Netflix Questions, Jeff Roe Anxiety, Chanel Rumors

Good morning,

It was another fabulous week here: Bill Cohan handicapped Wall Street’s biggest succession drama; Matt Belloni detailed some of Hollywood’s most vulnerable A-listers; Julia Alexander checked Netflix’s ad math; Julia Ioffe penetrated a White House secret; Tara Palmeri caught up with Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire and Teddy Schleifer hung out at his donor haunt at the Miami Four Seasons while Tina Nguyen calculated the disastrousness of his announcement on the MAGA Richter scale. Meanwhile, Dylan Byers presaged ESPN’s future and Eriq Gardner detailed a SCOTUS beef.

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

FASHION:
Lauren Sherman untangles the latest Chanel murmurs and digs into the celebrity stylist hunger games.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan previews James Gorman’s successor at Morgan Stanley.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers dishes on Bezosology inside The Washington Post and predicts what’s next for ESPN.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer explains how David Sacks became Ronny’s Rasputin.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni offers the latest twist in the writers strike.
and…
Julia Alexander details the streaming pivot to advertising.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri trails DeSantis around New Hampshire.
and…
Julia Ioffe posits some funky Biden-Putin-Xi-Zelesnky peace possibilities.
and…
Tina Nguyen unpacks that Twitter fiasco.

PODCASTS:
Matt discusses Disney’s prickly parks problem on The Town.
and…
Ben Landy and Teddy divulge the agony and ecstasy of Jeff Roe, the DeSantis advisor and well-compensated political consulting guru on The Powers That Be.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

Second Acts

I hope that I’m not dating myself with an observation in my own fortysomething dotage, but life used to be simple, as it were, or at least simpler. In our culture, only a generation ago, people tended to have a single vocation and stick to it: they were producers or power lawyers, investment bankers or actors, journalists or entrepreneurs, educators or public servants, etcetera, and they followed their career arcs in simple, incremental steps.

During the last twenty years or so, as influencer culture raged and the barrier to fame often came down to the size of one’s own ego or appetite for humiliation, this all changed in ways are are now obvious and innumerable, embodied by the likes of everyone from artist-turned-executive-turned-investor-cum-fashion icon Jay-Z, to Donald Trump, a flunky real estate scion from Queens turned-reality-star-turned-president-turned-demagogue. Elon Musk, a technologist who became a zillionaire industrialist and political icon, may be the truest personification of our modern shape-shifting era of reinvention, and possibly the most globally famous innovator since Ben Franklin. (Both, of course, are Walter Isaacson biography subjects.)

My pal and former colleague Mark Leibovich, now at The Atlantic, used to have a funny bit on this phenomenon that he’d share during our old hang sessions at the coffee mart in The New York Times Building a decade ago. It used to be that people ran for president to change the world, Leibo would sermonize; now, many did it just to land a book deal, a Sirius XM show, guest host on MSNBC or Fox, and spend the rest of their days as a citizen of the green room. Recreation, after all, is part of the American narrative. Scott Fitzgerald was shortsighted when he proclaimed there were no second acts in American life.

Sacks Sells

One of the most interesting, if still slightly undercovered, members of this multi-hyphenate generation made his first major cameo in the broader popular culture this week. David Sacks came into this world as perhaps the most soft-spoken of the so-called PayPal mafia, a group that included Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman. He then amplified his wealth by co-founding Yammer, which he flipped to Microsoft for $1.2 billion, and by helping rehabilitate Zenefits, the once-high-flying H.R. software firm founded by Parker Conrad, whose valuation peaked at nearly $5 billion before submitting to a more humbling fate. (In the end, it turned out to be Conrad’s starter marriage of a company. Rippling, his new firm, has raised about $700 million at an $11 billion valuation.)

Anyway, like many extremely wealthy success stories spawned in the venture salt mines, Sacks parlayed his exit into a new career as an investor… and, curiously, as a profoundly influential podcaster. Along with other A-list V.C. stars, like Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya, Sacks hosts All-In, a show whose influence has been growing for years, transcending from Sand Hill Road to Capitol Hill.

It’d be easy to dismiss Sacks’ point of view as a form of rich guy libertarianism mixed with a healthy dose of Silicon Valley-style how-are-we-thinking-about-it? provocation. But it also reflects an increasingly dominant stream of modern G.O.P. philosophy, which distrusts various institutions, from certain corporations to wings of government to the so-called mainstream media. You might call it a substrata of the views espoused by Musk, his bud and former PayPal colleague, and ride-or-die homie.

Given this worldview, it’s hardly a surprise that Sacks, along with Musk, co-hosted Ron DeSantis in his famously tech-marred Twitter campaign announcement, which had all the gut-punching enthusiasm-drainage of Howard Dean’s stage yell or The Tribune Company’s TRONC rebrand or Mookie Wilson’s dribbler slipping through Buckner’s legs. But the reality is that Sacks and DeSantis have history. Teddy Schleifer, Puck’s chronicler of the political-money game, notes brilliantly in DeSantis-Sacks ’24 the various ways in which the former has been using not only his cash and network, but also his newfound podcasting chops and political credibility, to assist his candidate of choice, presumably elevating his own profile in the process. It’s an incredible read, and it really suggests just how much politics has evolved in financial and media spheres.

But if you really want to know what’s going on in DeSantisworld, I’d also turn your attention to another Teddy joint from this past week. For “Ron-o-Rama” & the Fine Art of Bundling, Teddy headed to the wilds of the Four Seasons, in Miami, where DeSantis donors have burrowed themselves for days of Jerry Lewis-style dialing-for-dollars in support of their guy. Teddy provides a vivid view into the dark arts of donor maintenance and enthusiasm contrivances. As we embark on this long weekend, his work is a friendly reminder that we are in for the longest, and perhaps most consequential, presidential cycle of our lives. Indeed, it will be the story of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon