Good morning,

Happy Saturday and welcome back to the Backstory—your weekend capsule of the best work that we are publishing here at Puck. For those of you who are new subscribers: welcome! I’m Jon Kelly, the co-founder and editor-in-chief here. On behalf of our astonishingly talented team of journalists, thanks for spending some of your valuable weekend with us. 

It was another incredible week here at the mothership—Tina Nguyen’s brilliant and G.O.P.-gossipy analysis of the Trump minions’ parlor games; Matt Belloni’s industry-defining reportage on the Hollywood M&A landscape; Peter Hamby’s delectable dish on Betomania, plus Dylan Byers on the latest round of cable news musical chairs and Bill Cohan’s fantastic feature on perhaps the worst media deal in history. I implore you to read these stories, and stick around, below the fold, for the backstory on how it came together.

HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni breaks down Bob Chapek’s mission statement.

WASHINGTON:

Peter Hamby assesses Betomania ‘22.

And…

Tina Nguyen explains Trump’s ‘24 Achilles’ heel.

WALL STREET:

Bill Cohan reveals the secret story behind the sale of NBC.

SILICON VALLEY:

Teddy Schleifer unveils the furtive world of MacKenzie Scott.

And…

Baratunde Thurston exposes life on the blockchain.

MEDIA:

Dylan Byers uncovers the future of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox mid-streaming-pivot.

And…

Brian Morrissey decodes Ben Smith and his Times.

PODCAST:

Get the real inside story from our elite team on The Powers that Be, our weekly show. 

PODCAST

It might be uncharacteristic to regard elite reporters as the talent market’s most underpriced influencers, but it’s precisely what they are. Before Bill Cohan was the fiercest reporter on Wall Street, he was a ferocious M&A banker. Matt Belloni understands how Hollywood’s business engines truly churn better than anyone because, in his past life, he was an entertainment lawyer. Baratunde Thurston’s wisdom about tech and finance hails, in part, from his own formative years as a management consultant in Boston. 

Dylan was on cable news before he covered it for Puck. Julia Ioffe reports on Washington like a foreign correspondent—because that’s what she felt like when she returned after covering Vladimir Putin, for years, in Russia. Tina, as many of you know, worked for Tucker Carlson before she began scrutinizing him. (God love ya, Tina.) Teddy Schleifer was a billionaire before he gave it all away to cover the growing American oligopoly. (Okay, I made that last part up.) 

Our writers’ unique domain expertise is what makes their journalism so singular. It’s what allows them to penetrate the inside conversation: the facts, the gossip, and what the people who run it all are really talking about under their breath. And without being myopic, it’s what makes my job so unbelievably rewarding and exciting.

NEWSLETTERS

I’ll give you an example. On Monday, I was emailing with Bill about a question that had been percolating in my mind ever since his excellent piece on the birth of cable television, Portrait of The Zaz as a Young Dealmaker, which starred a bunch of GE executives who pioneered the industry back in the late ‘80s—the legendary “C.E.O. of the century” Jack Welch, and his protégé David Zaslav, among them. It’s a fantastic story, and I encourage you to read it, if you haven’t. At its core, it explains how some around-the-corner-seeing industrial logic can not only transform an industry but rapidly accelerate its disruption.

So, I asked Bill, if those deal-making geniuses had foreseen the pivot to cable, how did GE—once the world’s most valuable company—miss the pivot to streaming and lose its appetite for the media business, altogether? A decade ago, the company sold NBCUniversal—its linear, cable, and studio assets—in two tranches for about $30 billion. Given what AT&T paid for Warner Media (around $109 billion) and Disney paid for the palatable elements of the Murdoch empire ($71 billion or so), NBCU is probably worth well north of $100 million. For Comcast, it was the deal, or the steal, of the century.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Bill’s email was fascinating, laying it all out for me in effortless, graceful prose. (As a young twerp in this business, I used to always suggest that we publish our journalists’ emails, which were always the most intimate and effortless distillation of their thinking. I was usually, and summarily, told to fetch someone coffee. But at Puck, about once a week per author, we do.) Anyway, the deal was a combination of micro and macro factors. Welch, Zaslav, and the team from the ‘90s, had moved on. Also, the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis provided a unique and acute kryptonite to GE Capital’s fortress balance sheet. I asked Bill if he would explore it in a larger piece.

In his extraordinary story, Bill marries the economic and financial big picture with all the juicy, cinematic, and insiderly details illuminating the tete-a-tete–golf meetings gone nowhere, the swaggering prowess of mega-banker Jimmy Lee, the cool market-making of Jamie Dimon, a height-of-his powers Charlie Rose, plus a vengeful Welch and petrified Jeff Immelt, and a scene from an off-the-record C.E.O. conference that makes Succession seem like a show about rival saints. 

It’s too good to be true. Except that it happened. And it’s exactly the sort of story that you’ll only find in Puck. Pull it up on your iPad today as you throw a log on the fire.

Have a great weekend,

Jon

P.S. - if there's something holding you back from becoming a subscriber, I'd love to hear about it. Please feel free to reply to this email with your feedback (replies go directly to my inbox).