A MESSAGE FROM INSTAGRAM

Meanwhile, Elon Musk was throwing his weight
around on X, adding to the confusion and leading most sane people in the DMV to wonder aloud when this three-man dynamic would collapse. In particular, why had Johnson’s Mar-a-Lago obsequiousness proved so ineffectual? And when might Trump tire of “Uncle Elon”—his Trumpworld moniker, as my partner Tara Palmeri recently revealed. At the same time, as my partner Dylan Byers has indefatigably chronicled, the long, semi-depressing search for a new executive editor
at The Washington Post was coming to its denouement, with interim leader Matt Murray at last appointed to ascend the greased pole. Anyway, my buddy and I had a lot to kibitz over.

This is a reflective time of year, and there’s a natural instinct—both editorially and biologically, frankly—to wrap a narrative around the past 12 months and annotate it for the memory books. And while
I could certainly indulge that sort of whimsy, I think the behavior slightly misreads the moment. As I chewed over these D.C.-themed storylines at the Riggs, I became increasingly alive to the observation that the next several quarters will be far more fascinating than the ones just traversed.

I’ve often considered Puck to be a biography of our age, told a day at a time. But one of the greatest attributes
of our growing company is my partners’ ability to see around corners—a talent rooted in their own domain expertise and orthogonal thinking as peerless journalists. To wit: Dylan’s latest story on the Washington Post dynamic, And Then There Was Matt…, presciently encapsulates the post-pomp mandate he’ll be handed: laying off multitudes of his
colleagues as he reorients the business toward whatever end goal lies within Jeff Bezos’s brain. Similarly, in How to Spend It: Political Capital Edition, Tara chats with Bill Stepien, Trump’s former White House political director, to envisage how the president-elect will deploy his considerable influence over the
next 18 months.

This sort of vision is the apotheosis of Puck. In Grede Is Good, Lauren Sherman speaks with Skims C.E.O. Jens Grede to plot out the exit strategies for the most consequential apparel company—and
celebrity-adjacent business concept—of our micro-age. In The NBA’s Long December, John Ourand captures the latest agita among ESPN executives, who just paid $2.5 billion per year for NBA rights only to see league viewership decline by 21 percent year over year on their air. 

There’s more: In Sotheby’s Black Tuesday, the perspicacious Marion Maneker details how a $1 billion investment from Abu Dhabi is going to remake the historic auction house, and perhaps the entire industry. And in Amazon’s Christmas Theater War, the great Matt Belloni elucidates how something as picayune as the release schedule of Red One could presage the next disruption of the exhibition business. As I finished my martini on Thursday evening, I referred my friend to Eriq Gardner’s latest masterpiece,
Hollywood’s Diversity Villain & Streaming’s Insidious Bill, which focuses on a couple of Trump-era legal developments that could spoil the new year for showbiz executives. 

But if you only have time to read one thing this weekend, I’d refer you to
Bill Cohan’s latest brilliant entry in Puck’s David Zaslav oeuvre: Zaz in Cable Wonderland, which I previewed last week. Yes, yes, I know that Puck occasionally manifests a fair amount of alacrity when it comes to the Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. and his deal machinations. But, as Bill notes, the Zaz endgame is becoming
increasingly clear as he separates out his cable assets, brings on an expensive team of dealmakers and deal lawyers, and signals his intention to the market. After all, the guy isn’t simply gesturing at how he’ll remake his own company, but also a new model for the media business. It’s the story of our time and, as always, precisely what you should expect from Puck.