Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your weekend review of the best new work at Puck.

It was another remarkable week: Matt Belloni raised an eyebrow at the Comcast–NBCUniversal divorce; Bill Cohan war-gamed Jamie Dimon’s succession duel atop JPMorgan; Dylan Byers scoped out the private equity vultures potentially eyeing NBC News; Julia Alexander unpacked Google’s $75 million dalliance with A24; Eriq Gardner surfaced the legal land mines buried in the Times’s Dianna Russini exposé; Ian Krietzberg fretted over how Trump’s A.I. strategy could become a gift to China; John Ourand assessed the World Cup ratings bonanza with Fox Sports chief Eric Shanks; Lauren Sherman spotlighted Chanel’s quiet acquisition of the shirtmaker Charvet; Malique Morris found some plot holes in the Skims I.P.O. fairy tale; Marion Maneker reviewed Sotheby’s big week in London; and Jamie Lincoln Kitman toured Broad Arrow Auctions’ classic-car empire.

Meanwhile, down in D.C., Leigh Ann Caldwell outlined the voter ID brawl paralyzing Capitol Hill; Julia Ioffe chronicled the dread trailing NATO into Ankara; Peter Hamby checked in on the Dems’ “socialist takeover” after another big primary Tuesday; and John Heilemann faced down Sen. Chris Van Hollen over Israel and the midterms.

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

Lauren Sherman decodes Chanel’s play for the 188-year-old shirtmaker Charvet and tracks Lemaire’s climb past $175 million in revenue.
and…
Rachel Strugatz fields the industry’s burning beauty questions, from Fenty’s future to L’Oréal’s Armani math.
meanwhile…
Malique Morris makes sense of the cooling Skims I.P.O. buzz.

Marion Maneker crunches the numbers on London’s frothy summer sales.
and…
Jamie Lincoln Kitman charts Broad Arrow Auctions’ $624 million ascent.

Matt Belloni casts doubt on the Comcast–NBCUniversal breakup.
and…
Eriq Gardner untangles the shareholder brawl over The Chosen’s miracle success.
meanwhile…
Julia Alexander demystifies Google’s $75 million bet on A24.

Ian Krietzberg sounds the alarm on the West Wing’s increasingly improvised A.I. rulebook.

Rickie de Sole sits down with Tory Burch.
and…
John Brodie recounts the history of Manhattan in diners.

Dylan Byers handicaps a private equity raid on NBC News and maps the acquisition scenarios lurking behind the split.

John Ourand trades notes with Fox Sports chief Eric Shanks on the World Cup’s American moment.
and…
Eriq probes the legal questions haunting the Times’s Dianna Russini exposé.

Bill Cohan interrogates Comcast brass on the real logic for spinning NBCUniversal and previews the succession duel atop JPMorgan.

Leigh Ann Caldwell dissects the G.O.P.’s SAVE America Act impasse.
and…
Julia Ioffe gauges whether NATO’s annual summit is still worth the trouble.
and…
Peter Hamby pressure-tests the socialist insurgence narrative after Colorado’s blue-on-blue upsets.
meanwhile…
John Heilemann presses Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Israel, Gaza, and the midterms.

Former Meta executive Campbell Brown makes the case against A.I.’s self-grading habit on The Grill Room.
and…
Lauren and super-stylist Jason Bolden get into the business and ethics of styling on Fashion People.
and…
Heilemann and Avett Brothers bassist Bob Crawford champion John Quincy Adams as America’s greatest ex-president on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and EntTelligence strategy chief Steve Buck puzzle over Hollywood’s box office resurgence on The Town.
and…
Peter and Julia Ioffe hash out J.D. Vance’s pointed break with Israel on The Powers That Be.

As a reminder, you can update your profile at any time to get more stories like these directly in your inbox. Click here to customize your email settings.

America’s big birthday week got started in typically patriotic fashion with a story as native to these shores as amber waves of grain or bald eagles: the split of a family-run media dynasty, which almost certainly sets up a vicious multiple arbitrage opportunity for the years to come. Early Monday morning, as I was watering my famished hydrangeas, the Roberts family announced that they’d be breaking Comcast up in two—severing the cable and connectivity business from Sky and NBCUniversal.

The rise of the Robertses is a veritable Horatio Alger story on peptides. More than 60 years ago, paterfamilias Ralph Roberts bought a humble cable TV system in Tupelo that he would forge, over many decades, into the pioneering behemoth Comcast. The elder Roberts cultivated a patrician gestalt that helped define an era of breathtaking American industry and dealmaking. Beneath the bowtie and pocket square was a hungry visionary, whose financial acumen is delectably conveyed in Barry Diller’s recent memoir, Who Knew.

Brian Roberts, Ralph’s son, spent the intervening decades building the heirloom into a full-blown media conglomerate through a number of transformative deals—the pioneering $72 billion purchase of AT&T Broadband, which my partner Bill Cohan helped close in 2002, during his investment banker era; the two-step acquisition of NBC from GE, years later; and the more recent $40 billion takeover of Sky. The latter, of course, was perhaps a consolation prize after Roberts bid up Bob Iger to obtain Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment business before eventually losing out on the bounty. And yet, with more of a whimper than a bang, Roberts announced on Monday that his media and cable assets no longer made as much synergistic sense under one roof—a conclusion that the market had arrived at more than a year ago—sending the stock soaring as much as 20 percent before coming back down to earth.

Immediately, this all-American storyline mobilized my peerless partners at Puck, who examined the dynamics from every angle. Were the Robertses really spinning these holdings for life on the public markets, or simply positioning them for future M&A opportunities? Were they going to be sharks, gobbling up smaller assets in their markets, or mere minnows? Would Netflix, which recently lost Warner Bros. to the Ellisons, bite on NBCU—thereby, perhaps, rendering the company its own Sky of sorts? Would the connectivity business get hoovered up by Charter, which just paid about $35 billion for Cox, as the threat of Elon’s Starlink looms?

In Don’t Bet on the Comcast–NBCU Split Actually Happening, Matt Belloni brilliantly laid out the bull case for an acquirer to come along before the conscious uncoupling can even be completed. In Between 30 Rock and a Hard Place, Dylan Byers assessed the options for NBC News in this brave new world. And in Breaking Up Comcast Is Hard to Do, Bill captured the view from Wall Street. I behoove you to read them all during this long and heat-domed holiday weekend.

But I wanted to give the final word here to Bill, who not only worked across the table from Roberts during his empire-building phase, but also dutifully chronicled the company’s rise in his bestselling tome on GE, Power Failure. In particular, Bill was fascinated by the denouement of this remarkable American fable—“the laconic nature of such a big and transformative announcement, since it pretty much means the end of the Comcast behemoth as we’ve known it.” He then went on to quote Wolfe Research analyst Peter Supino, who noted in a report: “A generational conglomerate tracing honored family lines does a strategic 180-degree turn which includes the almost unmentioned resignation of its scion C.E.O., and all we got was 25 minutes with no slides and no open Q&A.”

Take it home, Bill: “Honestly, after what Brian went through to get NBCU in the first place, I was pretty shocked that he’d made the decision to part with it. But things have changed since he bought NBCU, and I’m sure he enjoys watching and helping his chosen executives succeed. At one point during my call with the Comcast executives, the names of fellow media titans John Malone and Barry Diller came up. It seemed like a telling and perhaps fateful reference. Malone, who is 85, seems to be winding down his ambitions. Diller, who is 84, remains tireless. He wants to get his hands on CNN, if somehow the Ellisons are forced to sell it. Will Brian take after Malone? Or Diller? Wall Street is still waiting on, and guessing at, his answer. My bet is that Brian—still two decades younger than either man—has a few more acts left before retirement beckons.”

My hunch is that Bill is right: America is the home of reinvention, and it’s hard to imagine Roberts doesn’t have another plot laid out. The old F. Scott Fitzgerald line about no second acts in American life is about the falsest epigram in our intellectual canon; Roberts’s next act is truly one of the great stories of our time, and a leitmotif here at Puck.

Happy Fourth,

Jon

Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news.

You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10006