Sorrell’s Elon Advice & Trump’s Financial Ankle Bracelet

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Happy Wednesday, and welcome back to Dry Powder.

It’s been a long 12 days since Elon completed his purchase of Twitter, and the collective response has been, to put it mildly, negative. So I was surprised this week, while corresponding with Sir Martin Sorrell, the world-class British ad man, to encounter someone who framed Musk’s unenviable position as containing a silver lining. In today’s issue, my conversation with Sorrell, plus notes on the latest developments in Letitia James’s case against the Trump Organization, and the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried.

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Sorrell’s Elon Advice & Trump’s Financial Ankle Bracelet

The latest inside chatter on Wall Street about, among other things, fixing Twitter, Trump’s deal-making handcuffs, and the S.B.F. postmortem.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

Over the weekend, I engaged in an interesting email exchange with Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder of WPP plc, the world’s largest advertising and P.R. group. After he resigned in 2018 amid an investigation about personal misconduct, at the height of the #MeToo era, the energetic Sorrell, now 77 years old, started S4 Capital plc., a premier digital advertising and marketing company that now has 9,100 employees in 32 countries. I reached out, as you can imagine, with questions about the operational viability of Twitter.

As we know, Elon Musk fired some 50 percent of the 7,500-strong Twitter workforce, including its C.E.O., C.F.O. and general counsel, days after closing his $44 billion deal. Other important executives have also left or been fired, although there is some reporting now that maybe Elon...

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