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Good morning,
Happy New Year! Thanks for reading The Backstory, our weekly digest of the great work emanating from our generationally gifted authors.
It was another incredible week: Dylan Byers dug into Bill Ackman’s media crusade; Matt Belloni scooped the news on Tom Cruise’s next big project; Julia Alexander deconstructed a streaming wars fallacy; Bill Cohan played the Hollywood M&A market; Peter Hamby went down and out in Iowa; Julia Ioffe investigated an injunction in Israel; Lauren Sherman detailed a Vogue reunion; Tina Nguyen presaged a disaster in the House; Teddy Schleifer caught up with the R.F.K. Jr. money hustlers; and Tara Palmeri ran the numbers on Chris Christie’s exit.
Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.
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FASHION:
Lauren Sherman details an Anna Wintour reunion and unearths some M&A gossip.
WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan imagines the possibilities of a WBD-NBCU combination.
MEDIA:
Dylan Byers finds out what Axel Springer really thinks of Bill Ackman.
HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni breaks the news on Tom Cruise’s next sequel and gets the skinny on the town’s next labor fight.
and…
Julia Alexander demystifies the streaming “co-exclusive” fantasy.
and…
Scott Mendelson contemplates the Color Purple question.
SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer ascertains why the tech bros love R.F.K. Jr. so much.
WASHINGTON:
Tina Nguyen explores Mike Johnson’s world of pain while Abby Livingston chronicles rumspringa in the House.
and…
Julia Ioffe investigates the latest Gaza war crimes question.
and…
Peter Hamby diagnoses the political media’s post-wunderkind blues.
and…
Tara Palmeri assesses Iowa’s Boschian landscape.
PODCASTS:
Matt Belloni and Bill Cohan discuss the most likely outcomes for Paramount Global on The Town.
and…
Tara Palmeri and Iowa political insider Jimmy Centers swap readouts on the underwhelming caucuses on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Peter Hamby and Dylan discuss Ackman’s revenge fantasies on The Powers That Be. |
| I say this all the time, but it’s just so exceptionally true: My partners at Puck aren’t simply uniquely gifted journalists… they’re also true domain experts. I was reminded of this multiplicity of talent earlier this week when I was perusing an early draft of Bill Cohan’s excellent piece, The Philadelphia Story, which delves into the question of whether Comcast C.E.O. Brian Roberts might one day merge his NBCU with WBD—and how he might govern it, work with Zaz, etcetera.
It’s a compelling and timely treatise on a number of fronts. Roberts is a historically acquisitive C.E.O. who has reeled in NBCU and Sky and once upon a time made aggressive bids for Fox and Disney. And, as devout Puck subscribers know so well, consolidation is lurking in the industry. We’ve reached the stage in the media M&A cycle where it’s become clear that the market can probably only support three or four streaming companies, and even some of the most historic incumbents are doing the internal inventory to discern whether they are sharks or minnows, or something in between.
Bill knows this better than most. The Philadelphia Story opens with an anecdote from his former career as an M&A banker. In 2001, he helped Roberts and the Comcast management team consummate their $72 billion acquisition of AT&T Broadband, the telecom giant’s cable business. Not only was the deal historic in size, it was also densely complex in structure and strategy. AT&T Broadband wasn’t a stand-alone company; it was an appendage of AT&T, which had zero motivation to sell.
If Comcast wanted to ingest the business, the company needed to choreograph a public persuasion campaign that would ignite the economic passions of AT&T’s investors while forcing the hand of its board of directors. “Long story short,” Bill writes, “the ploy worked. AT&T had little choice but to test the market to see if anyone else would pay anything close to what Comcast had offered for AT&T Broadband. Absent any credible alternate buyer at a similar price, AT&T did what it had to do for its shareholders and negotiated a deal with Comcast and Roberts, which turned out to be the largest M&A transaction ever at that time.”
Bill’s insight into Roberts’ acquisitive appetite isn’t merely facilitated by decades of reporting and endless research logged in his recent bestseller, Power Failure, which recounts in extraordinary detail all the whims and vicissitudes of Roberts’ successful attempt to take NBCU off the conglomerate’s hands for a song. It’s also informed by his real, in-the-room experience as a dealmaker. It’s one of the qualities that differentiates Puck. The Philadelphia Story doesn’t simply depict Roberts as a dealmaking rake in his progress; it also presages the next chapter of media consolidation.
But if you only have time to read one piece this weekend, I’d urge you to spend some time with Julia Alexander’s The Fallacy of the Streaming ‘Co-Exclusive.’ The piece offers an excellent and lucid assessment of Netflix’s domination of the business competition that was once colloquially termed “the streaming wars.” In reality, however, this dialectic has turned into a game of three-dimensional chess. As Julia notes, the only way that the legacy companies can support their investment in their own platforms is by licensing their libraries to Netflix, further deepening the latter's moat. Indeed, as Roberts and Zaz know well, this is the story that is defining an industry, and it is precisely what you should expect to learn about, with unrivaled proximity, here in Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
