Greetings, and welcome back to The Stratosphere.

In tonight’s issue, a series of scoops about matters serious and just plain fun—including some exclusive reporting on who Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is courting as his potential vice president, and an incredible story about Sam Bankman-Fried’s idea to get Tom Brady to run for president. (Yes, really.)

But first… some Nikki notes…

• Haley’s haul: Nikki Haley is expected to raise more than $800,000 today at her two events in the Bay Area, I’m told—quite a day’s work for the long-shot Republican candidate who remains, obviously, pretty popular with G.O.P. donors.

  Haley is set to pull in north of $200,000 from the 50 to 60 folks who showed up to her luncheon at Wine & Wall in downtown San Francisco, and then over $600,000 at her reception at Tim Draper’s house tonight in Atherton. Draper is a strange cat, but he’s good at this. And for Haley to fly out to California for two full days, keeping her off the campaign trail in more critical states, it’s got to be worth it. $800,000 is worth it!

  Unfortunately, however, California donors do not decide the Republican nominee. In fact, who they support may be a negative indicator of the presidential nominee.

It’s not hard to imagine the two on the same eccentric spoiler platform: Yang ran in 2020 as a self-styled technocrat, while Kennedy is a technophobic crank, but they share an outsider’s disdain for the Democratic establishment. Both men are now critics of the two-party system, with platforms and brands calibrated to the disaffected, politically disengaged center.

Yang declined to comment, but I’m told he was non-committal on the call, and this probably isn’t going to happen. Yang is hardly the only potential number-two that R.F.K. has been courting over the past several weeks. He is calling everyone. The timing of these entreaties is all about ballot access: In several states, candidates are required to have a V.P. nominee in order to submit signatures, and for Kennedy to be considered for the top of the ticket.

There are more than a few reasons R.F.K.’s entreaty might fall flat. For one, Yang has been a vocal backer of Democrat Dean Phillips, the upstart 55-year-old Minnesota rep fighting a quixotic primary campaign against Joe Biden; Kennedy seems to be misreading supportive things that Yang has said about R.F.K.’s campaign. For another, Yang was a major proponent of the Covid vaccine, and vaccine passports; Kennedy has compared Covid lockdowns to Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, over the past few years, Yang has been busy trying to launch his own new party, called the Forward Party—although the effort still feels embryonic, and the organization hasn’t attempted to field a presidential candidate.

Nevertheless, Yang would make an intriguing running mate for R.F.K. if Yang would do it. He has energy, a large media profile, and some connections to high-dollar donors. Perhaps most importantly, he maintains a heterodox group of followers that, for a brief moment, made him the favorite to be the next mayor of New York City. He could bring new people into R.F.K.’s movement, capitalizing on widespread disillusionment with a seemingly inevitable Trump-Biden rematch.

Sure, he disagrees with R.F.K. on plenty of stuff—he’s backing Phillips, after all, and not a third-party candidate. And in the end, perhaps R.F.K. will convince some bigger-name celebrity like Tony Robbins to join his ticket. In any case, we should know soon enough: On Tuesday, he told NBC that he will announce a decision “within 30 days.”

What if Brady could be convinced into running for the G.O.P. nomination for president of the United States? That was the fantasy of S.B.F. and at least some of the people who surrounded him at the height of his political power, primarily as a Democratic megadonor. I’m told that Bankman-Fried’s team even polled Americans to gauge support for the quarterback’s putative candidacy, according to two sources. After all, if Trump was an existential threat to democracy and the planet, why not at least consider every possible way to beat him in a Republican primary?

The plan had all the hallmarks of an S.B.F. caper: It was simultaneously serious and also decidedly not. That’s kind of just how things went in his orbit—many Sam ideas were highly unrealistic, effective-altruist thought experiments right up until the moment that they materialized. So it wasn’t all that different from the “play” (the term of art in Sam’s inner circle) that S.B.F. developed to bribe Trump to sit out the race entirely, a plan which, as I’ve reported, was overstated by Michael Lewis, but wasn’t totally lifeless, either. Brady 2024 wasn’t a widely known, deeply plotted move: Some senior people in Bankman-Fried’s orbit told me they never heard of it. Of course, even those who weren’t looped in found it all too plausible.

No, I couldn’t get my hands on the poll. Yes, the Bankman-Fried team polled plenty of things, and adding a question to an existing, “omnibus” poll isn’t much extra work or cost. Still, this was not idle chatter: Bankman-Fried did want Brady to run for president, and he told multiple people about it, according to two more sources. One person recounted a conversation to me in which Sam straight-up told them about his dream. Another source told me that Bankman-Fried called people in his inner circle in 2022 to feel them out on whether they thought Brady could be convinced to run for some office.

In these conversations, Sam didn’t get into specifics beyond saying that Brady was a great, handsome guy and he believed he could win. But I’m told that Sam went so far as to express this desire to Brady directly, in at least one private conversation, according to a person who was briefed directly by Sam. After all, just a few days before FTX imploded, Sam was scheduled to see the Bucs play on Sunday Night Football. Alas, he ultimately had to ditch the luxury suite and scamper back to the Bahamas to attempt to defuse the FTX time bomb.

Of course, Bankman-Fried is not the first rich guy to think the Fox Sports talent is presidential timber, and he won’t be the last to fantasize about the apolitical sports star wooing the middle of the country away from Trump. What’s different is that Bankman-Fried had access to him and Gisele, directly. Bankman-Fried and Brady were seemingly infatuated with one another—a nerdy Bankman-Fried saw the chance to be close to a celebrity he grew up watching win Super Bowls, while Brady was a genuine crypto influencer, raking in $30 million worth of company stock, and a ubiquitous FTX pitchman at its peak. (After its collapse, he seemed to experience a convenient case of amnesia. He’s currently being sued by crypto investors, and he hasn’t said a word about FTX since the collapse.) A Brady representative didn’t respond to a request for comment about any of this, or for the exclusive on his 2024 campaign-in-waiting.