Good morning,

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

It was another remarkable week: Matt Belloni diagnosed Hollywood’s A.I. détente; Kim Masters chronicled the Saudi tax rebate mirage; Eriq Gardner sized up the antitrust arms race around the Paramount–Warner Bros. deal; Dylan Byers plumbed the existential crisis at The Daily Wire and broke down Bari Weiss’s latest personnel surprise; Ian unpacked Mallory McMorrow’s A.I. platform; John Ourand refereed the Sankey–Petitti playoff feud; Bill Cohan profiled the hedge funder who predicted the SaaSpocalypse; Lauren Sherman got into the Everlane unwind with founder Michael Preysman; Rachel Strugatz dug up what really sank the Estée Lauder–Puig megadeal; Malique Morris interrogated Jerry Lorenzo’s higher calling; and Marion Maneker surveyed Sotheby’s middle-market resurgence, while Glenn Adamson spotlighted the rubber sculptures of Patrick Bongoy.

Meanwhile, down in D.C., Julia Ioffe war-gamed the never-ending Iran ceasefire; Leigh Ann Caldwell peeped the G.O.P.’s congressional mini-rebellion; Peter Hamby scrutinized Xavier Becerra’s underwhelming California coronation; and Abby Livingston gauged James Talarico’s Texas longshot after John Cornyn’s runoff rout.

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

Lauren Sherman empties the spring mailbag and sits down with Everlane founder Michael Preysman.
and…
Rachel Strugatz autopsies the collapsed Estée Lauder–Puig deal.
meanwhile…
Malique Morris interrogates Jerry Lorenzo’s C.E.O. experiment at Fear of God, and assesses Warby Parker’s $150 million smartglasses bet.

Marion Maneker excavates the $172 million hiding in Sotheby’s day sales.
and…
Glenn Adamson profiles Patrick Bongoy, the exiled Congolese sculptor whose work just landed at the Venice Biennale.

Matt Belloni clocks Hollywood’s A.I. appeasement and parses Gen Z’s franchise fatigue.
and…
Eriq Gardner tracks the white-shoe legal arms race over the $110 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. colossus.
and…
Kim Masters charts the agonies of Hollywood’s foray into Saudi Arabia.

Ian Krietzberg contends that Google may have already won the A.I. race and breaks down aspiring Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow’s “People Over A.I.” pitch.

Adam Rapoport examines the great broth revival.
and…
Nancy Jo Sales documents a lost generation of New York youth.

Dylan Byers reports on the existential crisis at The Daily Wire and Nick Bilton’s appointment at 60 Minutes.

John Ourand explains the Sankey–Petitti CFP feud and steelmans the UFC and F1 megadeals with analyst Peter Supino.

Bill Cohan spotlights Scott Goodwin, the hedge funder who saw the SaaSpocalypse before anyone else.

Julia Ioffe dissects Trump’s never-ending war and calls up Mikhail Zygar to ask if Putin is finally on the rocks.
and…
Leigh Ann Caldwell maps the G.O.P.’s congressional mini-rebellion.
and…
Peter Hamby questions whether Xavier Becerra is really the best that California can do.
and…
Abby Livingston handicaps James Talarico’s Texas chances after Paxton’s 28-point runoff rout.

Matt and Peter Chernin chew over the best investment opportunities in Hollywood on The Town.
and…
Lauren and The Cutting Room Floor’s Recho Omondi unpack the mystery of the Mango heir and the Everlane blowback on Fashion People.
and…
Dylan hosts Byron Allen for a BuzzFeed manifesto on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand asks research analyst Peter Supino to crunch the numbers for the Ellisons’ UFC deal on The Varsity.
and…
John Heilemann and A.I. for Good author Josh Tyrangiel make the bull case for the platform shift on Impolitic.
and…
Peter and Julia Alexander consider which publishers survive Google’s A.I. pivot on The Powers That Be.

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On Thursday, just after noon, I was sitting in the podcast studio in Puck’s airy lower Tribeca headquarters. We’ve recently begun pivoting our flagship audio show, The Powers That Be, to YouTube. So Peter Hamby, my longtime partner and the show’s inimitable host, was tucking into his home studio while I was setting up my shot in the office. Gaby Grossman, Puck’s delightfully merciless director of editorial operations, was sitting across from me, politely bossing me around as usual with her patented Beverly Hills militarism—reminding me where to look, how to adjust my lighting, when to wrap it up, etcetera.

After all, Peter and I have been climbing the greasy pole from middle-aged media veterans to aspiring vlog stars. In fact, the previous week’s episode was retweeted by controversial L.A. mayoral candidate and former reality star dimwit Spencer Pratt, who juxtaposed my narrative overlay on the city’s homeless crisis with a colorful video of a man defecating on the sidewalk. Growing pains, I suppose.

As we entered the second segment, I noticed an unusual flurry of text messages, Slacks, emails, and phone calls, all descending at once. And, perhaps most notably, they arrived from partners, former colleagues, friends, and family members, including my wife, Rebecca. Indeed, as I stole a look at my phone during the commercial break, I realized that this emerging piece of news hit the center of a complex Venn diagram merging my personal and professional lives: my longtime buddy and former collaborator Nick Bilton had just been named the executive producer of 60 Minutes.

I’ve known Nick for about the last 15 years. We were colleagues at the Times, where I helped turn his reporting on Twitter into a memorable cover story, back when that used to be a thing. (All Is Fair in Love and Twitter was an inflection point in my journey as a headline writer…) Years later, he was the signature hire at The Hive, a business I built for Vanity Fair and Condé Nast. We weren’t just colleagues, though. We were legit friends: I knew his wife and kids and could credibly and affectionately make fun of his middle-aged pastimes, like breadmaking. When I began building Puck, five years ago, my partners and I hoped to lure him here. By that point, though, he’d started a new career as a screenwriter. Admittedly, we’d been distant in the intervening years as life and busy careers had taken hold.

In many ways, Nick’s hire was reflective of a number of truths at both Puck and his new mothership: Bari Weiss’s CBS News, a source of deep interest inside David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale’s Paramount Skydance… which is about to become PSKY-WBD after it presumably closes its $110 billion deal for David Zaslav’s company. At Puck, we use our proximity to power and influence to create a patented product that combines all the best elements of traditional journalism, equity research, and real networking. Within minutes after the news hit the transom, my partner Dylan Byers already planned to report on the aftershocks of Nick’s hiring in In the Room, his industry-leading private email. Nick and Dylan have known each other for years, too, of course. (Meanwhile, Cardinale’s RedBird is a small minority investor in Puck through a transaction, and Zaz is a de minimis investor via the same deal. We’re adults, and we can keep it all straight.)

Meanwhile, Nick’s emergence at 60 represented the latest untraditional hire in Ellison’s brief ownership. It’s the most recent sign that the family and RedBird are dead set about taking a fully disruptive approach to the business. In Big Nick Energy, Dylan’s excellent piece, Bilton was circumspect about his new gig. “You can’t necessarily have an insider change an institution from the inside, because they don’t know how to look at it from a different perspective,” he told Dylan. “Sometimes you need an outsider.”

There’s validity in that perspective, and yet his growth curve will also be estimable. Creating television is a skill, even as the medium must be extended towards other platforms. Indeed, much of the haranguing over Nick’s hiring came from from green rooms and talent agency offices, and other pit stops on a gravy train that no longer runs on time. But in a world where OpenAI pays a couple hundred million bucks for TBPN, you can be sure that the next generation of TV executives won’t look like the last ones. Good or bad, that’s one of the great stories of our time, and something you can always expect to learn about at Puck. “There was no part of me that wanted to come back to journalism,” he confided to Dylan. “But when Bari approached me about it, I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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