OTOY

I have just finished reading Ari Emanuel’s memoir of his first 65 years: Roll the calls. I read it more or less in one go on my Kindle. And it is 656 pages. This is the best business book I have read since Jerry Weintraub’s When I stop talking you’ll know I am dead. I have gifted 100 of copies of Weintraub’s book. Only Nassim Taleb (Black Swan and Antifragile), Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things) and Peter Thiel (From Zero to One) have had the same honour. I think Ari Emanuel might outpace them all, as soon as I am able to purchase hardcopies in Sweden (please make sure it happens quickly, PG Wahlén). Ari Emanuel is a powerhouse of an agent in Hollywood. He is a forceful jew with dyslexia. He both holds Donald Trump as a client and fires him when Mr Trump becomes President Trump since he dislikes his politics. And gets invited to The White House. He is an avid defender of Israel, but disavowed Netanyahu when he gets a Simon Wiesenthal award – “because he loves Israel, but he loves the kids in Gaza, too”. This is a complicated enigma, wrapped up in a riddle lined with dyslexia and two very successful older brothers – one whom served under President Obama, and later became Major of Chicago. But the most important thing about this book is that it teaches you what business schools don’t. That there are no mergers. The reason for a failed IPO could be a douchebag stumbling into a Me Too-moment. That it is all about getting eaten or eat. And Harvey Weinstein – everyone knew. There is a lot of cussing in this book. A fucking lot. But then again, Ari Emanuel’s client Mark Wahlberg decided to base a character in Entourage on him. Ari Gold, obviously. At times, the character and the real person seems to be interchanging, and we learn of Ari Emanuel’s issues with staying on course in real life. He still has not seen a single episode. But he sure enjoyed and used the fruits of his new unseeked famed. For once, people started taking his cold calls. Ari Emanuel made some of the biggest and boldest bets of the entertainment industry ever. Including purchasing the rights to WWE and UFC. The pandemic was not a walk in the park. Emanuel knows all the movers and shakers and in the final 20 years, names like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Twitter starts to push out the Leonardo Dicaprios so to speak. The world moves on and Ari Emanuel with it. He seems almost reaching happiness in the end of the book, but at 65 he is no retiree and very much like Barry Diller, whom he seems to despise I expect him to build something big again. He is a tour de force, and so was this read. 10/10 Mikael Pawlo