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Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon compilation of
Puck’s best new reporting.

First up today, Lauren Sherman dissects the latest changes within the Chanel empire as the Matthieu Blazy era approaches: the Wertheimer family’s restructuring of the business, the painful layoffs and employee exits, and, most tellingly, the appointment of Teresa Ko (a.k.a. the “I.P.O. queen”) to the board. Is a
public offering on the horizon? 

Plus, below the fold: Peter Hamby takes stock of the tech billionaires who were front and center at Trump’s inauguration. Scott Mendelson ruminates on the five biggest themes keeping Hollywood executives up at night. On Somebody’s Gotta Win, Tara Palmeri is joined by Axios’s Marc Caputo to separate Trump’s inauguration rhetoric from the
viability of his agenda. On Fashion People, Lauren connects with The New York Times’s Sapna Maheshwari to discuss what the current TikTok chaos means for fashion brands. And on The Powers That Be, Peter rings up Bill Cohan for a sobering analysis of the first family’s cynically timed launch of multibillion-dollar memecoins.

As Chanel waits for new womenswear designer Matthieu Blazy to make his debut in October, they’re
not waiting to make other changes in the interregnum. To wit: This past week, the company quietly laid off about 70 people. While the cuts are relatively small, Chanel is trimming across all regions, preparing for both new executives and new creatives. Since Leena Nair was appointed C.E.O. in 2021, she’s pushed to streamline the business cross-functionally, while decentralizing decision-making power. Though the principle underpinning these changes was to futureproof the company against
the whims of the luxury industry, there has been speculation that the controlling Wertheimer family was surreptitiously setting the business up for some kind of liquidity event—a hypothesis that went into overdrive after the recent appointment of “I.P.O. queen” Teresa Ko.

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Trump has always possessed a magical ability to convince voters that he’s still a populist
outsider—the anti-politician, fighting for Joe and Jane Six-Pack against the “elites”—even as he takes private Mar-a-Lago meetings with multibillionaires expecting favors in return for their campaign checks. As rich as Trump is, or pretends to be, his man-of-the-people shtick somehow works—in part because he’s really never been a free market Wall Street absolutist in the classic Republican mold. But watching him at the inauguration, flanked by a platoon of billionaire supplicants and
unaccountable tech executives, Peter writes, one has to wonder how long the president can keep wearing the outsider mask.

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Open source AI is available to all, not just the few.

In this job market, how are you standing out in a sea of resumes? 

The solution: "With Llama, Meta’s free open source AI model, we built an AI tool that helps candidates write resumes and more—like a personal career coach," says CEO Mitchell.

Learn more about how others are building with open source AI.

Two of the three major studio releases of 2025 have already performed as well as could be
expected: Den of Thieves 2 notched a $15.5 million opening, followed by Sony’s R-rated comedy One of Them Days, which earned $13 million over the M.L.K. holiday frame. Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 2010 all over again. But the success of those relatively modest releases can’t compensate for a holiday weekend that was among the worst since the late ’90s—a dissonance that reflects the existential nightmare Hollywood has endured for many years now. And yet, with
the pandemic and strike delays in the rearview, this year’s slate will approximate the number of wide theatrical releases that the exhibition industry was accustomed to a decade ago. The question, of course, is whether that translates to similar box office success. Herewith, a look at five of the entertainment industry’s biggest themes, anxieties, and fantasies as the year kicks off.

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Tara is joined by Axios’s Marc Caputo from Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., to
share their instant reactions to the events of the day and the preceding weekend. They discuss the highlights of Trump’s speech, differentiate the rhetoric from his actual presidential intentions, and talk about their favorite moments from the event.

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Open source AI is available to all, not just the few.

Studies show it takes hundreds of days to match patients with a clinical trial.

The solution: "We used Meta's free open source AI model, Llama, to build an AI tool that helps match patients to clinical trials in a day," says Dr. Salloum.

Learn more about how others are building with open source AI.

Lauren is joined by New York Times reporter Sapna Maheshwari to discuss what the
current TikTok chaos means for fashion brands and beyond. They also provide live commentary on fashion at the inauguration, and address how the industry is playing ball with Trump this time around. Finally, they offer a big-picture analysis of Vuori’s business potential. Lauren also weighs in on changes at Chanel, including a small-but-significant round of layoffs.

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Bill Cohan joins Peter for a sobering analysis of the first family’s cynically timed and
self-dealing launch of multibillion-dollar memecoins over the weekend, and how the crypto donation box could become a five-alarm constitutional fire. Then they scrutinize the seating chart (and hidden motives) of the tech billionaires at Trump’s inauguration.

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