Media Monday: The Pelley Post-Mortem & More McAfeebucks

**Jon Kelly** (0:01)
Peli created this sort of disgruntled theater that was, it was not in any way professionally effective. You know, it was not useful to management or to employees. If you worked at 60 Minutes, Peli's rant wasn't going to make you any more safe.

**Peter Hamby** (0:17)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Pucks podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Monday, June 15th, which means it's Media Monday. Today, Jon Kelly joins me with some provocative thoughts on the CBS News narrative and Scott Peli's exit from 60 Minutes, a firing that was met with howls of anguish by the high priests of journalism. But according to Jon, kicking Peli to the West 57th Street curve was precisely the right move. We also take a look at Pat McAfee reportedly negotiating with ESPN for even more money and why McAfee's programming is so valuable to the worldwide leader.
We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode, The Powers That Be.
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Happy Monday everybody and welcome to The Powers That Be. If it's Monday, it's of course media Monday. I'm joined today by the boss man, Jon Kelly. We're going to talk about the ongoing upheaval over at CBS News in 60 minutes. We're also going to dig into McAfee bucks. ESPN wants to pay Pat McAfee even more than he makes right now. This guy is making so much money, Jon, which is a lot. Jon, let's start, speaking of money, with SpaceX. Did you buy some stock last week when they IPO?

**Jon Kelly** (3:18)
These Elon markets are sort of sui generis to their own. When I saw the size of the float and the share price, it seemed crazy. It's like double what Saudi Aramco listed a decade ago or whatever.
But you can't count this guy out because hype is what the investors buy. He's credible to professional Wall Street analysts in the investor community, but obviously it's the Game Stonk crowd that just loves the guy. So this is not investment advice, but everyone go out there and buy as much SpaceX as you can possibly get your hands on. This stuff is... This is tulip mania to the power of tulip mania.

**Peter Hamby** (3:59)
Jon, let's talk about 60 Minutes and CBS, the Barry Weiss of it all. Obviously, this is a running storyline for us at Puck, especially this last week. There's so many different things we could go into. Dylan and I went deep on this topic just a few days ago. Everyone go back and listen to that. If you like, there's good stuff there. Dylan has the goods, obviously. But we've got Scott Pelley getting acts and then going over to The Daily and doing an over hour long interview with Lulu Garcia Navarro, going into the weeds of his relationship with Barry Weiss, what she did, what Nick Bilton did when he came in, how she, in his words, meddled in certain stories. We've also got this reporting that Ellison wants to bring in a TV news grown up to help Barry Weiss manage the newsrooms. I told Dylan and he agrees, I don't totally believe that Ben Sherwood or Cesar Conde are going to want to come in and just sort of sit in the back seat while Barry runs the ship. That just doesn't seem very believable to me, despite what CBS and the Ellison people are saying with blind quotes in the media. So anyway, where is your head at right now on the management of this place heading into the fall season? And as you said last week, this is shoulder programming for the NFL 60 Minutes. They've only got three correspondents left.