Welcome back to The Stratosphere, now broadcasting from Washington.

Today, a scoop on a new Ron DeSantis event next month with a top Republican donor that’s already making waves in the ’24 shadow primary.

But first…

• EMILY’s List & an S.B.F. Scoop: Women Vote!, a super PAC aligned with EMILY’s List, plans to set aside and return the $2.25 million that they received last cycle from Nishad Singh, the FTX executive who pleaded guilty last month to serving as a straw-donor for Sam Bankman-Fried. In its first public comments about its plans for the donation, and after being a bit of a holdout, the super PAC told me: “While WOMEN VOTE! spent all of the funds it received last cycle on its mission to elect pro-choice Democratic women, we are engaged and cooperating with the multiple authorities seeking to reclaim these contributions and working on the details to return the funds through these avenues.”

  It’s an important development given that the group was the recipient of Singh’s single biggest PAC donation. (He was also the group’s second-biggest individual donor after Mike Bloomberg last cycle.) One challenge for outside groups like Women Vote! is that they do not simply have $2.25 million sitting in their bank account after the midterms; money will now have to be raised to essentially pay back authorities, a hard pitch to donors for the 2024 cycle.

• Curtains for Bezos?: Time is unquestionably running out for Jeff Bezos to wrestle away the Washington Commanders football team from Josh Harris, the Apollo co-founder whose group submitted their fully-funded $6 billion bid to purchase the club this week. Another $6 billion, fully-funded bid has arrived from Canadian billionaire Steve Apostolopoulos. But Bezos, who has much deeper pockets than they do, has reportedly struggled to get Dan Snyder—the widely-hated Commanders owner, who in turn hates Bezos’s Washington Post—to let him make a full-throated bid for the team. It now appears that Bezos (who I declared to be the favorite in December) is at imminent risk of losing out, despite hiring the elite Allen & Company sports dealmaking team of banker Steve Greenberg to make it happen.

Lonsdale spends much of his time running his venture firm 8VC, but he is also an ascendant player in Republican fundraising and, since he moved to Texas a few years ago, state politics. Notably, he’s set up his own lobbying shop-cum-conservative think tank, the Cicero Institute, which is set to feature DeSantis as a “special guest” at its first annual “Cicero Courage Awards,” for “courageous citizen legislators,” according to an invitation to the event from him and his wife Tayler passed my way. Lonsdale hasn’t formally committed to raising money for him yet, but the event strikes me as the clearest sign yet that Lonsdale, who has ties to everyone from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, is likely to eventually back DeSantis in his putative presidential run. Lonsdale declined to give an on-the-record interview about the event, but he’s previously told me that DeSantis is a candidate who he “could really see as someone I’d be strongly behind.”

There will be some exceptions across the industry, of course: I’ve reported that Peter Thiel, who recently turned down a Trump super PAC fundraising request, is still most likely to either back Trump or sit out the Republican presidential primary, entirely. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, has told friends that he very much wants Tim Scott to run for president. (Scott is scheduled to host a donor summit next month in South Carolina, and it will be interesting to see whether Ellison is committed enough to attend. His aides didn’t return requests for comment.) “Tim Scott is making a lot of entreaties to Bay Area donors,” noted one G.O.P. operative following the fundraising scene. “Scott would appeal well to the big Romney donors who stayed out in 2016, along with the ones who supported Biden.”

One Silicon Valley G.O.P. donor who may be something of a bellwether is Marc Andreessen, the early internet entrepreneur who was a “Gore-Tech” donor in the late ’90s before moving rightward during the Obama years and becoming a big Romney guy, himself. I recently stumbled on a fundraising invitation from 2013, a relic from a bygone era, for an “afternoon meeting” with then-House Budget Chair Paul Ryan on Sand Hill Road hosted by Andreesssen and Mary Meeker, then a partner at Kleiner Perkins. But after Trump’s election, Andreessen effectively exited stage right from political fundraising, saying that he went on a “spirit walk” as he tried to remold his understanding of the political system.

Will he have come to some realization in time for 2024? In a podcast last week with Erik Torenberg, Andreessen both inveighed against the “oligarchic elite” and said that he suffered a “soul-shattering” moment over the last few years. “I lost all faith in my own ability to understand what was going on,” he said. “And just realized that basically all of my assumptions around how people behave, at least in politics and current events and social dynamics, basically are just wrong.”

Lonsdale, who has been involved with the Koch political network, typifies the thinking of lots of conservatives in tech these days: Hardly sympathetic to Trump, but also more animated and perturbed by the left, with its “woke” ideology and suppression of free speech rights. (To wit: Lonsdale is the board chair of the Bari Weiss-led anti-cancel-culture University of Austin.) Every few months, Lonsdale ends up engulfed in some culture-war controversy or another, accidentally or not.

But off of the Internet, Lonsdale gets attention for actual policy. He’s particularly influential with a younger generation of tech entrepreneurs who see him as an ideas guy on issues like homelessness and healthcare, and he’s surrounded himself with about a dozen political and policy aides in his family office and at his nonprofits. Blake Brickman, a former chief of staff to Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, is Lonsdale’s Head of Public Affairs and runs his think tank; Bryan Sunderland, another old Kentucky G.O.P. hand, runs Lonsdale’s lobbying, dark-money arm. Lonsdale has even talked about running for office himself, possibly.

As of now, Lonsdale isn’t exclusively boosting DeSantis, who, of course, isn’t officially running: He hosted Nikki Haley at his house in Austin earlier this year and introduced her to several local area donors, I’m told. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy attended a big event at Lonsdale’s home earlier this year, too. Still, the splashiness of the DeSantis event—in the heat of the shadow primary, when DeSantis is competing hard for big donors—probably provides a clue to Lonsdale’s ultimate loyalties. The timing itself is coincidental: During the holidays last year, Lonsdale sent an email to his network about the need to reschedule the awards event from January to April in order to accommodate a “courageous US leader we think you’ll enjoy hearing from.” Presumably that’s DeSantis.

In any case, the Lonsdale event is already generating chatter, given their longstanding, increasingly cozy relationship. Lonsdale previously hosted DeSantis at his home in mid-2021, during which he first introduced the governor to Elon Musk; last April, when DeSantis wanted to pass along a message of solidarity to Musk as he attempted to buy Twitter, DeSantis called Lonsdale to share his ideas for the new Twitter owner, according to texts that came out during the ensuing litigation. Lonsdale offered to be a go-between for Musk and DeSantis and put the two of them in touch. Lonsdale’s company also donated $50,000 to DeSantis’s reelection campaign, last year, and has contributed almost $200,000 total to political committees in Florida over the last two years, much of it to pro-DeSantis efforts.

Those are not jaw-dropping amounts in the grand scheme of things, to be sure. But Lonsdale’s value is more as a validator and fundraiser than a megadonor. Outside of the event, Lonsdale is planning on introducing DeSantis to fellow wealthy friends while the governor is in town, I’m told. The event may have been planned quite a while ago, but it is happening at a time when just about every major donor in Republican politics wants to kick the tires on the man. Lonsdale is happy to oblige.