William Cohan

New York

Founding Partner at Puck

Writer-at-Large at AIR MAIL

Husband. Father. Best-selling author of, most recently, Power Failure. Founding partner, @Pucknews. Air Mail writer-at-large. Occasional @FT Op-Ed Writer.

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Articles

What Happens if the Paramount-Skydance Merger Falls Through?

3 days ago | puck.news | William Cohan

It’s been almost a year since the Ellisons and RedBird Capital struck a deal to merge Skydance Media into Paramount Global, while simultaneously recapitalizing the company and keeping it publicly traded under their control. Any deal where a broadcast license changes hands—in this case, CBS’s—can take a while to receive the necessary regulatory approvals. When GE sold NBCUniversal to Comcast more than a decade ago, some 14 months passed between signing and closing.
S&P Isn’t Buying Zaz’s Turnaround Just Yet

6 days ago | puck.news | William Cohan

Those following the travelogue of David Zaslav’s debt journey know that I’ve long anticipated a credit-rating upgrade for his beleaguered Warner Bros. Discovery—a putative reward that might finally boost the company’s long-languishing stock, which is down some 60 percent since WBD was created in April 2022. The logic was simple: Zaz and WBD C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfels have paid down $21 billion of their original $55 billion in debt in three years. A pretty impressive feat, all things considered.
Trump’s SALT Rule Targets Law Firms, Doctors, Small Businesses

1 week ago | puck.news | William Cohan

Buried deep inside Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” tax bill is a provision that has the professional class up in arms across the country, as it seems to unfairly target them for a big, beautiful, tax increase while others get a big, beautiful cut.
New Private Golf Clubs Are Impossible to Get Into

2 weeks ago | airmail.news | William Cohan

Bored rich men do a lot of strange things with their money. One particular folly they’ve been indulging in for generations is building private golf clubs. Sometimes there’s a clear reason for starting a club, and it works out well.
New Problems for Saks Global and Its Distressed Bonds

2 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

The situation at Saks Global, one of the most venerable names in American retail, continues to deteriorate. To “level set,” as the consultants like to say, the price of Saks Global’s $2.2 billion of senior secured bonds, due 2029, is now around 47 cents on the dollar, yielding 34.5 percent. Bond prices fluctuate all the time, of course. But it’s striking for a bond to have fallen in price by half in about five months, and to be yielding more than 30 percent.
SPACs Are Back in 2025

2 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

SPACs, one of the more odious products that Wall Street has ever devised, are making an unlikely comeback. SPAC Insider reports that there have been 44 SPAC I.P.O.s so far in 2025, compared to 57 in all of 2024, and 31 in 2023. (The FT commemorated the revival with their own ditty.) That’s peanuts compared to the 613 SPACs that raised more than $162 billion during the hallucinatory days of 2021.
The deal that has spurred Apollo’s plan to remake Wall Street

3 weeks ago | businessandamerica.com | William Cohan

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The writer is a former investment banker and author of “Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon”Volatile financial markets, like the ones we face now thanks to America’s ever evolving tariff policies, often create unique opportunities.
The deal that has spurred Apollo’s plan to remake Wall Street

3 weeks ago | ft.com | William Cohan

The writer is a former investment banker and author of “Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon” Volatile financial markets,...
Is Saks Global Headed for a Full Debt Restructuring?

3 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

As I’ve been documenting for a few weeks now, Saks Global continues to ride a seemingly endless cycle of market volatility and vicissitude—including some bumps of its own creation. Saks is the brainchild of Richard Baker, a Greenwich real estate developer who was the architect of the $2.7 billion deal that closed in December, wherein Saks bought Neiman Marcus Group, including Bergdorf Goodman, from the hedge funds that owned the company after it emerged from bankruptcy.
Zaslav Pushes Global HBO/Max as WBD Eyes Cable Split

3 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

A couple of weeks ago, while I was walking around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, waiting to catch a ride to see the David Hockney show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a city bus breezed by with an advertisement on the side for Max’s The Last of Us. Seeing the ad reminded me of one of my recent conversations with David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of Max, HBO, the Warner Bros. movie studio, and a bunch of linear television channels such as CNN and Discovery.