Tapper Tapers, The Twitter Diaries, Achilles Thiel

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon dose of Puck’s latest reporting.

Today, we start off with Dylan Byers’ insider analysis of CNN’s historic election night, in which the network placed third in the midterms ratings, behind even MSNBC, for the first time in modern cable news history.

Then, below the fold, Bill Cohan fields the rare vote of confidence for Elon’s Twitter gambit. Teddy Schleifer evaluates Peter Thiel’s post-midterm political future. Teddy, Tara Palmeri and Tina Nguyen huddle up to break down the election results and emerging plotlines. And Matt Belloni dissects the pseudoscience of movie tracking in advance of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

DYLAN BYERS

Sans Wolf Blitzer and his “key race alerts,” CNN lost the overall ratings battle to MSNBC on election night. It’s a sign that an era keeps ending, of course, but also that the executives in charge haven’t yet figured out how to create the next one.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

The latest inside chatter on Wall Street about, among other things, fixing Twitter, Trump’s deal-making handcuffs, and the S.B.F. postmortem.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER

As Peter Thiel poured $33 million into his acolytes J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, Republican power brokers fantasized that they had found their heir to Sheldon Adelson or the Koch Brothers. The truth, it turns out, is quite different.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER & TARA PAMERI & TINA NGUYEN

Tara Palmeri, Teddy Schleifer, and Tina Nguyen join Peter to discuss the real story behind the midterms: the Trump buzzkill, the Biden messaging twists, and how how the left expects the McCarthy-led House to step on the rake.