Good morning,

Happy new year! It was a thrilling week: Bill Cohan chatted with an ascendant Wall Street C.E.O.; Lauren Sherman scrutinized the Phoebe Philo mythology; Dylan Byers scooped a CNN leadership twist; Matt Belloni predicted some Hollywood agency consolidation; Julia Alexander revealed Bezos’s new sports strategy; Tina Nguyen told a Tucker formative tale; and Julia Ioffe lamented a Bibi surprise.

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 chats with the new Lazard C.E.O., and former Obama-era wunderkind, Peter Orszag.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers reports on a new piece of Mark Thompson’s plan to transform CNN into a fully digital business.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni locks in his surefire predictions on agency consolidation, Hollywood M&A, TV budgets, sports on streaming, and more.
and…
Julia Alexander does a talmudic reading of Jeff Bezos’ sports strategy.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer explains how a $3 billion investment might save S.B.F. some jail time.
and…
Baratunde Thurston predicts the next A.I. explosion and D.E.I. blowback.

WASHINGTON:
Tina Nguyen offers a Tucker Carlson before-and-after.
and…
Julia Ioffe reveals the latest Bibi-Biden tensions.
and…
Abby Livingston chronicles the pro-Palestinian uprising taking place in House offices.
and…
Tara Palmeri previews Ron DeSantis’s walk of shame back to Tallahassee.

PODCASTS:
Matt Belloni compiles the young movie star power rankings on The Town.
and…
Tara Palmeri goes through the Epstein files on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Peter Hamby and Matt discuss box office surprises, and reasons for concern, 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.

The defense, on the other hand, wanted the opportunity to demonstrate that S.B.F. wasn’t as dumb or malicious as he looked—that, commingled customers funds notwithstanding, he had actually made some fairly sagacious bets. Judge Lewis Kaplan eventually nixed this idea, ruling that the financial outcomes of S.B.F.’s other investments were irrelevant to the matter of whether he committed fraud. And yet, nevertheless, one investment may prove relevant: S.B.F.’s multi-hundred-million position in Anthropic, the effective altruist-aligned A.I. company.

Anthropic, which subsequently raised money from Google and Amazon, is on the cusp of an $18 billion valuation, which would pin FTX’s stake somewhere north of $3 billion. In S.B.F.’s $3 Billion Complexifier, Teddy Schleifer explains the surprising impact that this financial windfall might have on the fallen crypto king, his swindled former customers, and maybe even his sentencing.

My partners at Puck often teach me that things are orders of magnitude more complex than they initially seem. To wit: Julia Alexander’s excellent piece on Amazon’s interest in Diamond Sports Group, the beleaguered regional sports network entity, isn’t simply an opportunistic, churn-stanching attempt to bring the Diamondbacks or Padres to Prime Video. Instead, Amazon’s interest in local sports suggests the size of both its advertising and e-commerce ambitions. Hollywood cynics have long accused Jeff Bezos’s company of entering the entertainment business to sell more toilet paper. Now, as Julia notes in Amazon’s Wide World of Sports, some may wonder if Amazon is moving into sports to hawk ads and sell merch.

And yet if you only have time to read one piece this weekend, I’d encourage you to turn your attention to Tina Nguyen’s excellent Tucker in the Rye, an adaptation from her phenomenal forthcoming memoir, The MAGA Diaries. (You can preorder it here.) The story offers a fascinating, proximate view on a young Tucker Carlson, who used to be a liberal’s idea of a conservative—you know, the friendly Brooks Brothers variety, replete with an Oxford shirt and fishing tchotchkes, able to recount famous moments from presidential campaigns of yore, etcetera.

Tina encountered this version of Tucker a decade ago, back when she was a rake in her own progress at The Daily Caller, his once thing-ish media company. In Tucker in the Rye, Tina charts Carlson’s descent from outspoken libertarian to darkened outsider, as he becomes a metaphor for the descent of the conservative movement in the United States. It is, in many ways, the story of our times. And, as the Iowa caucuses beckon, it’s precisely the sort of story that you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon