Good morning,

It was yet another remarkable week: Matt Belloni got to the bottom of the Trump–South Park contretemps as Ellison’s deal finally closes; Kim Masters captured the post-Colbert anxiety around town; Eriq Gardner previewed Rupert Murdoch’s White House legal strategy, while Dylan Byers reported on Trump’s reaction from Air Force One; Lauren Sherman pierced the celebrity brand endorsement industrial complex; Rachel Strugatz detailed a Sephora sob story; and Sarah Shapiro caught up with the C.E.O. of La Ligne.

Meanwhile, Bill Cohan chronicled the new Goldman Sachs age; Ian Krietzberg dug into the president’s Silicon Valley–inflected A.I. wish list; Julia Alexander scrutinized Netflix’s sports programming strategy; John Ourand and Michael Nathanson chatted about the company’s NFL ambitions; Marion Maneker assessed Phillips’ new fee structure; and Julie Davich examined the luxury sales across these houses. Plus, Leigh Ann Caldwell and Abby Livingston tracked the Epstein fallout on Capitol Hill as Julia Ioffe deciphered Tulsi Gabbard’s motivations in the briefing room.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

Lauren Sherman details a Vogue succession wrinkle and surveys the brand endorsement micro-economy.
and…
Rachel Strugatz conveys a Sephora cautionary tale.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro charts La Ligne’s success.

Marion Maneker runs the numbers on Phillips’ new fee strategy.
and…
Julie Davich digs into the jewelry market.

Matt Belloni chronicles the South Park backstory.
and…
Kim Masters reveals the industry’s anxiety as Ellison prepares to take over Paramount.
and…
Eriq Gardner finds a wrinkle in the forthcoming Trump-Murdoch legal feud.

Ian Krietzberg examines Trump’s A.I. Action Plan and calls B.S. on the robotaxi revolution.

Dylan Byers considers Skydance’s Bari-adjusted EBITDA.
and…
John Ourand offers the latest on the ESPN–NFL Media deal.
meanwhile…
Julia Alexander unpacks Netflix’s sports strategy.

Bill Cohan runs the latest numbers at Goldman and JPMC.

Leigh Ann Caldwell explores the White House’s Susan Collins pressure-cooker strategy.
and…
Leigh Ann also chats with Rep. Angie Craig at Ned’s Club in D.C., a conversation presented by the Modern Ag Alliance.
and…
Julia Ioffe unfurls Tulsi Gabbard’s three-dimensional checkers.
meanwhile…
Abby Livingston predicts the next wave of Epsteingate.

Dylan and Julia Alexander chew over the Trump-Murdoch standoff on The Grill Room.
and…
John Ourand and SBJ’s Bret McCormick break down the new revenue pie for pro sports franchises on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and How Long Gone’s Jason Stewart assess the Burberry bump on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and the Times’s Maggie Haberman wade into Epstein politics on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw predict Colbert’s next act on The Town.
and…
Kim joins returning hero Peter Hamby to discuss the Paramount deal denouement on The Powers That Be.

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I’d barely stepped off the plane on Thursday afternoon, fresh from hosting a private Puck event on Nantucket, when innumerable Slack updates began to emerge on my phone. A number of my partners, from Dylan Byers to Kim Masters to Bill Cohan, were chiming in that key sources had alerted them to the F.C.C.’s imminent approval of Skydance’s long-gestating acquisition of Paramount Global—the $8 billion deal that has been ricocheting throughout the Puck cinematic universe ever since our partner Matt Belloni first reported Shari Redstone’s intention to part with her birthright way back in December 2023.

Meanwhile, I didn’t know how Bill had found the time to dredge up his own reporting. The previous night, he’d had me over for dinner at his oceanside pile, where he cooked a delicious crumb-encrusted cod (the non-greased variety) and tomato salad, which we finished off with a little B&B digestif to toast the Puck journey, along with his wife Deb Futter, the remarkable hostess and renowned president and publisher of Macmillan’s Celadon Books and Flatiron Books. Anyway, before I could even digest all the news, Dylan had commemorated the moment with a tweet.

The interminable deal, which was complicated by Trump’s 60 Minutes lawsuit and accusations of some enigmatic ancillary arrangement with the Ellisons, couldn’t have closed soon enough. Not only do most deals die of old age, but South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker had recently added an unpredictable complexifier in the form of a new episode involving the president, an erotic form of Satan worship, and then some. Naturally, Trump responded as you might expect. In mere hours, it became the latest casualty of his effort to redirect his base’s agita over the contents of the Epstein files. And yet the deal was finally set to close.

Later that evening, Matt reported all the backstage drama surrounding the episode in his characteristically brilliant piece, David Ellison and the Penis Politics of South Park. “Ellison didn’t watch the episode in advance, per multiple sources. But he was given a heads-up that it was ‘disparaging’ to the president. (Love the understatement.),” Matt wrote. After the creators worked until the last possible moment, their producer flagged the episode to Paramount’s three co-C.E.O.s, who undoubtedly weighed the predictable rebukes from the White House against the hand-wringing from the creative community that they would face for spiking the work of two satirical geniuses. After watching the episode, the co-C.E.O.s decided to bring in Redstone—cognizant, of course, of the bigger deal. “After the men described the episode to Shari (I’d pay good money for a recording of that conversation), Redstone said she would back their ruling,” Matt wrote. I beseech you to spend some time this weekend with his excellent piece for the full backstory on how it all went down.

In many ways, it was actually quite heartening to hear that the powers that be at Paramount had supported their creatives amid this bizarre political-economic climate. The decision reminded me of my partner Kim Masters’ recent blockbuster, In Colbert Blood, which focused on the town’s growing angst regarding the Ellisons’ intentions at Paramount. Somewhat surprisingly, there was a fair amount of hope in Hollywood that Ellison—despite the tortured sale, the 60 Minutes suit, his UFC courtship of Trump, etcetera—was going to be a creative champion. “People are grateful to have a friggin’ buyer,” one agent told Kim, reflecting the realpolitik and sangfroid of the moment. Indeed, this complex, multidimensional storyline is one of the great epics of our age, and precisely what you should expect to learn about in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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