Dave Portnoy and Alex Cooper, embittered ex-colleagues, are rewriting the script for media success

Stoolies rejoice: Dave Portnoy once again owns Barstool, the online hub of sports and puerile humor he founded. The deal has been the talk of the internet as the controversial founder has reclaimed his media company from casino operator Penn Entertainment for the remarkable price of $1 less than four years after selling it to Penn for $550 million.

Portnoy now owns 100% of Barstool’s media business but will have to give Penn 50% of the gross proceeds if he sells the company, something the man who refers to himself as El Presidente has vowed won’t happen.

“For the first time in forever, we don’t have to watch what we say, what we do; it’s back to the pirate ship. And, by the way, I am never going to sell Barstool Sports. I’ll hold it ’til I die,” said Portnoy in a Twitter (X?) Video where he outlines a succession plan of passing it down to employees and employees’ children.

So yes, it’s Portnoy’s big week. But he’s sharing the spotlight with former Barstool employee and Call Her Daddy host Alexandra Cooper. This week she launched her Unwell Network with extremely-of-the-moment influencers Alix Earle and Madeline Argy, which seems likely to produce podcasts and associated media for Earle and her ilk.

The crucial trend here for contemporary media magnates Cooper and Portnoy is intellectual property ownership. It makes sense. In traditional media spaces, content makers are increasingly fighting to gain favorable union contracts—claiming underpayment, abusive workplaces, and lack of representation. And social media creators’ livelihoods depend on the whims of social platforms, which constantly alter algorithms and payouts. And now there’s the not-so-existential threat of artificial intelligence capitalizing on creator content to feed large language models and output A.I.-generated creative work for free. 

So, of course, the opportunity to own and profit from the fruits of their media brands appeals to Portnoy and Cooper.

Cooper’s path to IP self-determination actually began with Portnoy. After Portnoy discovered Call Her Daddy on Instagram he acquired the show, and Cooper and cohost Sofia Franklyn became Barstool employees. During contentious contract renegotiations later on, Cooper emerged as the solo host of the show, along with 100% ownership of its intellectual property. Ultimately, she left Barstool and inked one of the most lucrative podcasting deals ever: a $60 million three-year exclusive licensing deal with Spotify. 

“With the amount that I put into Call Her Daddy there was no doubt about it that I was going to fight quite literally till the end for that IP,” Cooper told me when I interviewed her from the airy West Hollywood home that serves as her podcast studio (Dad Pad) for a magazine profile. “I understood what it would do to my career if I lost that.” 

A most shocking part of my time with Cooper was watching her produce Call Her Daddy completely alone. I sat in a desk chair behind her for multiple hours and watched her painstakingly edit this episode with La La Anthony. The only interference during the process of cutting the content, recording commercials, and uploading to Spotify was her assistant delivering her a meal from California Pizza Kitchen and bottled Costco water. Of course, Cooper could hire an editor but having her hands on the steering wheel is her comfort. When I asked if she’d ever consider another cohost she curtly responded: “Fuck no.”

It seems to be the same for Portnoy who says regaining total control of Barstool may be his greatest victory. And shortly after the sale was announced, Portnoy used the site to brandish employees in a post titled: “How Fucking Brain Dead Are All My Employees?”

Well, these are things you can write when you’re in charge.

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Alexandra Sternlicht

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by David Meyer.

NEWSWORTHY

Chip shortage. Germany may be racing to create semiconductor production capacity, but it will take years for those plans to resolve the shortages faced by Germany’s auto giants. That’s according to Audi procurement chief Renate Vachenauer, who Reuters reports is also calling on the industry to stop using quite such a broad variety of chips—there are around 8,000 different types being used in cars.

Meta glasses. The first release of Meta’s augmented-reality glasses will happen next year and will run to all of 1,000 units, rather than the originally-planned 50,000, according to The Information. It seems the next generation, arriving a few years later, will be the more mass-market proposition, while the first gen will be for internal use and for demonstrations. The publication says this is largely because the devices will need to be made in the U.S., as the lenses need silicon carbide and the government won’t allow the material to be exported to China.

R.I.P. Cortana (mostly). Microsoft is killing off its Cortana digital assistant, the iOS and Android apps for which are long gone, in Windows 11. No more Cortana support in Teams either, as of the coming fall, although The Verge notes that Microsoft will keep supporting Cortana inside Outlook’s mobile version. All together now: Cortana is kinda dead; long live Windows Copilot.

ON OUR FEED

“The operational run rate right now…we’re pretty close to break even.”

—X CEO Linda Yaccarino in her first broadcast interview since assuming the position. She also said she had “autonomy” under owner Elon Musk, and claimed X was a safer platform than Ye Olde Twitter was.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Meta spends $14 million on Mark Zuckerberg’s security, and Tesla is ‘highly dependent’ on Elon Musk—but no one can actually stop them from maiming each other in a cage, by David Meyer

Victory for fledgling robotaxi industry prompts San Francisco residents angry at the ‘deathtraps’ to stage traffic cone protests, by Chloe Taylor

Bob Iger said Disney’s formula for streaming success is something called ‘Star’, by Rachyl Jones

College professors are in ‘full-on crisis mode’ as they catch one ‘ChatGPT plagiarist’ after another, by Associated Press

Even the Pope is worried humanity needs ‘protecting’ from A.I.—he was a deepfake target himself, by Eleanor Pringle

U.K. Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is gearing up to send its first group of tourists to space after years of delays, by Prarthana Prakash

BEFORE YOU GO

Russia’s Google. Yandex is the company often referred to as “Russia’s Google.” Now cofounder Arkady Volozh (until last year the CEO) has taken the rare step for a Russian business figure of speaking out against the country’s war against Ukraine. "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is barbaric, and I am categorically against it," he told Politico. Arkady lives in Israel these days and was sanctioned by the EU in the early days of the war.

Meanwhile, Wired has an interesting piece on leaked Yandex code that reveals how the company tracks people online for ad-targeting purposes, much as rivals such as Google do. The leak provides an unusual glimpse into how these black boxes work and privacy engineer Kaileigh McCrea told the publication elements of that functionality—like making household profiles for people who live together and predicting people’s interests—were “deeply unsettling” and “creepy.”