Welcome back to Dry Powder, live from Nantucket—the easternmost and certainly the most stunning part of these United States. Speaking of patriotism, tonight I wanted to share my candid chat with Charles Phillips, the former Morgan Stanley banker and Oracle co-president and current Paramount Global board member, who played a critical role in the still-pending Skydance-RedBird deal. Phillips is also a longtime Kamala Harris supporter and thought partner. We chatted about the evolution of their relationship and her support on Wall Street.

But first…

• License to Bill: I was aiming for an update on how Bill Ackman was regrouping after his disastrous attempt to raise “permanent capital,” as he likes to say, for his new, retail-friendly hedge fund, Pershing Square USA. First, Bill thought he might raise a whopping $25 billion in the fund. Then he capped it at $10 billion. Then he reduced that number to between $2.5 billion and $4 billion. Then, finally, he reduced it again to $2 billion before pulling the plug on it last week. He texted me on Wednesday that he thought it was “all good” and “better actually” and promised to call when he could.

  I love Bill for his perpetual optimism, even in the face of tough realities. But he hasn’t called yet. (Perhaps his lawyers told him to lie low.) On August 1, Pershing Square USA wrote the Securities and Exchange Commission and asked to withdraw the registration statement related to the proposed offering, which had originally been filed last February and had still not been made effective by the S.E.C. “Withdrawal of the Registration Statement is consistent with the public interest and the protection of investors,” according to the fund’s secretary. I’m sure Bill’s got something new up his sleeve in order to raise more money to manage. I’ll let you know more after we chat. In the meantime, he is back to tweeting and seems to be picking a fight with Melinda Gates about the relative impact of their charitable giving, suggesting that she is merely a “trustee” of resources she “married into,” and asking whether “philanthropy is the answer to societal problems.” This could get interesting.

• The other Harris of interest: I wondered if Apollo Global Management co-founder Josh Harris, who now owns the 76ers, Devils, and Commanders, might be up to something interesting after he reported to the S.E.C. that he was doing a derivative trade on some 500,000 (worth around $60 million) of his more than 34 million Apollo shares. Could Josh be raising some money to put toward a new stadium for the Commanders or some such folly?

  But I gather his latest derivative trade is just part of his regular portfolio diversification, since the bulk of his $10 billion fortune still consists of Apollo stock, even though he left the firm in 2021 to start his own alternative asset shop, 26 North. His two co-founders are still doing well, for sure. Leon Black, who was the actual founder of Apollo, has a net worth these days estimated at around $14 billion—enough for as many miniature Raphaels as he wants. He has gifted, or sold, Apollo stock worth some $1 billion since the start of 2024. Marc Rowan, now the C.E.O. of Apollo, has a net worth of $8.5 billion. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher how Harris has a net worth higher than Rowan, but I will save that analysis for another day…

• Welcome to the island, Rufus!: Rufus Gifford, the finance chair of the Harris for President campaign since July, happens to be on Nantucket this weekend, celebrating his 50th birthday, which is tomorrow. On Friday, he tweeted a picture of a beautifully set dinner for 14 near our place. He’s off to a good start as finance chair, with Kamala’s campaign having raised a record $310 million in July, the Kamala campaign tweeted on Friday, mocking a social media posting from Trump in which he wrote that his campaign raised $139 million in the same month. I was hoping to speak with Gifford after he finished a hike on Saturday out to Sanford Farm, one of the most beautiful settings on the whole island, but that didn’t happen. Perhaps too much celebrating on Saturday night? Anyway, happy birthday, Rufus.

Now onto the main event: how Wall Street and Silicon Valley seem to be rapidly coming together to support Kamala Harris despite the several high-profile endorsements Trump has received from the likes of Elon, Ackman, and Steve Schwarzman…

“There is a bit of a honeymoon period,” he told me. “People were so stressed out that we didn’t have a candidate at all. People were confused and didn’t like where we were. So just a relief rally, as we see on Wall Street. There is some of that, there’s no question. And [the campaign knows] that. And they’re looking past that. But once that settles down, I think she’ll come through with the substance. The good news is, because of that relief rally, which helped get people’s attention, they’ll want to see what’s there, and she’ll be prepared. There’s nothing bad about having that sugar high, if it gets your attention and gets people to refocus on you versus your opponent for a while. And then you’ve got to deliver. And I think she can.”

Phillips, a former Marine, has known Harris since his time living in San Francisco. Larry Ellison, one of his clients at Morgan Stanley, recruited him in 2003 to be Oracle’s co-president and a member of its board. That same year, Harris ran for district attorney, and they met through the grapevine. “Given it’s a fairly small Black population in San Francisco, it’s easy to find everyone,” he said. “We all kind of knew each other.” He held a fundraiser for her successful D.A. campaign. “I just thought she was a good prosecutor, well-spoken, had charisma,” he continued. “She seemed to connect with everyone in the room no matter what their background was, and so I just thought she had potential to go further. I didn’t know how much further, that’s for sure.” Phillips continued to support Harris when she ran for the U.S. Senate. “I did multiple events for her in New York at my home here and also in East Hampton,” he said.

In 2016, a group of Black executives who supported Hillary Clinton were increasingly concerned that the campaign wasn’t galvanizing enthusiasm in communities in Atlanta and Detroit. They had a meeting with the Clinton folks. “What’s the plan to get out the vote in the Black community?” Phillips recalled asking at the time. “They told us, ‘We got this, don’t worry about it.’ We weren’t experts, so we said, ‘All right, you guys have it.’” When Donald Trump won in 2016, they were vindicated but also devastated.

Harris helped to pick up the pieces. Phillips pulled together 70 business executives and dignitaries to discuss the next step at a meeting in the Hamptons. Cory Booker and Deval Patrick were there, as were Ron Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, and Eric Holder. Maya Harris, Kamala’s sister, attended, as did her husband, Tony West, a former U.S. associate attorney general who is now the general counsel at Uber. (He’s taking an unpaid leave of absence from Uber to work on his sister-in-law’s campaign.) Harris, the new senator from California, came and spoke to the group.

Kirk suggested the executives form a PAC, get organized, set objectives and agendas, and hold people accountable for them. “You’re frustrated now,” Kirk told them, “because we all thought we were giving money to a winner, and it didn’t happen. And then we wonder why.” After that meeting, they created the Black Economic Alliance to pursue policies that benefited the Black community. Its slogan—“Work, wages, and wealth”—has been adopted by successful politicians including Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. Phillips, the co-chair of the group, said Kamala “was fundamental in helping think through the idea, and inspired the idea.”

In its first year, the PAC raised about $15 million, and has since raised $50 million to invest in Black entrepreneurship. The B.E.A. also has access to its own independent polling data through an alliance with David Simas, who worked for Obama and is now a manager director at Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective. Phillips said that Simas’s organization is polling 85,000 people a week, particularly in the swing states, and his information is highly accurate. “People are asking” for that information, he said. The B.E.A. has endorsed Kamala for president.

He said he also participated in a recent call with Effron, the co-founder of Centerview Partners, which represented the Paramount Global special committee in the sale process. (“Me and Blair have multiple relationships,” Phillips said.) He said there was “a definite change” among Wall Streeters after Biden announced he would not seek reelection and threw his support behind Harris. “The feeling was that Trump might have peaked early,” he said. “Certainly at the time [the debate] happened, people thought it was over. And now it’s 180 degrees from that.”

Phillips then offered a veritable litany of Harris accolades. “She’ll build a better team [than Trump],” he said. “She’s open to people who are good athletes and have good ideas. She wants the best people around her.” He continued: “She just has a bigger platform now. That’s part of her magic, because she can be in a room with C.E.O.s, but still, when she’s around working people, they know she’s authentic, and her prosecutor background will help.”

Of course, I wondered if Phillips would be interested in a cabinet job, such as treasury secretary, if Harris wins. After all, he’s got an amazing résumé between Morgan Stanley, Oracle, being the C.E.O. of Infor, an enterprise software company, and his current position as co-founder of a technology-focused private equity firm. But he said he would not be. “I’m just a background guy who has been a friend of hers for a long time.” he said. “I have zero interest in any of that stuff. I’m just a business guy who is helping a friend out.” He said he got his fill of politics watching his father, Charles Sr., who was on the city council of College Park, outside Atlanta. He said his father was “too cheap” to hire a campaign manager, so that job fell to him for a while. “I did that for a long time,” he said. “He was in there for 30 years. So I got exposed to it early.”

If not him, did he think Kamal might choose Effron, who has long aspired to the job of treasury secretary in a Democratic administration? He said he thought Blair would be a good choice. “Ninety percent of it is a political job anyway,” Phillips said of being treasury secretary, “in relationships and persuading Wall Street. And he knows how to do that.”