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

Zaslav Pushes Global HBO/Max as WBD Eyes Cable Split

3 days 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.
Paul Singer Declares (Proxy) War on Phillips 66

1 week ago | puck.news | William Cohan

It’s been a relatively quiet proxy-contest season on Wall Street, with nothing even approaching last year’s conflagration between Disney’s Bob Iger and Nelson Peltz, the “Smiling Crocodile” who teamed up with fellow billionaire and Mar-a-Lago habitué Ike Perlmutter to agitate for changes and a few board seats in the Magic Kingdom. Peltz and Perlmutter lost resoundingly, as you’ll recall, and Iger got to celebrate maintaining the status quo.
Saks Bonds: A Deal “That Never Should Have Gotten Done”?

1 week ago | puck.news | William Cohan

Sometimes you just have to marvel at the ability of Wall Street bankers to sell something that probably should never have been sold in the first place. That’s essentially what happened with Saks Global, the $2.7 billion roll-up of luxury retailers Saks Fifth Avenue and NMG, the parent company of Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman.
The History of The Kennedy Family Feud, Explained

1 week ago | townandcountrymag.com | William Cohan

Above: The Kennedy fight club includes, from left, Bobby Jr., Joe III, Caroline, Jack Schlossberg, and Rory. In late January, fresh off her two-year tenure as Joe Biden’s ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy did something decidedly undiplomatic. Back at her apartment on Park Avenue, Kennedy, the only surviving child of the slain 35th president of the United States, broke her family’s longstanding code of omertà.
Lazard C.E.O. Peter Orszag on Trump Tariff Effects

2 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

I’ve been in Paris for the past week, and so I decided to pay a visit to my old stomping grounds, Lazard, the Grand Dame of French high finance. In particular, I wanted to check in with Jean-Louis Girodolle, the C.E.O. of Lazard’s investment banking group in France and the co-head of its investment banking group in Europe.
The Leon Black Legal Saga Ad Absurdum

2 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

Big corporate law firms, such as Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps, have suffered their share of slings and arrows during Trump II, as the president has waged a war of retribution against them for, essentially, being lawyers. Then there are the trials and tribulations of Wigdor LLP, the small Manhattan firm that has made a business, in part, out of representing alleged sexual assault victims.
Will Saks Global Make Its $120M Interest Payment?

2 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

The plot continues to thicken at Saks Global. At last check, the $2.2 billion publicly traded Saks senior secured bond, due 2029, which pays 11 percent interest, is now trading at 67 cents on the dollar and yielding 22 percent. This is not a good situation for bondholders, who have watched the bond lose a third of its value in the four months since it was issued last December as part of Saks’ $2.7 billion acquisition of Neiman Marcus.
Best Comparison for U.S. Under Trump 2 is… Postwar Argentina?

3 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

Larry Summers, the last Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, first director of the National Economic Council under Obama, and onetime president of Harvard, is well known to the faithful readers of Dry Powder. He remains a tenured professor of economics at Harvard, as well as a newish OpenAI board member, and a part-time resident of Arizona.
Can the Saks-Neiman Merger Survive Trump’s Tariffs?

3 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

When the yield on the average junk bond spiked 100 basis points, to 8.5 percent, shortly after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff presentation, there was bound to be serious fallout for individual corporate bond issuers. Et voilà, here we are. Take, for instance, the $2.2 billion senior secured bond issued in December by Saks Global, the new parent company of the retail behemoth formed by the merger of Saks Fifth Avenue with Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman.
Newsmax’s April Fools’ IPO Flash Crash

4 weeks ago | puck.news | William Cohan

There are so many curious things about the recent I.P.O. of Newsmax, the conservative digital media and cable news company, but it all begins with the prospectus. Newsmax, of course, is the brainchild of Christopher Ruddy, the former New York Post journalist and longtime Trump buddy who is a regular presence at Mar-a-Lago. Ruddy founded the company in 1998, two years after Fox News first hit the airwaves, and built it up into a meaningful player in the ever-expanding right-wing media landscape.