Joe’s Inflection Point, Music Streaming Overhaul, Elon’s Fate

Welcome back to the Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to the latest reporting from Puck.

Today, we lead with Tara Palmeri’s revelatory interview with Greg Schultz, Biden’s ex-campaign manager, whose insights are informed by a synapse-level familiarity with the president’s unique strengths and foibles.

Plus, below the fold, Eriq Gardner unveils a precedent-setting $7.8B music streaming case set to flip the industry’s power balance. Then he swings by The Powers That Be for a joint conversation with Bill Cohan and Peter Hamby, in which they chart Musk’s legal fate after he reneged on the Twitter deal late Friday night.

Greg Schultz: He’s someone who is really comfortable in almost all of the rooms he’s in. Trips out with him are super stressful. He takes speech prep very seriously, he takes policy prep with the team before events very seriously, so it can be a very stressful plane ride out. And then it’s honestly one of those fun plane rides back. He can be very tough in prep, but then when you’re done, he’s like, How’s your mom? Give her a call. Let’s see how she’s doing.

The guy really was one of the more optimistic people in the White House. I don’t know if it’s just that when you go through tragedy, as he has, you just have to keep a perspective that’s brighter than the others around you. It always kind of stood out to me. I think it’s kind of a forward-looking optimism that you don’t often find.

But he also has a temper.

He’s like a lot of Irish friends I have. They wear their emotions on their sleeves, there’s not much room for guessing how they’re feeling at that moment.

You’re a Biden guy, and you saw him win a once wildly improbable electoral victory. Now he is polling at 33 percent. How can the White House demonstrate his strengths effectively?

I think Joe Biden’s gut is closer to the gut of the average American than probably almost anybody in D.C.—any operative, any staffer. I think Joe Biden gets the average person better than almost anyone. And it’s stressful staffing him because you have to trust that, at the end of the day—well, maybe the end of the week or month—that he’s going to take you more forward than he does backwards...