Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, your Saturday roundup of all the best new work at Puck.

It was another incredible week: Matt Belloni investigated how high the Ellisons might bid for Paramount while Bill Cohan revealed the limits of Netflix’s own financial firepower. Julia Alexander diagnosed the streamers’ surprising vulnerabilities, and Eriq Gardner detailed an unrelated legal snafu. For his part, Dylan Byers parsed the derivative implications for the anchors hyperventilating in the CNN crying rooms.

Meanwhile, Lauren Sherman unearthed the roots of a Versace defenestration; Rachel Strugatz documented a beauty industry un-canceling; Sarah Shapiro filed a dispatch from Substackistan; John Ourand relayed a college football lovers quarrel; Ian Krietzberg demoed an A.I. life coach; and Marion Maneker ran the numbers on the booming Les Lalanne market.

Down in Washington, Leigh Ann Caldwell pondered Mike Johnson’s career crisis; Peter Hamby identified the Democrats’ latest potential 2028 headache; Julia Ioffe scrutinized Pete Hegseth’s Caribbean misadventure; and Abby Livingston chronicled a Mamdani-esque saga in Texas.

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

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Lauren Sherman envisions Versace under Prada and weighs in on the Saks debt discourse.
and…
Rachel Strugatz unpacks the John Demsey redemption tour.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro captures the action on the industry’s new preferred platform.

Marion Maneker reports back from Miami Art Week.

Matt Belloni takes stock after David Ellison’s hostile bid for WBD.
and…
Julia Alexander articulates the Netflix–Warners thesis.
and…
Eriq Gardner monitors the streamer’s latest legal scuffle.

Ian Krietzberg explores the blossoming L.L.M. self-help sub-category.

Dylan Byers breaks down the latest Bari Weiss–CBS kremlinology.

John Ourand considers the Notre Dame College Football Playoff tantrum.
and…
Julia Alexander presages EA Sports’ streaming ambitions.

Bill Cohan details the junk-bond limits of Netflix’s pursuit of Zaz’s Studios and Streaming business.

Leigh Ann Caldwell charts Mike Johnson’s career crossroads.
and…
Peter Hamby tackles the left’s A.I. messaging problem.
and…
John Heilemann digs into the Hegseth double-tap scandal.
and…
Abby Livingston evaluates the Jasmine Crockett of it all.

Paul Goldberger revisits Frank Gehry’s career.
and…
Christine Muhlke toasts Raoul’s at 50.
meanwhile…
Carolina de Armas dissects the elements of style.

Dylan and Julia Alexander discuss Yahoo under Apollo rule on The Grill Room.
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Ourand declares the sports media winners and losers of the year on The Varsity.
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Lauren and The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins make sense of the Uniqlo empire on Fashion People.
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Heilemann and retired general Barry McCaffrey discuss Trump’s escalating war games on Impolitic.
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Matt and research analyst Peter Supino map out the WBD conquest on The Town.
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Peter and Leigh Ann trade notes on the ’26 MAGA time bomb on The Powers That Be.

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Last week, shortly before the bids were due for Warner Bros. Discovery, I was catching up with a media executive near the nucleus of the action. It was a social affair, but I was dying to ask for the latest information—even if this person could only convey it off the record or within our circle of trust. Instead, this person turned the telescope around and asked me the same question—what were Matt Belloni and Bill Cohan and Dylan Byers and Kim Masters and John Ourand hearing? What did Julia Alexander, Puck’s sui generis streaming savant, make of the competing bidders? And what did Eriq Gardner, our resident legal analyst, think about the various regulatory paths? I could only smile. I told him to read carefully.

Soon thereafter, Netflix shocked the entertainment industry and Wall Street with its winning bid, and, as I noted last week, my partners jumped into action—defining all the contours of the public’s understanding of the deal. Last Sunday, as the Ellisons were licking their chops, my peerless partner Bill Cohan delivered the first of an epic pair of pieces, Netflix’s $83B Math & The Ellison Hostile Meter. Sure enough, the Ellisons launched their hostile bid mere hours later, which prompted Bill’s prescient tome, The Ellisons at the Gate, which brilliantly laid out just how far Netflix could take its own bid before veering into junk bond territory and public market purgatory. “If the Ellisons really want to end this drama right here, right now, they should raise their offer to $34 a share, all cash, and take this baby off the table,” Bill wrote. “Netflix won’t be able to match it. Some $93 billion in borrowings is both a bridge too far for Netflix’s balance sheet and, dare I say, even for the debt markets as a whole during these uncertain times.” Hours later, a WBD executive texted, “Cohan is a force of nature.”

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Bill’s incredible work was complemented by so many of our partners, who endeavored to evaluate the innumerable consequences of this saga. In How High Will the Ellisons Go?, Matt scrutinized the deal from the other side. “How high will they go? $32? $35?” Matt wrote. “If Warners rejects his latest bid, Ellison will almost certainly offer more, I’m told. Will Netflix match or exceed that offer? Netflix has restless shareholders. Ellison controls Paramount and does not. Remember, Warner Discovery was trading at less than $10 before the sale chatter began. Pretty amazing.” In Why Netflix Needs Warner Bros., Julia Alexander enumerated the streaming hegemon’s private challenges. It’s required reading for industry observers and company executives, alike. (The usual, and now slightly ubiquitous disclosure: Through our recent acquisition of Air Mail, both WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav and Paramount investor RedBird Capital are minority investors in Puck. Zaz, for what it’s worth, is a de minimis investor in the company.)

But if you’re Ellisoned out, or overwhelmed by the various attendant subplots, I’d turn your attention to an entirely different part of the Puck cinematic universe. As Wall Power readers well know, the art market has recently been jolted out of a long somnolence by a successful series of auctions in Paris and New York.

Recently, my partner Marion Maneker joined the traveling circus for the latest stop on the tour—Art Basel Miami—to see if the momentum was enduring. “There are a few possible reasons why this year’s fair was so well-attended,” Marion reported from South Beach. “Not to get political, but I’ve been wondering if the art market’s new mood is somehow intertwined with the serious cracks emerging in the MAGA coalition. This crowd mostly votes with its economic interests, even if its members often express a different social point of view from the Republican powers that be. But rich people got what they wanted from Trump, and now, perhaps believing they won’t have to suffer through a forever administration, they’ve started to feel better about spending.”

Then he offered a supplemental theory: “The other contributing factor, ironically, seems to have been the relentless drumbeat of negative news in the art press for the past year or more,” he said. “Many dealers, advisors, and their clients were recoiling from all the gloom and doom—some of it warranted, and much of it presented for the sake of drama. Buying art is inherently social, and few collectors are self-directed enough to want to be the only one doing it.” 50 Hours in Miami, his travelogue, is an excellent snapshot of a nuanced and delicate market at an inflection point, featuring cameos from plenty of the characters that make that world so fascinating. Has the groundhog indeed failed to see its shadow? It’s one of the great mysteries of the moment, and a topic that we’ll continue to explore just as feverishly as the WBD deal here at Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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