The inside story of a dynasty born with price tags and sunk by a pyramid of credit.
Today’s story arrives a few days late. Late enough that Zero Bullshit didn’t come out last week. The launch of Meelton (my ecosystem of newsletters), which I told you about a few weeks ago, is eating up a lot of time, and Meelton is what allows Zero Bullshit, which doesn’t make money, to be published at all. Except that putting out an issue like today’s takes a serious amount of time.
Because today’s story begins one winter morning, when a source sends me confidential documents about the looming collapse of Saks. Dozens of documents. Thousands of pages. Including court filings and technical stuff that isn’t always readable for anyone who isn’t an expert in US and Canadian procedure (meaning me).
Those exchanges are actually what pushed me to launch the Zero Bullshit portal for sources a little earlier than planned. The informant needed absolute anonymity, and the documents couldn’t be handled lightly, let alone published, before being thoroughly scrubbed, or the source would have been burned.
The tool is now open to everyone.
It lets anyone pass on information, documents and so on, anonymously or not, talk with me and receive answers in absolute confidentiality.
So if there is ever a seizure or a court order, there will be nothing to recover. All the more so since, on several occasions, people named in these pages have tried to take Zero Bullshit to court to obtain identities, which I have refused every single time.
From now on, for security reasons, all information and all conversations with sources will go through this portal. And yes, that is obviously linked to the many recent hacking attempts on my social media accounts, my email and so on.
Anyway, thanks to this source, I can document for you one of the most spectacular bankruptcies of recent years. A luxury empire worth billions, run into the ground by a man who has done this before, with a business track record that Frédéric Merlin (the young tycoon busily buying up department stores in France) seems to have had his eye on for a while…
So here is the inside story of the fall of Saks. And why the company’s fate was in fact sealed 18 months ago.
EDIT 24/01/26, 18:19: replaced the editorial, which was the draft version