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Happy Friday and welcome back to The Daily Courant, your pocket guide to Puck’s best new
reporting.

First up today, Matt Belloni digs into the troubles plaguing Apple TV+, Tim Cook and Eddy Cue’s money-losing streaming service that, despite a meaningful Severance bump, lost $1 billion dollars last year and has spent more than $20 billion on original content since 2019. Given Apple’s recent stock price hit, will the $3
trillion company’s streaming ambitions become expendable? 

Plus, below the fold: Julia Ioffe gathers the inside chatter surrounding Putin’s bad-faith diplomacy and Zelensky’s new post–Oval Office–blowup negotiating strategy. John Ourand reveals how DraftKings’ content gamble took a nosedive. And exclusively for Inner Circle members,
Lauren Sherman identifies the Achilles’ heel for Richard Dickson’s hype-fueled turnaround at Gap Inc. 

Meanwhile, on the pods: Racquet’s Caitlin Thompson joins Dylan Byers on The Grill Room for a rollicking assessment of her quarterly tennis magazine. On Impolitic, John Heilemann rings up former F.B.I. general counsel Andrew Weissmann
to evaluate Trump’s escalating attacks on the judiciary. On Fashion People, Lauren catches up with Rati Sahi Levesque, C.E.O. of The RealReal, to discuss the evolutions in thrifting culture and the company’s tech strategy. And on The Powers That Be, Bill Cohan and Peter Hamby unpack Wall Street’s response to Trump’s erratic and impulsive economic reset.

HOLLYWOOD

More than five years into the Apple TV+ experiment, it’s never been entirely clear what C.E.O. Tim Cook and services
chief Eddy Cue are up to in Hollywood. Since 2019, Apple has shoveled $20 billion into original content for the service, which lost $1 billion in 2024—all the while accumulating only 45 million subscribers worldwide. Indeed, the Nielsen Gauge report continues to omit Apple TV+, meaning that the service generates less than its reporting threshold of 1 percent of viewership on connected TVs. Nevertheless, in just over five years, Apple has become a reliable partner and a high-quality
buyer for Hollywood shows and movies. But will the streaming service become a target if Apple’s financials grow more challenged?

Read Now

WASHINGTON

On Tuesday, Trump presented Putin with the Ukraine-approved proposal for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire—and in
classic Putin fashion, he rejected the offer, instead parrying with a conditional ceasefire. Trump, determined to spin this as a win, convinced Volodymyr Zelensky to accept the whittled-down agreement. But minutes after Trump relayed the information to Zelensky, Russian drones pounded the Ukrainian capital and took out power in a city in the east, leading to counterattacks against an oil depot in Russia’s south. As Julia notes, Trump’s ceasefire team is getting a crash course
in Putin’s bad-faith diplomacy, and Zelensky can only hope the White House loses patience with Moscow before Ukraine’s stockpiles run out.

Read Now

SPORTS

Last January, DraftKings hired Marie Donoghue as chief business and growth officer, signaling a push into content to
boost user engagement. More recently, however, the company seems to be reversing course. It sold its content-generating media company, VSiN, back to the Musburgers; cut ties with Mike Golic and Golic Jr.; parted ways with Trey Wingo after just a year; and Donoghue announced that she would be departing in April. As John incisively observes, this journey toward a Goldilocks relationship with media is representative of a larger paradigm playing out across the industry. DraftKings, after all, isn’t
a media company—it’s a platform, and its goal is to bring in new users at an efficient spend rate. This is little different from the question that bedevils the executives at Prime Video or Netflix, who are figuring out what they need to produce themselves, or what they can simply license.

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FASHION

In this Inner Circle–exclusive dispatch, Lauren turns a skeptical eye on Richard Dickson’s ostensible turnaround at
Gap Inc., despite the bullish outlook shared by many retail analysts and solid sales figures every quarter in 2024. Despite those figures, it’s still unclear to her why someone would choose to shop at the Gap over any other basics purveyor. What problem is Gap solving? It’s an issue across the Gap Inc. portfolio, and one that hasn’t been helped by the hiring of Zac Posen as group creative director. While Posen has recruited high-fashion talent to style and shoot campaigns, it’s still puzzling
why Dickson hired him for the role. So while Dickson has done a formidable job of getting Gap Inc. on the right flight path, can he land the plane?

Read Now

MEDIA

Caitlin Thompson, founder of Racquet, joins Dylan for a deep dive into her mission to make tennis more
vibrant and accessible through her quarterly magazine, blending top-tier journalism, tennis fashion, travel, and escapism—and offering a refreshing contrast to the sport’s corporatized past. Caitlin also weighs in on the evolving media landscape, underscoring the need for mission-driven storytelling to elevate the sport.

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WASHINGTON

John is joined by former federal prosecutor and F.B.I. general counsel Andrew Weissmann to discuss Donald Trump’s
escalating attacks on the judiciary and what it means for the rule of law. Weissmann explains why the showdown between the Trump administration and Federal District Judge James Boasberg amounts to the first genuine constitutional crisis of the Trump 2.0 era; digs into Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s rare public rebuke of a sitting president; and explains why Trump’s recent speech at D.O.J. headquarters was even more ominous than it sounded. 

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FASHION

Lauren catches up with Rati Sahi Levesque, C.E.O. of The RealReal, about the rise of thrifting culture, why The
RealReal’s app is so addictive, the changing face of the luxury consumer, why everyone is searching for collarless Armani blazers, the emergence of Theory as a hot secondhand brand (corporate cosplay?), why investing in tech is sometimes a good idea, and a whole lot more.

Listen
Now

WALL STREET

Bill Cohan joins Peter for a deep dive into Wall Street’s response to President Trump’s erratic and impulsive
economic reset—one that’s doing little to ease consumer prices while throwing markets into disarray. Bill and Peter ask: Where have the big-money power players gone as Trump’s protectionist trade policies sow chaos on The Street? Plus, Bill considers whether Scott Bessent could actually emerge as a stabilizing force.

Listen Now

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