What you’re missing: The Reset is a newsletter we send out every Sunday to the corporate enterprise subscribers to WrapPRO. If you think your company or organization would be interested in signing up for an enterprise plan, please reach out to our head of enterprise sales, Kimberly Donnan, at kimberly.donnan@thewrap.com.
Welcome Back WrapPRO Enterprisers,
In all the hype this past week about the White House-assisted conclusion to a TikTok deal with China, which prevented a shutdown in the U.S. for the wildly popular social platform, I took note of one of the investors among those controlling a 45% stake that may have been overshadowed by Larry Ellison’s Oracle.
That was Silver Lake, a largely tech-focused private equity firm with more than $100 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake has been around for more than two decades but it feels like its Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent investments recently make it worth keeping a closer eye on, especially as the industry feels more tightly aligned than ever with technology overlords. Like the Ellisons’ entree through Paramount.
Consider where Silver Lake is placing its bets, like taking Endeavor fully private back in the spring in a $25 billion acquisition that shifted agent tour de force Ari Emanuel to executive chairman of WME. Silver Lake owns stakes in Oak View Group, co-founded by music giant Irving Azoff, the Madison Square Garden Sports group, APAC ticketing giant TEG, minor league baseball owner Diamond Baseball Holdings, to name a few in the “content and entertainment” space as Silver Lake’s website notes.
And just on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Silver Lake was among the investors aiming to take gaming giant Electronic Arts private for $50 billion in what would be the largest leveraged buyout of all time.
Silver Lake is run by co-CEOs Egon Durban and Greg Mondre, both of whom cut their teeth as i-bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, respectively. Georgetown and Wharton undergrad degrees, respectively as well, if you like the executive set without MBAs.
Now TikTok. We are less than a week out from the deal being announced with lots of fanfare, so much more to come on this. But it will be worth keeping a close focus on where Silver Lake, with TikTok in its portfolio now, is training its eye for its next move in the Hollywoodsphere.
Have a great week.
Tom Lowry
SVP/Editorial Strategy
tom.lowry@thewrap.com
1. Sneak Peak at Exclusive Research on Live Entertainment in 2025 from WrapPRO and Pollstar As part of our effort to continually provide our PRO subscribers with premium offerings, this week we will be unveiling an exclusive research report in partnership with Pollstar, the premier trade publication dedicated to covering the worldwide concert industry. Pollstar data is the leading resource for the touring industry.
As part of this data-rich report, WrapPRO conducted its own survey to get a read on our readers’ live entertainment preferences and spending. Below is one of the questions from that survey. Look for the full report coming this week as TheWrap hosts its annual business conference TheGrill where Irving Azoff, the co-founder of Pollstar parent Oak View Group, will be a keynote speaker.
2. AI Slop We’ve read so much about the benefits of AI-assisted work efficiencies, how the technology will improve not only the quality of work but the time spent working. That is why a study cited by The Harvard Business Review last week was striking to us. “In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as ‘AI slop’.” At work, it’s been referred to as workslop and it’s even being turned into a verb as in “you were workslopped.”
Of 1,150 U.S.-based full-time employees surveyed by BetterUp Labs across industries, 40% report having received workslop in the last month. The phenomenon occurs mostly between peers (40%), but workslop is also sent to managers by direct reports (18%). Sixteen percent of the time workslop flows down the ladder, from managers to their teams, or even from higher up than that.
One more reality check for us all on the AI hype machine.
Warren Buffett once famously said: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.“
For many of his critics these past two weeks, those words might feel relevant for Bob Iger, the 74-year-old CEO of the Walt Disney Co. It’s way too early to judge how history will look at Iger’s decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air under pressure from the FCC and the White House and then return him to the airwaves days later this past Tuesday. The blowback, from product boycotts to union protests to vocal star power outrage, was extraordinary, even for a corporate leader who has faced his fair share of scrutiny and crises.
Iger will be handing over the reins of Disney later next year to a still unnamed successor and his legacy is front of mind. Consider his track record during two stints as CEO:
First stint as CEO (2005-2020) – Stock up 579%
Second stint (2022-current) – Stock up 20%ish
Bought Pixar Animation Studios
Bought Marvel Entertainment
Bought Lucasfilm
Added 20th Century Studios
Opened Shanghai Disneyland w/ plans for Middle East park
Launched Disney+
Market cap in 2005 – $48 billion
Current market cap – $204 billion
That record obviously generates a lot of CEO envy among his counterparts. When he took over in 2005 for Michael Eisner, who was seen as a much stronger creative than Iger, there was no shortage of doubters about the executive who started out as weatherman in Ithaca, New York. Iger has proven them all wrong. This final stretch for Iger may not define his career, even with his change of heart on Kimmel. Iger and his decision to return the late night host to TV was guided “by the right thing to do,” insiders told TheWrap. There’s still plenty of fight on this issue ahead as Sinclair and Nexstar dug in their heels at first by not putting Kimmel back on the air. They’ve now backed down. For Iger, doing the right thing, or doing things differently, as Buffett described it, will be more important than ever for his final Disney chapter.
Lessons for newsrooms about creator journalism from the Online News Association, Charles M. Sennott’s groundtruth
Two CEOs? It Can Work, CEO Brief, WSJ
Robert Redford remembered: ‘He gave Park City a cachet,’ The Park Record
