Vogue editor Anna Wintour is once again rumored to snag an ambassadorship to France, now that Marc Lasry has been forced to withdraw over his lack of “hedging” his bets with a poker ring allegedly run by the Russian mob.
The bombshell disclosure about Lasry was first reported in The Post on Friday.
Ambassadorships are usually handed out to the big-spending donors, which was the reason the hedge-fund billionaire who runs Avenue Capital was able to nose out Wintour in the first place.
In March, Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend, in a bid to keep Anna happy and cash in on the glamour quotient he had built up running the fashion bible for 25 years, gave her the added title of artistic director of all the company’s magazines.
“Anna is happy in her current role,” said Megan Salt, a Vogue spokeswoman, who is herself exiting for a public-relations job with Amazon on May 10.
The person Wintour has tapped to take over Salt’s job certainly looks like the ideal pick — for someone with political ambitions. None other than Hildy Kuryk, most recently the national finance director of the Democratic National Committee. She began with Obama during his early primary fight against Hillary Clinton and is a trusted member of his inner circle.
Some things just make On the Money go hmmm . . . –-Keith J. Kelly
Career path
Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief Joanna Coles (pictured), who was among the luminaries honored with a Matrix Award by the Women in Communications in New York last week, said she’s learned the four stages of being a top editor in the publishing world.
Step 1: Who is Joanna Coles?
Step 2: Get me Joanna Coles!
Step 3: Get me the next Joanna Coles!
Step 4: Who the hell is Joanna Coles?
Coles said that right now in her career — which saw her elevated from Marie Claire to Hearst’s flagship earlier this year — she is somewhere between Steps 2 and 3. –Keith J. Kelly
Cookie monster
While Yahoo! may place cookies on your computer, the cookies inside Yahoo!’s offices are harder to come by.
An insider at a satellite office outside Sunnyvale, Calif., complained last week that the company is hiding desserts immediately after lunch, and suspects CEO Marissa Mayer is sending a message to staff to shape up.
“Since they have had the free-food thing, I’ve noticed lately that they stash the cookies away after lunch,” the hungry employee said.
One of Mayer’s executive moves after joining Yahoo! was having free lunches like those served at her former company, Google.
Yahoo! did not return a request for comment, and it is unknown whether Mayer has taken a page from Google’s cookbook.
Our insider said less-fatty food could do some of the staff some good.
“For some reason, there are a lot of obese people in their 20s and 30s here,” the staffer said.–Garett Sloane
Professor Doom
Dave Cliff is becoming the Nostradamus of Wall Street. The professor from the University of Bristol in England darkly warned in 2010, in the immediate aftermath of the Flash Crash, how financial markets were foolishly “normalizing” the occurrences of these increasingly frequent electronic disasters.
“The absence of a catastrophe thus far is taken as evidence that future catastrophes are less likely than had been previously thought,” the professor wrote. “The flaw in this line of reasoning is starkly revealed when a catastrophe then ensues.”
That’s for sure. Take a look at the Facebook IPO on Nasdaq for one spectacular example.
Last year, a computer glitch was blamed for a $440 million loss at high-speed trader Knight Capital Management.
Last week it was business as usual: Some market professionals simply shrugged off two of the latest disasters.
On Tuesday, the S&P plunged almost 1 percent, temporarily erasing $130 billion in stock value, within seconds of a fake news tweet.
And on Thursday, the CBOE had to delay its opening for several hours. The largest US options exchange blamed, yes, those pesky software problems.
Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading disagrees. “Certainly, there are going to be software glitches, but there seem to be more and more of them lately,” he told us.
“All it takes is somebody to blow out some e-mini contracts on the futures market, and you get this cycle going through every asset class — that’s why it is so scary,” Saluzzi said.–John Aidan Byrne