Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

I’m en route from New York to Los Angeles (heading to JFK as we speak, so please shoot me a text). Thanks to everyone who joined us on the 100th floor of Central Park Tower last night for our Powers That Be: Live event, where my partner Bill Cohan celebrated his birthday with a lively and engaging off-the-record chat with Goldman Sachs C.E.O. David Solomon. Thanks also to the source who introduced me to my new favorite bar in Midtown, just a stone’s throw from 30 Rock and the News Corp. building. (You know who you are.) I’ll be back this way next week, so please give a shout.

In tonight’s email, fresh reporting on the latest twist in the Bill Ackman-Business Insider microdrama. Ackman and Axel Springer chief Mathias Döpfner set the stage for détente over dinner at Daniel last month, and the two sides are now looking for an offramp. Of course, a lasting peace will depend on Ackman’s ability to make this all look like a win.

But first…

🤼‍♂️ Fubo vs. Spulu: FuboTV has sued Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox over their plans to launch a joint sports streaming service this fall, and has enlisted the power lawyers at Kellogg Hansen to lead the fight. Fubo C.E.O. David Gandler argues that the Spulu triumvirate “has consistently engaged in anticompetitive practices” by forcing Fubo to carry little-watched non-sports channels and preventing the company from launching a sports-only bundle like the one they themselves now intend to launch. My colleague Eriq Gardner, Puck’s resident legal expert, tells me this first draft is “fairly thin” regarding the competitive harms of the new venture, but “presents a stronger case concerning past bundling tactics.” So, “while FuboTV is unlikely to achieve an injunction stopping Spulu,” he says, “maybe FuboTV can stay in the game by securing must-have content on reasonable economic terms.”

🇺🇸 Avlon files in NY-1: Two weeks after I broke the news that CNN anchor and senior political analyst John Avlon was planning to run for Congress in NY-1, he has filed paperwork and made the bid official. Avlon will run for the Democratic nomination and the right to face incumbent Republican Rep. Nick LaLota in a district that Trump handily won twice. (New York’s 1st encompasses the Hamptons, but also the more blue-collar parts of Suffolk County that have been red since 2015). “There’s just too much at stake for the country and the community that I love,” Avlon said in an announcement video. “Together, we can flip this seat.” Maybe…

🗞️ State of the subs: New York Times Company chairman A. G. Sulzberger contextualized the strength of his paper’s subscription business in a recent chat with Oxford’s Reuters Institute. “At the peak of print,” across newspapers and magazines, there were “150-200 million news subscriptions,” he said. “If you add up all the news subscriptions in this country today, … I would guess that it is closer to 30-40 million. That’s significantly less than Paramount+, which is not exactly a successful streamer. We are not even sniffing at Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Prime. … I don’t think that our industry can or should accept that we are going to collectively be smaller than an eighth-grade streamer.” A.G., who is normally very buttoned-up, has a point: We’re still in the very early stages of a business model transformation, and there may be reason for optimism after a few months dominated by industry-wide layoffs.

For weeks, Ackman had been waging a holy war—public threats, appeals to investors, dissertation-length tweets, etcetera—to persuade Axel to disavow and retract reports from Business Insider, one of the largest assets in its U.S. portfolio, that accused his wife, Neri Oxman, of plagiarism. This was a significant detour from Ackman’s initial mission to combat antisemitism and D.E.I. on college campuses after Hamas’s attack on Israel, and one that made Ackman the hero of his own incessant microdrama, which he seemed to relish. Alas, as Proverbs reminds us, the lord works in mysterious ways.

The first time Ackman and Döpfner spoke, it hadn’t exactly been amicable. During a lengthy phone call after the Business Insider stories were published—the first time the two men had ever spoken to one another—Ackman spent the majority of the time forcefully stating his case, while Döpfner tried in vain to interject and level-set. The conflict then escalated: After conducting a poorly messaged internal review, Axel decided to stand by Business Insider’s reporting. Ackman responded with predictable (and prolix) passion, promising to address Axel and B.I.’s “false claims and defamation” in a formal complaint, adding: “By complaint I mean lawsuit, to be clear.” What wasn’t clear is if Ackman had much of a case, of course, but Axel and B.I. nevertheless girded for litigation.

At the very least, I’m told, the Ackman-Döpfner summit almost certainly set the stage for a more sensible, non-litigious end to this whole affair. More to the point, the revelation of the dinner—the fact that it leaked to Page Six now, more than three weeks after the fact—suggests that Ackman may be planning to pursue an offramp that will allow him to avoid a lengthy and protracted legal battle. Of course, it’s fair to assume that an ego like Ackman’s won’t give up this fight without extracting concessions to make détente look like victory. Indeed, in an interview with Lex Fridman published Tuesday, Ackman floated the idea of sending a letter to Axel “demanding they make a series of corrections, and if they don’t make those corrections, the next step is litigation.” I’d anticipate that letter gets sent sooner rather than later.

Presumably, Ackman will seek changes to Business Insider’s reporting that better contextualize Oxman’s citation errors as something less than the malicious, intentional theft of ideas they are currently portrayed as. Axel may not like the idea of acquiescing to those demands now that it has emphatically stood behind B.I.’s journalism, but it may also see the logic here. Indeed, as I’ve noted before, academia is rife with unintentional instances of improper attribution and inaccurate citations that are not malicious. And, without excusing Ackman’s bullying, it’s fair to say that B.I.’s reporting on Oxman has been rather breathless.

To wit: publishing the headline Neri Oxman Admits to Plagiarizing after she apologized for mistakenly failing to put quote marks on source material that she otherwise credited in both the text and the bibliography may be legally permissible, but it’s also an editorial choice that plays into Business Insider’s reputation—despite that glorious Pulitzer—for the kind of gotcha journalism that can be a hazard of the traffic-based business model. It’s also not a difficult thing to tweak.

In any event, it would presumably be better for everyone, including Ackman, to put this issue to bed. His once noble fight against antisemitism and the drift of Ivy League academia has quickly been eclipsed by personal grudges and doxxing campaigns, a point New York’s Reeves Wiedeman makes quite eloquently in his recent profile. And while Ackman may relish his role as the protagonist in this fight—and no doubt likes seeing his mug on the cover of New York—he too must sometimes ask himself what he’s really fighting for at this point.