Welcome back to Dry Powder. I’m Bill Cohan.

This afternoon, I wanted to share an update on my favorite Nantucket neighbor, Steve Schwarzman, who recently christened his new Gilded Age Newport shrine, Miramar. Loyal readers will recall my update on the Schwarzman real estate sitch in last week’s Dry Powder. This Sunday, my partner Marion Maneker, Puck’s art market expert, offers a follow-up assessment on the Schwarzmans’ longer-term goals.

But first…

• Deadhead doldrums: I have been an inveterate Deadhead since my high school days, a fact that was sealed forever during my senior year at Duke, when the Grateful Dead played one of its many shows at Cameron Indoor Stadium, home to Duke’s loved and hated basketball team. (Die-hard Dead fans will point out that prior to the Dead playing Cameron, the team had never won a national championship. Since the Dead shows, they’ve won five.) After the show, my good friend Jim Simpson and I went backstage to hang with them for about 20 minutes and gawk. Before we were dispatched—by Bob Weir, as I recall—we got the chance to shake the hands of the band members, including that of the legendary, late Jerry Garcia, missing finger and all.

  So you can imagine how far my ears perked up upon seeing the claim on Twitter/X that maestro guitarist John Mayer had bought 51 percent of the equity in Dead & Company, the latest incarnation of the many successor bands to the Grateful Dead. Dead & Company was fresh off its boffo stay at the Sphere, in Las Vegas—my partner Dylan Byers has all the details on that—and the deal with Mayer seemed at least plausible, given that he’s been touring with Dead & Company for years and the remaining band members aren’t getting any younger.

  Alas, it appears to just be a rumor. I called up my friend Irving Azoff, chairman of Full Stop Management, whose amazing roster of clients includes Mayer as well as Steely Dan, U2, Harry Styles, and the Eagles, among many others, and who had a big hand in arranging Dead & Company’s 30-show stay at the Sphere. “It’s not true,” Irving texted me while I was en route to Idaho for a little off-island adventure. “No idea how that got started.” (Thanks, Elon, for continuing to make X a trusted source for fake news.)

  In any case, it would make sense for the band to work on a retirement plan as the older members start bowing out. Dead aficionados will note that drummer Billy Kreutzmann (age 78) did not join Weir (age 76), Mickey Hart (age 80), and Mayer at the Sphere. What’s more, Weir and Hart will play in Mexico in January as Dead Ahead, and Mayer is not part of that. So there are things that need to be figured out. But for now, Mayer, age 46, is definitely not the controlling partner of the Dead & Company adventure, no matter what the good folks who populate X would have you believe.

• Bronfman’s Paramount fantasy: The only thing I can say for the potential Edgar Bronfman Jr. play for Paramount Global, and his dream of upsetting the Ellison/RedBird apple cart, is… please. I have no doubt that Bronfman would like to get his hands on Paramount, whether by buying NAI, the Redstone family holding company, or buying both NAI and Paramount Global (or a big chunk of it), but I don’t really see what Bronfman can do to get the special committee of the Paramount Global board of directors to change its recommendation by next week, or to extend the go-shop period, unless Shari Redstone is supporting the Bronfman incursion, which I doubt she is. By the way, I thought Bronfman had shown up to the party with Bain Capital as his money source. What happened to that?

  A few weeks ago, I heard that Bronfman was doing due diligence on Paramount, but Bain was hanging back, not willing to commit to the process and to Bronfman. And now, per the Journal, Bain is nowhere to be seen. According to that reporting, which uses a lot of subjunctive, speculative voice, Bronfman, the executive chair of FuboTV, has cobbled together a group that would potentially include Roku, Steven Paul (who previously made noises about wanting to buy NAI), and the hedge fund Fortress Investment Group, which is now owned by Mubadala Capital, an arm of Mubadala Investment Company, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, which may actually have more money than Larry Ellison. (Of course, since CBS can’t be owned by non-Americans, I am not sure how that will shake out, but there’s always “a plan.”)

  Fortress has been a hot potato lately. It was started by a bunch of ex-Goldman guys in 1998 and then became one of the first hedge funds to go public. A few years ago, Softbank bought Fortress, and earlier this year Softbank sold its 90.1 percent stake to Mubadala. I guess Mubadala has the money for all of this, including having to pay Ellison/RedBird the $400 million break-up fee if Bronfman somehow prevails. Of course, Ellison/RedBird also has the opportunity to top any Bronfman bid if he manages to get the special committee to change its recommendation. Could this soon turn into a battle of megabillionaires: Larry Ellison vs. the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund? That would be something, but I agree with my partner Matt Belloni: I don’t see it. Mubadala would have to stay behind the scenes, and I’d also argue that Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s time in the Big Media limelight has come and gone. I’m sticking with David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale on this one.

• Art market optimism: Despite a slate of recent articles featuring broad-stroke analysis of the art market’s downturn, Marion has carefully laid out a persuasive case for optimism—and even signs portending a strong fall sales season. In short, while the top of the market has undeniably contracted, contributing to the dour mood inside big auction houses, “the bottom of the market is motoring along.”

  To paint his more nuanced picture, Marion asked art analytics firm ARTDAI to separate auction results from the past 17 years into six separate tranches. The results underscored the current “strength of the market at lower price points, defying the broader narrative of a crash.” While works sold for above $25 million achieved their lowest total in four years, and there was similarly poor performance in the $5 million to $25 million range, “sell-through rates and sales above the low estimate in the $1 million to $5 million range ticked up in the first half of the year.” Works that were sold in the $250,000 to $1 million range, “the heart of the art market,” have backslid since 2021, but there are signs of stability emerging in this band, and works sold in the $50,000 to $250,000 range are above average levels for the past 17 years. [Read More]

And now, here’s Marion with a brief update on one of the stars of the Dry Powder cinematic universe.

Probably not, so why the concerted publicity push? After reading Bill’s item on the christening of Miramar—which is just a little more than a mile walk away from the most famous house in Newport, the Vanderbilts’ old Breakers—I noticed some other suggestive stories about the party, the house (which the Schwarzmans bought for $27 million in 2021), and their decision to convert the house into a museum that will be open to the public after their deaths. A couple of the reports included quotes from Ian Wardropper, the outgoing director of the Frick Museum in New York, where Schwarzman is a trustee. “They are really taking this seriously,” Wardropper was quoted as saying in two different outlets, “and trying to get the very best objects they can find to make this house sing.”

Wardropper vouched for the quality of the Schwarzmans’ meticulous renovation of the house, which was designed in the French 18th century style and originally completed in 1915. That was three years after the death of its original owner, George D. Widener, who tragically went down with the Titanic while coming home from a trip to Europe to buy furnishings for the house. Widener, who never got the chance to live in Miramar, came from a wealthy Philadelphia family of art collectors. His father, P.A.B. Widener, who built his Gilded Age fortune on Civil War procurement contracts and invested in Philadelphia streetcars before eventually reaching full-fledged Robber Baron status, was a major art collector. His surviving son, Joseph Early Widener, also became an important collector. His 2,000-work donation was one of the founding gifts to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where most of the great collections of the day found their final resting place.

That gives us some clue about what might be going on at Miramar. The mansions in Newport may be grandiose, but they don’t contain much in the way of important art or decorative arts. So the bar is pretty low here for Schwarzman—who has also been endearing himself to the locals by repairing damage to the popular Cliff Walk that runs by the bottom of his property—to stand out. The Schwarzmans are not art collectors in the usual sense of the term, although their $45 billion net worth means they surely buy art. (They’ve got a lot of homes to decorate, after all.) If their goal was to build something to rival the great American collectors like Frick, Barnes, and Getty, they would be starting fairly late in life.

Schwarzman likes to slap his name on things (like the New York Public Library). What I suspect he hopes to get out of sinking tens of millions of dollars into a home he’s not likely to spend more than a few nights a year in, located in a town where he’s never really spent any time, is explained in the museum being slated to be opened to the public some time in the not-too-distant future. In Newport, where the Vanderbilts’ Breakers is the town’s biggest tourist attraction, opening its doors to half a million visitors a year, Schwarzman can affiliate himself with the great fortunes of the Gilded Age and get better name recognition from all who come and see.