In recent weeks, as David Ellison and the Paramount Skydance team met with regulators, held earnings calls, and rolled out their rationale for acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, company president Jeff Shell was conspicuously absent. Jeff, the former NBCUniversal C.E.O. who came to Paramount via his advisory role at Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird, was omitted from a deal team that included Paramount chief strategy officer Andy Gordon, legal chief Makan Delrahim, and comms chief Melissa Zukerman, as well as Gerry and his partner Tyler Alexander.

Paramount’s front office has attributed Jeff’s exclusion to an ongoing internal investigation by Gibson Dunn, spurred by one R.J. Cipriani—a colorful high-stakes gambler, federal whistleblower, and former associate who, in a recent draft complaint, accused Jeff of divulging material information to him ahead of Paramount’s $7.7 billion deal with the UFC. In truth, the Cipriani complaint—which, again, has not yet been filed—may demonstrate a lack of discipline on Shell’s part, but it’s unlikely to reveal any legal transgression. Paramount has vehemently pushed back against it, and sources inside the company generally view Cipriani as a shakedown artist. David himself is said to be skeptical about Cipriani’s claims.

All that said, I’m told the Cipriani drama has exacerbated David’s own misgivings about Shell, which have grown stronger in recent months. Sources familiar with the two men’s relationship have told me that David no longer trusts Jeff, and suspects him of being involved in various leaks to the press and others during his time as president. Those same sources believe Jeff is unlikely to survive at Paramount past its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Paramount Skydance declined to comment on Jeff’s future there, though sources close to the company told me that any pronouncements on personnel decisions were premature. Matthew Hiltzik, the crisis comms guru that Paramount has enlisted to help Jeff manage the investigation, also declined to comment. Some of Jeff’s friends and defenders said insinuations about his future were being driven by detractors inside Paramount who were seeking to capitalize on the investigation. But even his supporters acknowledged that Shell is not universally beloved by his peers inside the company.

In truth, Jeff may have always been a temporary player. In acquiring Paramount, David needed a veteran media executive with oversight and operational experience, but that was always just the first step on the path toward true media moguldom. Now that he’s set to take over a combined Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery, there will presumably be many executives hoping to take leadership roles. “In retrospect,” one source close to the situation said, “I’m not sure Jeff was ever the long-term plan.”

On Friday morning, Mathias Döpfner’s Axel Springer announced that it had acquired The Telegraph from RedBird for £575 million in cash. This was a shocking plot twist in the long saga of the Telegraph sale, for several reasons. As I reported last week, Gerry had been on the cusp of selling The Telegraph to Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and General Trust group, but at the eleventh hour, Mathias joined a consortium of rival bidders led by Dovid Efune, the British-born proprietor of The New York Sun. Few expected that Mathias would call an audible and simply take the asset for himself. (Usual disclosure: Through our acquisition of Air Mail, RedBird is a minority investor in Puck.)

For Mathias—a perennially acquisition-ready media baron in the making—the option to move on an asset like The Telegraph was likely too compelling to ignore. Beyond its revered status as the vade mecum for Britain’s Tories, The Telegraph is also a good business. In recent years, it’s brought in around £55 million in profits on around £280 million in revenue, much of that driven by high-double-digit percentage growth in digital subscription revenue. Mathias has also had a personal fascination with U.K. media, and once tried to acquire the Financial Times.

Anyway, when Rothermere balked at the U.K.’s archaic and protracted regulatory process, Mathias jumped. Of course, regulatory approval remains a concern for him, too: As I’ve noted before, the xenophobia toward Sheikh Mansour’s Emirati money can extend to Mathias’s “Hun” money, too—yes, some nativist Fleet Streeters still use that term. On a call with company leaders this morning, I’m told, Mathias noted that there could be “some public headwinds” to the German ownership, and also referenced Axel Springer’s ideological orientation—presumably alluding to the company’s avowedly pro-Israel stance.

In any event, the main question is how The Telegraph fits into Mathias’s broader ambitions for Springer. With The Telegraph and Politico, he will now have two separate English-language brands already engaged in or eyeing international expansion. Will he let them exist as separate entities or combine them? (I’d assume the former…) And how much will he be able to invest in them? Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that a £575 million, all-cash deal leaves Springer with around $400 million for inorganic and organic investment in a structurally challenged portfolio. And what about further acquisitions? On the call, Mathias said Springer wasn’t likely to make any more big acquisitions in the foreseeable future, noting that Rupert and Lachlan were unlikely to sell The Wall Street Journal, and that Springer couldn’t afford it anyway. (CNN is now off the market, too.) Of course, that may hint at another motivation for his purchase. Media assets that one might actually want to own come on the market almost as rarely as NFL teams.

Anyway, this is all great news for Gerry and Jeff Zucker, who have been struggling for two years now to offload the asset and relieve Sheikh Mansour of the humiliation of holding an option he can’t execute. Recall that when Jeff first acquired The Telegraph and The Spectator for £600 million, critics accused him of overpaying. With The Spectator’s sale to Sir Paul Marshall for £100 million, and now this sale to Mathias, RedBird is exiting at a very healthy profit. And, more satisfying still, they’re wiping their hands clean of one of the more arduous chapters in their investment journey.