Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inside conversation in the media industry. This week, I link up with my colleague Teddy Schleifer, author of Puck’s excellent Stratosphere email (sign up here), to explore all the ramifications of the Journal’s Elon-Nicole-Sergey exposé—for the players involved, and for the paper itself.

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In modern times, salacious details about the alleged sex lives of moguls tend to be unearthed by The Daily Mail or The National Enquirer, or by TMZ, which recently published exclusive photos of an Adonis-like Ari Emanuel hosing down Musk on a yacht off Mykonos. “How is this a Journal story?” more than a few media executives muttered aloud after its publication. Musk tweeted that the Journal had gone “way sub tabloid.” Many of the paper’s biggest critics in the business community, as well as a few Friends of Elon similarly accused the paper of falling to tacky standards when we spoke to them—and this was before Elon Musk and Nicole Shanahan, Brin’s ex and the woman implicated in the story, issued their strongly worded denials and effectively accused the paper of defamation...