Welcome to The Best & The Brightest. I’m your host for the evening, Abby Livingston.

It may be the so-called dog days of summer, but we’ve lost track of time amid the most unpredictable and exciting election cycle of our lifetimes. Tonight, I offer some thoughts and fresh reporting on Ilhan Omar’s primary victory. Otherwise, it’s a very media-heavy issue. My partner Dylan Byers offers some news and notes on the rumblings within The Washington Post and CNN, two familiar haunts for this crowd. And then Puck’s William D. Cohan delights us with a financial analysis of Twitter, Trump’s on-again, off-again platform du jour. (Sorry, I just can’t call it X with a straight face…)

But first…

🎧 Essential listening: If you missed it, John Heilemann was joined last week by MSNBC’s Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace to discuss Tim Walz’s debut as Kamala Harris’s running mate. (Listen here or here.) He also just dropped a new episode featuring wunderkind New York Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein, where they got into whether the aging, increasingly doddering Trump is the new Biden on the campaign trail; Nancy Pelosi’s preternatural intuition; and how the Harris campaign is reconstructing her political identity in real time. You can hear it all here or here.

Also, I want to turn your attention to a particularly excellent edition of Tara Palmeri’s podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win. She and our partner Matt Belloni discussed Harris’s ties to Hollywood and whether they will be a benefit, a perk, or perhaps a curse. Check out the episode here.

And now, some news and notes on the media swirl from Dylan…

• Will Lewis returns: Washington Post C.E.O. Will Lewis will be back home at his recently purchased $7 million Georgetown domicile next week after what appears to have been a three-week sojourn in the South of France. While en vacances, he sent several attaboys to staff congratulating them on various aspects of their coverage, and was conveniently OOO for the brief, Folkenflik-induced spasm surrounding news of a possible criminal investigation into his past activities cleaning up Murdoch’s phone-hacking scandal. In any event, he returns to more pressing challenges, including whether to keep Matt Murray in place as editor (still the preference of the newsroom, it seems), and how to finesse the creation of that “third newsroom,” which, as I noted earlier this month, is likely to require a drastic reorganization of the Post’s non-core coverage areas, and thus more layoffs, leadership changes, and even possible M&A. Should be an eventful fall. “Hope he comes back rested,” one Post insider told me.
• Wither Reliable Sources?: The future of Reliable Sources, the influential CNN media newsletter that Brian Stelter launched nearly a decade ago and that Oliver Darcy shepherded in recent years, is now uncertain after the latter elected to forgo a contract renewal and set off on his own (his new newsletter is called Status). CNN says Reliable will relaunch in the fall, and C.E.O. Mark Thompson spoke highly of his outfit’s media coverage in a recent staff call. Still, CNN has obviously sought to wind down the enterprise since WBD took over, starting with Chris Licht’s decision to defenestrate Stelter and kill off the long-running Sunday show of the same name, and continuing with its disinclination to really invest in Reliable or Darcy as a true franchise. And perhaps that makes sense: Media coverage of this variety is often too insidery and self-referential for a mass-market brand like CNN, and it didn’t help that Darcy showed an eagerness to play ombudsman and tweak his own bosses.

  On the other hand, one could argue that Reliable is exactly the kind of franchise Thompson should covet as he seeks to build a new suite of subscription products to buoy the network’s fortunes. Obviously, it would never have the mass appeal of, say, a Sanjay Gupta health vertical, but media insiders are also a very engaged and monetizable audience (trust me). In any event, it’s not something CNN leadership seems terribly preoccupied by. And even if they were, good luck finding a well-sourced media reporter with the Stelter- or Darcy-like stamina and work ethic to put out that lengthy compendium of the day’s media news four or five times a week. (I know this all too well from my time in those salt mines.) Indeed, it’s likely the next iteration of the newsletter will be, like the network itself, a little more general, a little more accessible, and a little more bland. “I don’t think they want the newsletter anymore,” one CNN veteran said. “I think they’re happy he moved on.” —Dylan Byers

Like many successful House incumbents, Omar spent the first year of her congressional term raising—and saving—as much money as possible, both to prepare for a primary or general election challenge and to scare off potential challengers. As of mid-July, Omar had a reported $1.8 million in cash-on-hand.

After Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack on Israel, it was clear that the U.S. response would become a hypercharged political issue—and not all Squad member campaigns were equally prepared for the fight ahead. To wit: According to mid-October campaign finance reports, at the time, A.O.C. had a whopping $5.4 million in cash-on-hand. Ayanna Pressley, meanwhile, had only $186,000, but had a functional campaign infrastructure and a formidable profile in Massachusetts. They were almost certainly never going to lose a reelection fight. Meanwhile, Rashida Tlaib and Omar had less impressive—but still strong—fundraising numbers: Tlaib posted $620,000 in cash-on-hand, while Omar had about $650,000. While not stratospheric, these figures telegraph incumbents in fighting condition and thinking about reelection. Bowman and Bush, however, were not in great shape. Bowman had about $180,000 in cash on hand, while Bush had under $20,000.

While both Bowman and Bush’s campaigns would eventually kick into gear in the new year, with tens of millions of dollars pouring into their races, those weak campaign finance reports likely painted them as easy targets for political enemies. Perhaps that explains why Omar is still standing. —Abby Livingston

Now for tonight’s main event… Bill Cohan on Elon’s latest X debacle and C.E.O. Linda Yaccarino’s quixotic legal crusade to force advertisers back onto the platform… (Make sure you sign up for Dry Powder, his brilliant private email, here.)

Now Elon has attempted to turn himself into the victim, a tough role for him. This week, X filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media—an initiative that seeks to reduce the occurrence of ads appearing adjacent to harmful social media content—and the World Federation of Advertisers for allegedly boycotting the platform. In an “open letter” to advertisers that accompanied her bizarre video (as well as the lawsuit), Yaccarino cited a House Judiciary Committee report that found GARM and its members “directly organized boycotts” to “target disfavored platforms,” such as X. In the complaint, which was filed in a Texas federal court, X argued that the “conduct” of the defendants “is a naked restraint of trade without countervailing benefits to competition or consumers” and asked for treble damages. “This is not a decision we took lightly, but it is a direct consequence of their actions,” Yaccarino wrote in her letter. “The illegal behavior of these organizations and their executives cost X billions of dollars.” Yaccarino also managed to find the opportunity to plug her business. “In August 2022, people spent 7.2 billion active minutes on the platform,” she wrote. “Today, that number is more than 9 billion, a 25 percent increase.”

Elon then retweeted her “open letter to advertisers,” adding his thought that, “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war.” As a result of the filing—who wants to get into a legal fight with Elon Musk?—GARM announced that it was winding down its operations. That was probably wise, considering that NPR is reporting that Elon has landed the case before his “favorite judge” in Fort Worth, Reed O’Connor, a Tesla investor and a member of the Federalist Society.

I can see why Yaccarino is panicking: Her job is probably on the line. According to an eMarketer report published in the Times, X had advertising revenue of $1.13 billion in 2023, a 52 percent decline from 2022. It hasn’t been much better so far this year. According to the report, X had $114 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2024, a 25 percent decrease from the first quarter of 2024 and 53 percent less than the year-earlier period. Its third-quarter revenue projection is set at $190 million, supposedly bolstered by Olympics-related ad spending (I’m not seeing that in my feed), which would still be 25 percent lower than a year earlier if it were achieved.

For a business that was not owned by the world’s richest man to lose 25 percent of its year-over-year revenue would be devastating, especially when he so wildly overpaid for the company in the first place, using a fair amount of leverage. This is a fiasco, for sure, but it’s one of Elon’s and Yaccarino’s own making, not that of the advertisers, who are well within their rights to abandon the platform if they so choose.

The equity investors in Elon’s X are wiped out, for sure. Like Elon, who is going to lose his $24 billion, I doubt Larry Ellison will care about losing his $1 billion, as incredible as that may seem. (His net worth is nearly $150 billion these days, up $23 billion so far in 2024.) But I do feel a bit sorry for my old friend Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, of Saudi Arabia. That poor guy, who I once wrote about in an old-school Vanity Fair profile, could have cashed out his holdings in Twitter for $1.9 billion, or at the purchase price of $54.20, in cash, for each of his roughly 35 million shares. Instead, he rolled his equity over into Elon’s X. That money’s gone, dear prince. (I guess he’ll be okay, too; Bloomberg pegs his net worth these days at $15 billion, despite his unplanned stay in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton in 2017.)

Let me assure you, that is not normal behavior. If anyone else owned X, those interest payments would almost certainly cease. There would likely have already been a default, or a restructuring, or a bankruptcy. And the par banks—the banks that made the initial loan—would have sold out long ago to the vulture investing crowd that includes the likes of Marc Rowan at Apollo and Jeffrey Gundlach at DoubleLine. Instead, the par banks are holding on for dear life, hoping that Elon keeps paying that interest and that they somehow recoup their $13 billion.

I’m not a lawyer or a judge, and who knows what Elon’s friendly judge in Texas will do with this lawsuit. Maybe it’s moot now that the defendant has closed its doors. But the idea that advertisers can somehow be found liable for choosing not to advertise on a media platform, especially when the owner of said media platform has given them plenty of reasons not to, is laughable.