatz unearthed some fresh Goop dish; Marion Maneker assessed $1.3 billion in auction sales receipts; John Ourand and Baratunde Thurston hypothesized A.I.’s new sports frontier; Peter Hamby asked Bannon if this tariff war is for real; Abby Livingston diagnosed a G.O.P. tax ailment, and Tara Palmeri plumbed the depths of Mar-a-Lago for the real inside gossip about “Uncle Elon.”

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

FASHION:
Lauren Sherman has the latest on the Chanel creative director sweepstakes.
and…
Rachel Strugatz reports on a Gwyneth Paltrow-Cassandra Grey union.

ART MARKET:
Marion Maneker analyzes Ken Griffin’s $121 million Magritte purchase and other big-ticket acquisitions from the November sales.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni charts the latest fallout from an Apple TV+ fiasco.
and…
Eriq Gardner explains why other media companies are rooting for Rupert Murdoch in his latest lawsuit.
meanwhile…
Scott Mendelson reviews the Glicked weekend box office.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan gets the readout from Marc Rowan’s treasury secretary interview.

SILICON VALLEY:
Baratunde Thurston and John Ourand explore when Tom Brady’s brain will be fully digitized and command-based, presented by Meta.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers reveals the secrets of a MAGA-friendly media unicorn.
and…
John Ourand parses the nuances of SpinCo.

WASHINGTON:
Peter Hamby gets candid with Steve Bannon about the tariffs, Little Marco, DOGE, Elon Musk, the Democrats, and more.
and…
Tara Palmeri offers a backstage look at the transition from Mar-a-Lago.
meanwhile…
Abby Livingston identifies the first theater of the G.O.P.’s coming tax battle.

PODCASTS:
🎧 Dylan talks with the Punchbowl founders about their path to Hill domination on The Grill Room.
and…
John Ourand and former Turner C.E.O. Dave Levy assess the Comcast cable spinoff fallout on The Varsity.
and…
John Heilemann has an ideas meeting with The New Yorker’s David Remnick on Impolitic.
and…
Listen to Matt’s conversation with Dune director Denis Villeneuve on The Town.
and…
Tara picks through the wreckage with D.N.C. dark horse Max Rose on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Lauren and designer Aaron Levine tour the mall brands on Fashion People.
and…
Peter and Marion weigh in on Maurizio Cattelan’s $6.2 million banana on The Powers That Be.

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Indeed, despite the holiday-shortened week, my partners worked in overdrive to peer around corners and read the tea leaves about where we’re headed. In Loose Bannon, Peter’s chat with the MAGA Rasputin renders the most complete explanation for how Trump will deploy tariffs and weaponize Elon and Vivek against Washington; how he’ll play chicken with his party in the Senate, and exercise his deportation revolver.

Meanwhile, in Elon Irritations & Epshteyn’s Overreach, Tara Palmeri offers a vivid look inside Mar-a-Lago’s shock-and-awe decision-making structure—an unsurprisingly amorphous confederation where Susie Wiles is feeling out her influence and many are openly wondering when the president-elect will lose patience with “Uncle Elon,” who is now a fixture on the patio. Bill Cohan’s brilliant piece, The Apollo Moon Landing That Wasn’t, offers subscribers a privileged view inside the room where Marc Rowan lost the Treasury sweepstakes in Palm Beach.

As before, Trump is threatening to remake our economy and politics, and everything in between, in his own image, according to his own whims. This is why, as Eriq Gardner recently noted, the media industry is beginning to take note of the news emanating from the Leonard L. Williams Justice Center in Wilmington. A year ago, Fox News prepared to defend itself against Dominion Voting Systems in the same courthouse. (As you’ll recall, the company settled for $787 million before defenestrating its chief legal and policy officer.) This time around, Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants are accused of breaching fiduciary duties by pandering to Trump with a steady diet of misinformation. Company shareholders suggest that the board ignored all sorts of defamation risks, which led to the Dominion settlement, among other exorbitant legal headaches.

And yet, as Eriq notes in A New Murdoch Suit & R.F.K.’s Cable Bomb, amid the changing legal tides anticipated during Trump II—an antagonistic F.C.C. and the derivative implications of House resolution 9495, to name but a couple—many in the media industry may actually be pulling for the Murdochs.

But if you only have time to read one piece this weekend, and you’re politically sated for the moment, I’d turn your attention to Lauren Sherman’s latest masterpiece, Blazy Saddles, about the emergence of Matthieu Blazy as the leading contender for the vacant Chanel creative director role. In its own right, the Chanel search is an outlier amid the larger transformation among creative industries to professionalize, eliminate the key man risk of a singular design voice, and manage costs and supply chain economics as critically as what’s on the rack. This is one of the great stories of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon