Happy Friday, and welcome back to In The Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

In tonight’s email, we catch up with last season’s antihero, Chris Licht—in Riyadh, of all places! Plus, some fun palace intrigue on CNN and ABC’s war for Saint Anselm, and Charles Barkley’s shots on Nielsen.

But first…

💬 The In-Crowd’s hottest text thread: I learned this week that hundreds of the most powerful figures from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood have joined a sprawling, informal WhatsApp thread to share thoughts on how to build support for Israel and combat antisemitism following the attacks of October 7. The group, which is called Builders For Israel, includes the likes of Sheryl Sandberg, Bill Ackman, and David Marcus, among others, and contains several working subgroups focused on all manner of initiatives.

Of course, dozens of such threads have proliferated since the attacks. Starwood Capital’s Barry Sternlicht is doing the very substantive work of raising millions for an anti-Hamas media campaign, with an assist from Ari Emanuel. And then there are the Hollywood-centric WhatsApp groups like The Brigade, founded by P.R. guru Melissa Zukerman and producer Limor Gott Ronen, and another started by famed talent manager Guy Oseary. Still, the BFI thread is a high-wattage chat room of a whole other magnitude.

💰 Shari’s Skydance card: Shortly before hosting another one of Puck’s great private dinners here in L.A. last night, my partner Matt Belloni broke the news that Skydance’s David Ellison and RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale are kicking the tires on a Paramount acquisition, or perhaps a major stake in its parentco National Amusements. The news sent Paramount shares up nearly 15 percent on Friday, a sign of just how much Wall Street wants Shari Redstone to offload her assets. And of course, Paramount’s other potential suitors—looking at you, Zaz!—are surely taking note.

Alas, this is what happens when you leave the game, and it’s as true for executives like Bob Iger during the Chapek interregnum as it is for talent like, say, Brian Williams or Don Lemon. Life goes on, maybe even gets better. But the klieg lights get taken down immediately, until you declare yourself ready to return to the field. And for egos addicted to the spotlight—you know, the type who might let a reporter accompany them to a predawn workout—it can be hard to sit on the sidelines for long.

Zaz’s remark was probably innocuous, and had more to do with dispelling the perception, posited by The New York Times, that his ownership of CNN forced him to sever personal friendships with the likes of Licht, Lemon, and Brian Stelter. Zaz even tried to extend the olive branch to Jeff Zucker, a once-close golfing buddy with whom he had a well-known falling out after his own defenestration from WarnerMedia. (Although, as I reported last week, Zucker recently looked at acquiring Zaslav’s All3Media. Deal fever heals all wounds, I guess.) In any event, there are, to the best of my knowledge, no plans to bring Licht back into the WBD fold ever.

A more reliable indicator of Licht’s professional ambitions can probably be gleaned from his recent attendance at another conference: the Saudi Future Investment Initiative, also known as “Davos in the Desert.” The annual global investment conference, which took place in November and is hosted and financed by Saudi Arabia’s primary sovereign wealth fund, is one of the most important and controversial events of the year for global finance leaders. After the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Wall Street titans either boycotted the event or kept their name tags hidden behind their ties. Only a year later, many prominent figures returned to Riyadh, prompting Sorkin himself to astutely question, in 2021, whether there was “a statute of limitations in associating with a country accused of human rights abuses.”

Each year, Wall Street is forced to weigh the optics of kissing Mohammed bin Salman’s ring, but inevitably the most notable names do go: Larry Fink, David Rubenstein, David Solomon, Steve Schwarzman, and Jamie Dimon among them. The human rights abuses haven’t slowed Riyadh’s normalization in the West, and indeed this last summer, Saudi ambassador Reema Bandar was invited to participate at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she was interviewed by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Don’t forget, of course, that Biden fist-bumped M.B.S. on a state visit to Saudi Arabia last year.

In any event, FII was an unlikely venue for Licht, a longtime late night and morning show producer who was given an ill-advised and ill-fated turn running a global news network. In conversations with friends and colleagues, Licht has said he attended FII on his own dime and was merely surveying the scene to assess potential business opportunities, sources who spoke to him told me. But other sources with ties to Saudi media said Licht also engaged in conversations with the state-backed Saudi Research and Media Group, or SRMG, about consulting on their tentative efforts to launch an international English-language news channel that would rival Qatar’s Al Jazeera. I reached out to Licht multiple times on Friday for comment, but he did not respond.

As I reported a few months back, it wasn’t initially clear that CNN was going to come away with any debates this cycle. Licht had petitioned the Republican National Committee for rights to at least one of the debates early in the year, but the committee had balked at the network’s negative reputation with conservatives—despite the fact that Licht had ostensibly been given a mandate to fix that issue. In October, shortly after taking over as C.E.O., Thompson met with R.N.C. officials and urged them to reconsider.

In its announcement, CNN said that its New Hampshire debate would take place on January 21 at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, two days before the New Hampshire primary. In doing so, they effectively ambushed ABC News, which has served as the media partner for all of the pre-primary debates at Saint Anselm going back to 2008, and planned to honor that quadrennial tradition this cycle, as well. Indeed, ABC’s team was in Goffstown as recently as Monday to conduct a site survey, sources familiar with the matter tell me.

ABC News president Kim Godwin was on a leadership retreat in California when CNN’s announcement hit—go figure—and she and other network executives were blindsided by the news, sources said. Over several hours, she and her P.R. team scrambled to issue a press release announcing that the network would proceed with its own debate on January 18, also at Saint Anselm.

But there’s an additional wrinkle: The leadership at Saint Anselm claims they, too, were blindsided, and had no knowledge of CNN’s plans for a debate. Neil Levesque, the executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm, said Friday that school officials “were surprised to be included on a press release by a network about a debate which we had not planned or booked.” And while CNN sources assure me they had communicated with the school about the debate, a network spokesperson suggested they now intend to find a different venue: “We can’t speak to any miscommunication within Saint Anselm,” she said, “but we are moving forward with our plans to host a debate in New Hampshire on Jan. 21.”

In the event both the ABC News and CNN debates do take place, there will now be two Granite State debates in the span of just four days. That’s a whole lot of undercard—and probably more Vivek than the nation should be forced to stomach—especially given the already relatively low interest stemming from Trump’s boycott. Viewership, which started at 13 million for the first Fox News debate, dropped to just 4.1 million for this week’s NewsNation debate. (Then again, that’s a huge number for NewsNation, which normally averages tens of thousands of viewers in primetime. Kudos, Michael Corn.)

Presumably, CNN will take whatever bump it can get, given that they’re currently averaging around half a million viewers in primetime. Of course, ratings are a touchy subject at CNN these days. On Friday, the network’s newest co-host Charles Barkley sought, in signature fashion, to dispel any concern about the Nielsen numbers. “An article came out that our ratings weren’t great,” Barkley said on The Steam Room podcast, which he co-hosts. “I want to tell my team, Man, these Nielsen people are the biggest clowns in the world. Name me one person you know with a Nielsen box?”

“These Nielsen people try to say our ratings weren’t great, but we won a certain demographic. Hey man, to my team: Fuck them,” Barkley continued. “Don’t you worry about what people tell you about your ratings. Nobody knows what people are watching. They don’t!”

In the event that ratings are relevant and, you know, help sustain a business that recently turned more than a billion dollars in profit, ratings for King Charles, which Barkley co-hosts with Gayle King, were down in the show’s second week, to 466,000 total and 115,000 in the key news demo—a 4 percent and 13 percent drop, respectively. And sure, the show was competing with the second hour of the aforementioned NewsNation G.O.P. debate. But AC360 was competing with the debate, too, and somehow King Charles still managed to churn a quarter of Anderson Cooper’s audience. (Those that stuck around got to see Barkley refer to Trump’s supporters as “a small little group of nutty people.”)

Shortly after the most recent ratings came out, one industry veteran suggested it was “time for King Charles to abdicate.” In the event that happens, Barkley will be just fine, of course, and will continue in his role as arguably the most entertaining and often insightful basketball analyst on TV. King, too, will continue to co-host CBS This Morning and hobnob with her friends in the jet set. Meanwhile, CNN will still be searching for solutions.