Years ago, a mentor of mine took the time to extemporize about the theory of
punctuated equilibrium, the concept in evolutionary biology (and since applied to politics and economics) that progress rarely occurs gradually, as we expect, or hope, but rather in cacophonous fits and starts.
Indeed, industries don’t really evolve in a piecemeal manner. Instead, there’s an awakening or disruptive technology—the printing press, the Renaissance, the cotton
gin, Ford’s assembly line, the iPhone, Obama, Trump, ChatGPT—that catapults the culture forward, inevitably causing a series of reverberations. As Shakespeare knew well, there’s almost always an inciting event that provokes the drama—or the markets—into action. That’s a truth we hold to be self-evident, and one of the many reasons we’ve derived our name from the bard. (For those just tuning in, Puck is named after the mirthful narrating fairy in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Anyway, without getting unnecessarily philosophical, the conversation crossed my mind amid a week replete with so many gyrations, oscillations, and conflagrations, from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C.
In her extraordinary debut at Puck, my newest partner, Leigh Ann Caldwell, delivered a pair of showstopping dispatches from
Trump’s Washington that captured the nonstop whiplash of, well, so many aspects of his dervish—the reversed O.M.B. freeze, the elongated nomination battle royales, and the attendant anxieties and animosities of both his supplicants and foes on Capitol Hill. If you really want a flavor of what’s going on in the nation’s capital, I’d suggest devouring Leigh Ann’s two masterstrokes,
The Week & The Damned and Endless Executive Time. For his part, Dylan Byers elegantly captured the new and utterly bizarre machinations and jolts inside the Brady Briefing Room and D.C. media
scene in his latest joint, Boiler Room.
Obviously, it’s not just politics that’s on the fritz. In Sex, Lies & Nvidia, Bill
Cohan dispassionately examined the chipmaker’s massive sell-off, the most potent expression of a panic that swept Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike. As Bill put it, “One faithful Wall Street eminence, a lusty contrarian, wrote to me on Monday that his ‘decades’ of market experience had led him to the conclusion that ‘stocks have their sharpest drops from their highest peaks when all see only upside.’ I’d say we experienced a healthy dose of reality on Monday. I think we have a few
more doses to take before we’re done here, even if in the longer run, owning stocks—at least over the past 45 years or so—has proved to be a major wealth generator.” Punctuated equilibrium, indeed.
The peerless Matt Belloni captured the same phenomenon in his fabulous story Kabletown at a Krossroads, which juxtaposed Netflix’s boffo earnings and seemingly irreversible ascent with Peacock’s latest losses and continued uncertainty. As we move into an era when so many streamers have pivoted toward profitability, Peacock is stuck deep in the red—a $372 million loss in the last quarter, to be precise—and approaching decision time. “So that leads to the inevitable M&A discussion that has consumed Hollywood for the past few years,”
Matt noted. “We all know that Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav wants a transformational deal.” But do Comcast’s Brian Roberts and Mike Cavanagh? “That’s been the open question, and the triple-whammy of broadband weakness, the cable TV spinoff, and the issues at Peacock suggest the right time may be approaching.”
But if you have time to read
only one piece this weekend, and perhaps you’re pining for some distance from the domestic landscape, I’d turn your attention to Lauren Sherman’s newest release from her ever-satisfying oeuvre on Europe’s largest conglomerate, We Need to Talk About LVMH, which is exclusive to our Inner Circle members. (Upgrade your subscription
here, if you haven’t already.)
LVMH, after all, is a company steeped in history and yet also ruthlessly attempting to maintain its moat by shuffling its portfolio—divesting smaller entities while focusing on its largest brands, and rearranging creative executives and operators in the process, all while sorting through the
real-time management of succession planning. Its maneuvers, complex and often vague, are the latest evidence that progress rarely happens gradually but rather, as Hemingway said about bankruptcy, slowly and then seemingly all at once. It’s a leitmotif of our culture, and something you’ll always see reflected in Puck.
