Good morning,

It’s Jon Kelly, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Puck, our new media company focused on the nexus of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. I say this all the time, and I really, really mean it: on behalf of our amazing team of journalists, we appreciate your ongoing support. We hope that you’re enjoying what you’re reading. (Also, check out the latest episode of our podcast, The Powers that Be.) It’s a privilege to stand up this company before your very eyes.

Herewith, some of the incredible work that you might have missed during another busy week at Puck. And stick around, below the fold, for the backstory on how it all came together.

HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni delivers the latest news on The House of Zaz.

WALL STREET:

Bill Cohan ponders life after Leon Black at Apollo

SILICON VALLEY:

Teddy Schleifer has a revealing conversation with Eric Schmidt about the end of the C.E.O. as we know it.

WASHINGTON:

Julia Ioffe reports on how critical race theory has become the G.O.P.’s post-Trump Trumpian political weapon.

And…

Tina Nguyen uncovers that even Trump’s inner circle members think his new social media venture is a joke.

I love Washington, D.C. in the fall, largely because it lags New York in the seasonal changes by a month or so, meaning that you usually get another few weeks out of sweater weather before having to bundle up and resign yourself to the shorter, colder days ahead. Sadly, this was not the case when I arrived on Tuesday morning, stepping from the Acela into a dreary mix of chilly rain and the foreboding vibes of winter. 

I’ve spent my whole career in New York, where media is one of the defining industries in a professional constellation otherwise comprising finance, the legal bar, real estate, healthcare, academia, fashion, and the art scene. Part of the charm of Washington, however, is its singular focus on the hometown trade: politics, which is served by its lobbying businesses, journalism enterprises, its alphabet soup of federal agencies, and the white shoe law constituency. And despite the glum weather, I quickly realized that I had arrived amid the equivalent of a playoff atmosphere. Tuesday, after all, was election day in the hotly contested, endlessly-speculated-about, pundit-head-spinning Virginia governor’s race between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin.

Northern Virginia, of course, is D.C.’s bedroom community. It’s where the swampiest of the swamp live and lurk. And I wasn’t surprised that virtually every meeting I attended on Tuesday included a veritable intermission in which my various companions whipped out their phone to check the exit polls, glance at Twitter, and glower over text threads. 

As Peter Hamby has brilliantly written, an alien would have a hard time detecting much difference between McAuliffe and Youngkin, at least at first blush. McAuliffe is an exceedingly successful businessperson, and former governor, perhaps still most famous for being a long-time member of the Clinton fraternity. Youngkin is ostensibly different only in that he is orders of magnitude wealthier: he’s the former co-C.E.O. of the Carlyle Group, one of the most powerful and renowned private equity companies on the planet, and he cut his teeth under a very different kind of singular personality: the legendary investor David Rubinstein. Both Youngkin and McAuliffe would look equally at home standing beside a Tesla in a half-zip watching their kids play soccer.

But given the state of our politics, the race between suburban soccer dads turned into a vicious social issue-driven Boomer affair. Despite an ongoing pandemic and fears of an economic correction, the race basically came down, in large part, to Youngkin’s ability to stoke fears among suburban moms about critical race theory, which asserts that structures of American society were built upon racist foundations and still function that way. As Julia Ioffe reminds us in an excellent piece this week, critical race theory is not even taught in Virginia’s K-12 schools. This shouldn't have been a controversy at all: concepts like equity and inclusion are common vernacular in the modern workplace and society. But that didn’t stop Youngkin from pledging to ban it anyway on his first day as governor. 

Youngkin had reframed (to use an example of political-financial argot) a crucial election, which could have focused on healthcare or the economy, over a contrived social wedge. More depressingly, reckoning with America’s racial past and present issues is one of the most significant challenges of our time; it requires listening and understanding, not rage-baiting. And yet in our copycat business-political climate, Youngkin’s ability to turn critical race theory into a wedge issue was being heralded by the G.O.P. within hours of his victory. He had established a “playbook” (to use another example of political-financial  argot). By Wednesday morning, the Republican Study Committee issued a memo noting that, in future elections, “Republicans can and must become the party of parents” and build a platform around decrying critical race theory. As our Teddy Schleifer reports, the Democracy Alliance, the left’s mega-money donor network, will be convening (virtually) next week to articulate their own playbook against Youngkin’s playbook.

As Youngkin knows from his business career, the smartest investing decisions are about locating long-term trends and unleashing dry power to accelerate them. Political capital, which used to work the same way, now seems fixated on near-term and reactive micro-trends. But I’m willing to take the long view and assert that divisive contrivances will eventually fall away as myriad constituencies band together to battle the existential issues of our day: healthcare, race, climate, and privacy. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I’ll take the long view.

On a more prosaic level, Youngkin represents something else. A generation ago, the cultural hamlets of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood generally operated separately, with their own machers and hierarchies. Mitt Romney lost the presidency, in part, because he seemed like too much of a business guy. But in the past decades, these sectors have increasingly become one consolidated world. And it’s a world where it’s no longer a surprise that a Harvard M.B.A. and McKinsey alum, who led Carlyle’s $22 billion leveraged buyout of Kinder Morgan, the natural gas colossus, would be running the commonwealth of Virginia. Indeed, Phil Murphy, the victor in Tuesday’s other hotly contested election, in New Jersey, is a former Goldman banker.

This vanishing line between America’s spheres of influence is the leitmotif of Puck. As you ascend the worlds of tech, finance, media, entertainment, and politics, it’s all one world, increasingly run by the same players and their networks. And this theme comes up, too, in Teddy’s terrific interview this week with Eric Schmidt, the former adult-in-the-room at Google, who set the search giant on a path to become a multi-trillion dollar concern, and then leveraged his station  to become a one-man influence machine in Obama-era Washington. Interestingly, however, Schmidt has some deep thoughts that he shares with Teddy about how that path is becoming increasingly fraught. Youngkin may prove that you can go from being C.E.O. to governor, but Schmidt, as only he could, sees some speed bumps in the ecosystem.

Similarly, I couldn’t help but notice these blurred lines in Matt’s typically expert reporting and analysis on David Zaslav, who is preparing to lead the forthcoming Warner Bros. Discovery entity after the $43 billion deal is consummated. Zaz, the quintessential Manhattan media Zelig, is now the toast of L.A., holing up in the Polo Lounge and attending star-studded dinners with Bryan Lourd and Warren Beatty. 

None of this is surprising at all. Zaslav is structuring his business, a collection of incredible media assets, to truly compete with Netflix. And part of that challenge requires convincing Wall Street to value Warner Bros. Discovery like a Silicon Valley company—with those golden tech multiples—rather than a media behemoth, with its more earth-bound valuations. And, as Matt notes, all of this presumes that regulators in Washington won’t hold up the deal. Zaslav’s moves, far better than Youngkin’s victory, articulate the direction that our culture is headed. It’s all one world now.

Thanks so much for your support. Have a great weekend.

Jon

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