Joining me from upstate New York, a pleasure to have you back on, sir, is Bill Cohen, founding partner of Puck, best-selling prolific author. One of my favorite books, of course, is House of Cards, a tale of hubris and wretched excess on Wall Street. You turned that out shortly after the kind of the bottom of the financial crisis. I've heard you on NPR, clearly. I think we back in the day, we used to do Charlie Rose together. Sir, how are you?
Oh, I'm I'm good. I mean, I've just finished up my eighth book and, you know, still doing my Puck thing, some Air Mail stuff, some Town and Country stuff, FT, New York Times. So, I've been busy and trying to, you know, keep my head above water in the midst of the chaos that we sort of find ourselves in these days.
I'll tell you, and this is not flattery. This is auto. This is this is really kind of in terms of my influences. I'd be at Grand Central Station taking the Metro North to Westchester and if there was a fat issue of Vanity Fair that had a Bill Cohen byline in it, like a big glossy piece on, I don't know, Microsoft and Steve Ballmer culture, I loved it. That was like a gift to me. You'd get a bag of popcorn and you'd read that and that was I guess in the last stand for glossy magazine journalism of which Graydon Carter the editor now he has his memoir out and you write for him on Air Mail but that is actually the kind of work that brought me to the magazine industry where I tried to get jobs at Fortune. I ultimately, you know, ended up at Smart Money and the New York Times and Business Week, but I would say like turn of the century apotheosis of print journalism.
I mean, yeah, the whole industry has, you know, been turned upside down obviously and it's been well documented by lots of people. But when I started, you know, and this is I think one of the big selling points for me about Puck is when I started in journalism, I like my career is bookended like with 20 years of investment banking in the middle, right? At Lazard. Yeah. Lazard and Merrill and JP Morgan Chase and, you know, starting first as a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and then in 1983 and then going to the Raleigh Times in Raleigh, North Carolina which was owned by the Daniels family and the News and Observer publishing company. And when I started, Robin, you know, they paid journalists, you know, as minimal amount of money as they possibly could. Meanwhile, the EBIT margins for the newspaper were like 65%. So that the owners were like raking it in and the people who wrote the stories and provided the content were getting paid, you know, minimum wage at best. And I couldn't reconcile those two. I've had trouble reconciling that, you know, ever since. You know, why is it that the people who produced the content that the ads were wrapped around, that people bought the newspaper for, you know, that got the headlines, that were out there pounding the pavement, talking to their sources, bringing the stories, all that. Why did they get paid? Like, if I may use that word, while, you know, the owners of the paper got paid.
You know, I was always told that there was always an overabundance of willing writers and editors. Too many people that come out. Obviously, you've met them in law and Wall Street in my line of work. And so, you would deal with, I mean, I showed up, my first job interview was at Forbes at the turn of the century. I love saying that because it was 25 years ago and they had Fabergé eggs in the lobby. You know, this is one the Forbes family owned. I remember and they expect you, you know, you talk about a reporter researcher position and they're like, 'Son, it's a very big honor that you're getting this interview to begin with and we expect you the majority of your work. You'll be fact-checking for, you know, wise people, but it's a great proving ground and you will be paid $22,000 a year.' And I was like, what am I going to rent in the tri-state area? And I remember your junior editor was telling me, there's always Queens, there's always the Bronx, and there are wall companies that will put up drywall or something so you can split the room. But that was the implicit. I mean, yeah, Steve Forbes would be flying around on the capitalist tool or wherever the heck it was, that Fabergé eggs in the lobby. And the issues, as you know, the turn of the century, there was like a thud factor. Son, you shall work for $22,000. And I was like, let me think on it. You know, that sounds like gravy to me.
I mean, I worked in Raleigh for 13,000 a year in 1982, 1983. And the Daniels family that owned the paper, which lovely people by the way, they sold the paper to McClatchy for like $300 million. And McClatchy is not even worth $300 million now. I mean, McClatchy bought the Miami Herald which was my hometown's paper, but I'm all over the place. What I love about it is so I also came from Wall Street. I worked in sales and trading. I was at Goldman and at the turn of the century I had this hankering for just to leave this and do something that I enjoyed writing which was about Wall Street. So I moved to journalism. So I've always really...
Let's leave the last bit of praise there. I've loved your byline. Love the fact that you can volley the serve with Wall Street terminology, put it in a real, you know, magazine-like spellbinding thing. I encourage everybody to go and read House of Cards, which is like the definitive book to my mind on the financial crisis. But I also think about this recently with your coverage of Elon Musk and Twitter. And I think about how blindsided everybody was when he came out with this offer, I think it was in '22, to overpay substantially for Twitter, which is now X. And as you documented quite well at Puck and in your writing and in your newsletter, that he realized immediately, this is like a foot-in-mouth thing. I got to get out of this. He tried to invoke, you know, your gross, you're larding up your user numbers. There are many bots out there. And no, I mean, you put a bona fide bid out there, the banks can hold you to it, and you might have to pay them a billion or two to go away. Suffice it to say, everybody knows we're in 2025 now. Elon Musk ended up buying Twitter. It ended up being a disastrous deal in terms of advertisers went away. There were more bots than ever. There was, you know, right-wing kind of supremacy, trollage, and to the point that every time we saw a post-market valuation, it wasn't worth $40 billion. Fidelity and the likes were marking it down to, you know, maybe a fraction of that. I'm blown away by what Elon Musk has since become, as you know, wholeheartedly like this Doge ancillary kind of vice presidential type person. And recently, as you saw in the news, somehow through some ledger domain, through some sleight of hand, he is no longer underwater with Twitter. How did that happen when by any objective metric, cash flow, advertisers, nothing was there? It was like in the words of Air Supply, he was making love out of nothing at all.
Well, well, well, Robin, if it hadn't been bought by the world's richest man, you know, who was, you know, worth at one point whatever $350 billion, if it hadn't been bought by the world's richest man, it would have gone bankrupt. There's no question about that. I mean, in other words, if it had just been bought by like a buyout company and they had paid $44 billion for something that was worth, you know, a fraction of that and then larded it up with 13 billion of debt. And so, you know, I mean, I don't think there's been a deal with more equity in it, right? Him. He did. To his credit, he put in $24 billion of his own equity, corralled another 7 billion from his buddies, you know, some smart people including, you know, Larry Ellison and, you know, the geniuses at A16Z and, you know, Marc Andreessen, you know, Andreessen et al. And so, you know, to his credit, there was 30... you know, you're right, he didn't want to buy it. He tried to get out of it. He even, he couldn't get away from the contract he had signed.
Right. Del, I remember you were covering what was happening in Delaware. Like there was going to be a real smackdown. We do have rule of law. We do have contracts. You can't just shirk your way out of a deal.
Right. Well, we did in 2021, I don't, you know, or 2022 whenever it closed. You know, hopefully we still will in 2027. But, you know, he had to go through with it. Even he couldn't get out of it. To his credit, he put in 31 billion dollars of equity, but the 13 billion of debt was, you know, sometimes even a dollar of debt is too much and that was the case in Twitter basically. $13 billion. Again, if he had to rely on the cash flow of the company to make the interest payments on that $13 billion of debt, it wouldn't have made the first interest payment and it would have gone bankrupt then. But he's the world's richest man. He paid, you know, whatever it was, the billion two or billion three of interest payments every year out of his own pocket. And so he sort of...
Explain this for our listeners, and this is where I think you do it so well. $13 billion was syndicated across a handful of Wall Street banks. If they do any due diligence and they're realizing you're doing effectively a big leveraged buyout, you're committing the cash flows of this company that really has anemic cash flows for the buyout price, as you know. So the interest would just be debilitating on 13 billion. And yet these companies took it on their books. These, what was it, Barclays, Bank of America, a handful of investing... I mean, the understanding there is that you're going to be able to sell it to your clients, which reminds me of my time back then. I mean, is there even a conflict of interest in this? Like, well, we took on back in the day, we took on dot-com companies that might not have lasted and everything, and you'd hear here, you'd hear here on the hoot and holler and on the sales call, you want to buy this. So who are you subordinating? I mean, you're like, we love Elon, he's a great call option, he was worth $350 billion, SpaceX and other things are coming down, but we have clients that are going to have to buy this in the meantime.
Right. Well, you know, that's exactly how the syndication market works. They underwrote the debt, 13 billion, so that he could, which means that they bought the debt and they paid him the 13, you know, they funneled the 13 billion to him, which he combined with the 31 billion and paid the 44 billion to the ex-Twitter shareholders.
Okay, so that for something that probably was not even worth a total of 20 billion.
Oh, no way. Probably wasn't even worth the debt. Probably wasn't even worth... basically the equity was lost on day one, if to be honest, right. And then when you combine that with firing 80% of the people and turning it into not paying the janitors, right? I mean, everything that we understood, you know, everything he did, you know, made it a toxic social media platform which it basically remains to this day. And, you know, if you look at the advertisers now, they're, you know, a fraction of what it once was and it wasn't that great to begin with. So, I mean, but, you know, again, he's the world's richest man and so the bet that the banks were making was, okay, he's the world's richest man, he'll pay the interest and at some point, it took two years. Now, usually the way this works is they underwrite it and they blow it out within a week or two or three weeks. They get it off their books. They do not warehouse it and they're required to do that by the Federal Reserve, which is their regulator. So, it's not like they're doing it because, I mean, they want to do it obviously, but they're doing it because they have to do it. They have to be in the moving business, not the storage business. And so, right, but with this X debt, they couldn't get it off the books because they didn't want to take the, realize the big hit that they would have to take to sell it. And I, you know, I was hearing from people on Wall Street constantly that it was worth like 50 cents on the dollar. So, that means, so they placed it at 100 cents on the dollar obviously.
And if it's mark-to-market, right? We discussed this recently with Jeff Lasser. There's this, you know, with what happened with those banks, if you remember the spring banking crisis of 2023, there's a special box where you don't have to recognize, you could kind of live in denial that that's a 100 cents on the dollar asset. But if you do have to, if there's price recognition and you do have to realize that you just took a serious haircut on that, that is egg on your face as an investment bank. A loss to your equity account and their capital requirements with the Fed. And again, I'm trying not to be in the weeds for our listeners, but the banks had to have known that it's all de minimis in the grand scheme of everything else we can bank to this guy Elon Musk. If you think of SpaceX, if you think of whatever AI, the stuff that's coming down the pike, Tesla, right? Even if we take that hit up front, even if it's a hung deal, even if it stinks and it smells on our balance sheet, it's going to be all wiped out just by the fact that he's so much larger than all of it.
Well, that's exactly right. I mean, you know, you underwrite your client, you make bets on your client. Again, if it was just your run-of-the-mill buyout firm that was buying this thing with limited capital, not unlimited capital, like, I mean, there's no buyout firm with $350 billion of assets, you know, of equity capital, right? There are buyout firms with that many assets under management, but it's, you know, either private credit or private equity, whatever. So if it had been a normal buyout firm and a normal deal, it would have gone bankrupt within the first year in my estimation. But it didn't because Elon could pay the interest, which he did, and for two years until they were able to sell the debt at close to par, close to 100 cents, you know, in the last few months. And of course the way he did that was again to me more jiu-jitsu, you know, more sort of financial engineering and shenanigans. But he had in the meantime, he had started an AI company inside of X called xAI and he got that valued separately at some ridiculous, you know, amount of 75 or 80 billion because a paper value, a kind of a notional value. But he actually raised equity capital at that valuation. So, it was both notional and quasi-real, but, you know, all of these AI valuations are off the charts ridiculous, right? Which, you know, is another aspect that Wall Street does very well. They latch on to whatever the hottest fad is and, you know, hype it up and, you know, raise a lot of money at that hype valuation and then hope to, you know, pawn it off on the public in some sort of equity offering and, you know, move on to the next thing. So based on that high valuation which completely propped up the value of X overall, the banks were able to blow out that debt at, you know, 95, 96, even more. I think that was trading at more than 100 cents on the dollar.
If it was trading at 15 cents on the dollar, and again, it's a private market. We don't exactly know these things. We know when Fidelity and other fund shops have to write down a certain value, there's price recognition on their equity, right? On their equity. But, Bill, we're joined by Bill Cohen. He's the bestselling author, co-founding partner of Puck. He's covered Twitter and the Elon Musk saga, I think, so incredibly well. This is actually what literally made me feel so dirty when I read about it in the Wall Street Journal. Okay, so recently, this is the spring of 2025, post-election 2024, Elon Musk, this appendage inside the White House, this kind of like vice vice president, if you will, the torchbearer for Doge, the Wall Street Journal reports that big advertising companies in the process of a merger, I think Interpublic Group and another one, these big holding companies get calls from these third-party figures saying, 'If you know what's good for you, you better start advertising on Twitter because Elon Musk is now close to the Trump administration and the FTC or whoever it is can or cannot sign off on what they're doing.' Stop me. I mean, this is, I mean, Teapot Dome, Watergate, whatever you want to call it. Maybe we're just, we're jaded. We don't care anymore. But, you know, this is like Roy Cohn stuff. This is like mob stuff. I mean, am I being naive that you're getting a call saying if you guys don't adver... you better call your clients and have them advertise more on X if you know what's good for you? Did I read that incorrectly? I mean, is that any different than say squeezing the top law firms into bending the knee or squeezing Disney or squeezing CBS or having people buy the Trump memecoin and inviting them to a dinner at the White House if they buy it?
I mean, Trump is personally making billions. He, the people around him, are using the power of the office to put the squeeze on advertisers, on corporations. You know, it's happening every day and we've just, nobody knows how to stop it. Very few people are standing up to him. You know, Harvard is standing up at the moment. Columbia bent the knee. As a graduate of two schools at Columbia, I found that very disappointing obviously, as many Columbia alumni did. So I mean, this is, but this is the thing that's Trump, that's Trump himself. That's the Trump White House. When you have a person who's kind of, you know, attached to it.
I mean, I'm sorry. It still blows my mind like if the Wall Street Journal's reporting that and that's out there, that effectively it's a mob tactic, right? I mean, you remember the scene, you remember the scene in The Sopranos where they show up at this coffee place and they're trying to shake the place down for protection money and they're like, 'Listen, every last penny is accounted for on the company's CRM software. Like, I have nothing to give.' And they lament. They're walking out on the street like, this corner is not like it used to be. That's, and that's what kills me when I read, and surely you've read all this stuff in Vanity Fair and elsewhere about him being, you know, so close to Roy Cohn, his mentor back in the day, and Roy Cohn advised, you know, the New York City mafia in the days of, you know, Fear City. I'm just saying my friend Gabe Sherman's movie The Apprentice is great. I mean, it just documents that evolution quite well and he's now implementing it. You know, his master, his teacher, his mentor would be very proud of him, I'm sure. And what's crazy I always say to people is that Roy Cohn was mentored by Joe McCarthy. So he's a degree of separation from McCarthyism. I know part of you must be saying, 'Kid, why are you telling me everything that I already know?' You know, you're weathered. You've seen this stuff. But it's just such a fire hydrant of just shameless cross-promotion between the coins and we're going to talk about the shakedown of CBS and 60 Minutes. We're going to talk about what ABC News had to pay. It's just kind of, at least cover your tracks, right? Getting a call that you better, if you know what's good for you, to advertise for Twitter. It's just nakedly corrupt.
And we've become inured to it or just desensitized to it or we're helpless in the face of it. I mean, what, you know, if the Republicans in Congress won't stand up to him, if the Supreme Court ruled that everything a president does while he's in office is immune from prosecution, I mean, you know, our institutions are failing us. And it's, you know, it's somebody who grew up, I mean, I grew up with the assassination of JFK and then Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Watergate and the Vietnam War. I mean, I almost cannot believe what I have witnessed in my lifetime. But the bottom line of it, unfortunately, is Trump and the deterioration of everything I thought we held sacred in this country. And it's being, you know, turned into dust right in front of our eyes. And I mean, I feel like I'm literally living through a historical moment and not in a good way.
Yeah. Historical moments. We read about the Gilded Age. We read about certain things, you know, AP history and things that may or may not have happened under US Grant and Warren Harding. And in some respects this just seems to be, there's no, there's no, I suggest there's no bottom, there's no bottom and every day is another design. I mean, I literally imagine sort of Stephen Miller sitting around in the White House, my fellow Duke grads, sitting around in the White House trying to come up with every morning, like his job at 8:00 in the morning is what can President Trump say that will make, you know, the media go crazy, deflect from what we're really doing that's bad and be so outrageous that, you know, it'll just send the libs into a spiral for the 24 to 36 hours until we find the next thing. And they're very good at it, I might add. Shocking, jiu-jitsu, fire hydrant, whatever you call it. I mean, one week we're focused on Salvador. The other, you know, clearly there's a conflagration now between India and Pakistan. Various explosions have been going off in Iran. Have we back-burnered Gaza? Right. Taiwan, which was supposed to be day one. Russia, Ukraine was supposed to be ended day one. Ukraine was supposed to be ended day one. Egg prices were supposed to be, inflation was going to be brought down to zero day one. All of this was happening day one. And now let me ask you, Bill, before we go to break. Do you buy any of the tariff stuff because he's walked it back or he's, you know, he said stuff like you saw him in the White House with the premier of the newly elected premier of Canada. It's like, you know, there was more charm.
There was more charm like, you know, we'll see what happens. Never say never, you become the 51st state. Can you imagine if somebody were to say the 51st state, how do you think the people in Toronto or Montreal or Calgary or Saskatoon would react? Like, welcome our liberators, the American troops coming in. I mean, I understand for rhetorical flourish or even trolling people and saying Canada, you are kind of like a 51st state to us, but a person like that is still taken seriously in negotiations for tariffs or, you know, with Zelensky or going to the Vatican. There's an asymmetry to it.
It's classic bullying. It's deranged behavior. It's embarrassing for our country, frankly, for him to talk about annexing Canada or Greenland or Panama or turning Gaza into Riviera. I mean, these are individual countries with their own sovereignty, with their own duly elected leaders who are obviously going to protect that sovereignty. Now, you know, if there's, we, you know, we have bought land in the past. Obviously, we bought Alaska, we bought the Louisiana Purchase from France. I mean, you know, that is also the history of this country. I mean, if he's kind of referring to that, if that's his precedent, wink. If that's sort of winking at that, okay, I mean, I can almost get my mind around that. I mean, if there's a willing buyer and a willing seller, okay. I mean, if the people of Greenland vote to join the United States as a 51st state or Canadians vote to join the US as a 51st state and we pay them a gazillion dollars to do that. Okay. If that's what everybody wants to do, I could get my mind around that. But we're consenting sovereigns, right? Yeah. Right.
But to, I mean, again, is it a rhetorical flourish? Is it meant to divert our attention away from, you know, the Trump memecoin or how he's enriching himself for billions of dollars or Teapot Dome-like scandals or, you know, Elon Musk telling advertisers they'd better advertise on X or else? I mean, or, you know, firing. I mean, look at how he's gutting the National Endowment for the Arts. Look how he's gutting, I mean, he's taking away grants from charitable institutions, from museums, from arts organizations that have been granted. He's pulling them back. He, you know, let alone the ones that are going to be awarded in the future.
I mean, all of these diversionary tactics are meant to try to take our attention away from the horrible things that he's doing. And he's doing it all by executive order. He's like completely ignoring. It's like we have one branch of government now. The government was built on three branches. The judiciary, especially at the highest level, seems to have capitulated. Some of the lower courts are obviously standing up, but he knows in the end it's going to go to the Supreme Court and they're going to, they're by and large going to back him up. Congress is completely out of the picture. I mean, this is, I mean, I can't believe we've watched this. This is sort of what he wanted to do in Trump One. And the fact that 75 million people lived through Trump One and wanted him back for Trump Two, I mean, I can't get my, I can't even begin to get my head around that.
Full disclosure, stay with us. Full Disclosure, podcast to NPR, Spotify, Apple, all the podcasters, and we are indeed now on YouTube. The link, I've put all of the, gosh, various media there is fulldisclosurepodcast.com. Again, fulldisclosurepodcast.com. You could follow us on Instagram, on LinkedIn. You know, I'm no longer on Twitter. I left several months ago. I just couldn't handle it anymore. But for what it's worth, I'm on Blue Sky even though it's pretty quiet. A lot of tumbleweed going there. Anyway, the link is fulldisclosurepodcast.com where you could find all of my links. And a shout out to our radio listeners on WVTF Radio. That's Virginia's NPR news source. Holler if you too would like us on your air. My DMs are always open. If you're just joining us, my guest is Bill Cohen. He's a founding partner of Puck, the digital news upstart. I love the podcast. I love the work, what you and Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby and Julie Alexander. I mean, it's just such brilliant stuff. He's a bestselling author. You've seen his byline, Vanity Fair and the New York Times. Sir, I got to ask you specifically about something else that you've covered quite well. But this is, this is a, you know what we call it, denouement for Paramount and the Redstone family, right? Shari Redstone, daughter of the late Sumner Redstone, who held on way too long. I mean, this guy was celebrated back in his day that you had all these assets under one roof. CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, the sports. But as we know, in his really late years, he held on way too long and he was taken advantage of. And the company had lost tens of billions of dollars of market valuation. And now it's just in a position that is called Paramount Global. It's begging the Trump administration to sign off on this kind of whimper disposal to Larry Ellison's family.
Yeah, you summarized that very well. You know, there have been books written about this saga. I've, you know, I, my Vanity... well, I mean, Bryan Burrough, my colleague at Vanity Fair for a long time, you know, kicked it off with articles about Sumner. And I picked it up about the two Sumner girlfriends that were running his life and taking over not only his day-to-day existence as he became increasingly infeebled, but were like ordering directives to Les Moonves at CBS and Philippe Dauman at Viacom. And these women were running these businesses and nobody really knew that. And they were sending out directives under Sumner's... it was effective, it was like a Weekend at Bernie's type conglomerate. That's exactly, except that it was, you know, CBS and Viacom. And then, you know, then Shari, who Sumner didn't even want to be involved in the businesses. He explicitly said, 'I don't, you know, you don't have what it takes.' She took advantage of his disabilities. I mean, she was, you know, her brother was already been paid off and out of it. And so, she was, you know, basically the logical heir at...
this point. And uh but she used her father's uh increasing uh you know, disability to go in there and uh execute her own documentation to take over uh the company. uh and then you know has basically uh somehow figured out a way to almost run it into the ground. Uh uh he didn't want Viacom, his father didn't want Viacom and CBS to be merged, remerged. They had been merged. He broke them up and he thought let's pause that for a minute. CBS being this broadcast icon with CBS News and the sports franchises and, you know, evening true, you know, crime things that my mother-in-law watches, Viacom really having doubled down on cable, being the cable pioneer, having all of these channels, right? I don't know if Comedy Central was still part of it, but clearly MTV, Nickelodeon, and the other and cable has had this atrocious decade in the era of cord cutting. It's just destroyed a lot of value unto itself.
Like you know, Denu, if we didn't even have this whole situation of elder abuse, it would be a crap business. I mean, look at what's happening at Warner. But the fact that everybody stood to the side while it hemorrhaged tens of billions of dollars in market cap, as opposed to disposing of things at the right time, getting a good bid for BET, or maybe figuring out digital for MTV a little better, you know, fiddling while Rome burned, if you will. Um, I I don't understand how that happens in a shareholder structure with independent board members with supposed fiduciaries. If you could explain.
Well, it happened in this case because she controlled the company through her whatever 77, 78% voting stock position that nobody prior to that, prior to that when everybody always had voting control of the company. So that, you know, they were two independent publicly traded companies, but by and large those were economic uh, you know, independent economically. She owned less than, the family owned less than 10% or 10% of of the economics but controlled close to 80% of the voting. So, you know, when you have a structure like that, they might as well not be public companies because public shareholders have very few rights. And yes, there were uh boards of directors and yes, there were independent directors and yes, a special committee was set up when she decided to merge them and and there was special committees decid set up when she decided to sell the company. But basically everybody uh uh acts on her uh decisions and authority and she rules the roost and uh basically uh didn't do the things you just described uh in a in the in a manner, a timely manner that they could have been done to prevent a lot of this value destruction. And then when she finally decided to pull the plug, you know, it was such an unwieldy, highly leveraged entity with, you know, the linear TV assets going down the tubes and Paramount Plus, which was their streaming business, you know, losing billions. Uh, who who would want to step up and do that? So, you know, you did uh eventually have uh uh, you know, the Ellison through Skydance essentially recapping the company. It's still going to remain a publicly traded company with uh, you know, uh controlled by by the Ellisons now uh and with Skydance uh, you know, the Ellisons' uh movie studio being a part of it and merged into it and, you know, with new management and hopefully, you know, they ran through the management. There was, you know, very disappointing management for many years and Sherry, it's probably very hard to work for Sherry. And I think there's some degree of hope that um the, you know, the Ellisons and Jerry Cardelli who runs Red Bird uh will be able to uh, you know, revitalize this thing. I think there's a chance of that. Um, it's not zero chance.
What's nominally holding it us up if you can explain, as was evidenced on this surreal um soliloquy on 60 Minutes recently where they stood up and said uh we're being watched. Uh, management is asking us, increasingly sticking its nose under the tent and saying can you give us a heads up if this happens, effectively like a chilling effect on reporting on certain things that might be unsavory to the Trump White House, which after all its FCC has to sign off on this extraordinary purchase. You're getting one of the premier broadcast networks in addition to everything else and he has a lawsuit against 60 Minutes for strategically editing a a candidate, Kamala Harris, interview back in the day that omitted, I don't know if it would hold up in court. You know this stuff better than I do. But his asking price to go away is is ridiculous. And a lot of the rank and file, the people I know at CBS News are terrified that that they're going to go ahead and pay this and issue the apology and that will whatever CBS News looks like after this will always have that black eye.
Honestly, Robin, I I don't understand why Trump even has standing in this situation. I mean, again, I'm not a lawyer, so but I mean th this was uh he's complaining about the edit of Kamala Harris's interview. What does that have to do with him?
Well, the intimation is that you omitted, she was probably not ready for the interview, but you were so on her side that you edited to look great. Whereas editors always take B-roll. People at news always do this, but everything always gets edited. That's called journalism. You can, you're producing the journalism, you can edit the way you want to.
But correct, even if it doesn't have standing, even if a judge were to dismiss it, he, you know, the FCC chair, his handpicked chair, serves at his leisure. Well, and they're ask why these things are linked and that's why they're being taken seriously and it's also because uh they're trying to get this merger approved by the FCC. So, uh, that's why I mean, you know, the Ellisons and Jerry Cardell and, you know, even Sherry, they're in a very tough position, right? I mean, ABC who had a similar thing with Stephanopoulos and Stephanopoulos accusing him of, I don't know if it was rape versus sexual abuse, they paid it to go away. I think they must have calculated that an attorney could bill countless $400 hours on this. And this is where every time, every time, $2,000, 20,000, right? Every time this happens, it just um, you know, it's the precedent. It's like a valuation round. It sets the standard for the next negotiation.
Well, I mean, and and look what happened with, you know, with Paul Weiss uh, you know, highly respected law firm, you know, with a leader who was uh, you know, Democratic, supports Democrats and sort of outspoken in that way. And Trump went right after them and, you know, instead of fighting, um, they sort of capitulated.
And you know, again, very difficult decision, I'm sure. Um, but you saw what then happened immediately thereafter. He, without even, a lot of the law firms without even being uh a victim of his executive orders, just capitulated just to try to avoid. I mean, it's it's like these strong-armed tactics. It's dictatorial tactics. I, you know, and that's what's happening with, you know, after Disney and and Meta did it and and now CBS is facing this situation. And you, I mean, Disney did it with, you know, just with related to the Stephanopoulos lawsuit, which you know.
