Ari Emanuel, Wrestling Billionaire
But he can't escape a brutal Hollywood media war even as he allies with Elon Musk vs Open AI
It’s a big day for Ari Emanuel. He’s finally, officially attained billionaire status. Although yesterday’s bloodbath in TKO stock can’t have been good for his fortunes. Billionaire is the new millionaire. Only billionaires can really be oligarchs in Trump world and only true oligarchs can be players in 2025.
The Hollywood Reporter has the deets:
The Hollywood titan and CEO of entertainment and media agency giant Endeavor has seen his net worth soar over the last 12 months as bets on WWE and UFC have paid off handsomely. Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index anointed Emanuel as part of the rarefied club of the super rich, owing in large part to his holdings in Endeavor, which has enjoyed a 48 percent rise in its share price in the last year, according to Bloomberg.
Endeavor’s gains have been underpinned by a majority stake in TKO Group Holdings Inc., the parent company of WWE and UFC. TKO, of which Emanuel is also the CEO, has nearly doubled in value in the past 12 months.
Ari Became A King of Hollywood Just As The Culture Factory Lost Its Mojo
A decade ago many people, likely including Ari himself, assumed he would eventually become a billionaire, but no one would have predicted he would become the second billionaire whose fortune came from monopolizing professional wrestling.
Unlike Vince McMahon, the previous pro-wrestling billionaire, Ari Emanuel is no laughing stock in the wider culture. Fifteen years ago when Vince was a billionaire and Ari wasn’t even close, Emanuel had infinitely more social cache.
That’s why Vince hired Ari when he was trying to “go legitimate” and become a force in Hollywood. We’ve argued in previous posts that the reasons for Ari’s success today — being early to recognize the power of owning content for streaming — came out of what he learned watching Vince’s early WWE Network.
And when Vince hit a rough spot, Ari was there to step in and buy the WWE from his old client. And when Vince hit a rougher spot, Ari was quick to push him out of the TKO boardroom.
Now Ari’s boardroom triumphs have made him a billionaire but not because of Hollywood. No, Ari’s a billionaire because of pro wrestling and mixed martial arts. And yet he’s far more respected than either Vince McMahon or The Fertitta Brothers, several of whose billions come from selling the UFC to Ari.
No, in the early 2010s, most assumed that Ari Emanuel’s road to riches would be paved with Hollywood gold after he assumed control over the storied William Morris Agency in a 2009 merger described as a hostile takeover.
That was back when Hollywood was still the cultural capital of Earth and its films were a major export for the United States. That was back when Chinese audiences clamored for Hollywood product.
The screenshots below from The New York Times, CNN, Forbes, and The Independent show how Ari Emanuel, the newest in a long line of Hollywood moguls was scene back in the day.
Unfortunately for Ari’s career ambitions, Hollywood went to shit and when the COVID epidemic (that’s “plandemic” to you Jesse on Fire and Bryce Mitchell fans) hit in 2020, the whole Endeavor empire nearly went tits up.
How the UFC Saved Ari’s Empire in 2020
As The LA Times reported at the time, it was a close-run affair:
…when you’ve spent the last several years bulking up into a 7,500-person media, sports and entertainment juggernaut, with a fair amount of braggadocio, only to in short order pull a highly anticipated IPO and then announce layoffs and furloughs while navigating a global pandemic that’s virtually halted every piece of your business, the rumor mill goes into overdrive.
Indeed, for the last several months, speculation has been rife that the Beverly Hills-based Endeavor is in trouble. The chatter has reached a fevered pitch in recent days amid murmurings that the feared and powerful firm was being restructured at the bidding of its powerful private equity overlords; that Emanuel, the chief executive, was to be cordoned off to one corner and that his partner, Executive Chairman Patrick Whitesell, would take over the talent business; or that the company would be sold for parts or file for bankruptcy.
Fortunately for Ari Emanuel and his ambitions, Endeavor had made a seemingly odd choice to diversify into combat sports in 2016, paying what seemed like an outrageous $4 billion to buy The Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Variety wrote “at the time, the industry snickered that Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel overpaid for UFC” and when Endeavor’s credit rating was lowered in the early days of covid, Emanuel’s whole plan seemed to have ended in disaster.
As Mike Ozanian wrote for Forbes:
Ari Emanuel, the CEO of Endeavor, built the company via a string of acquisitions starting in 2000. By 2018, the buying spree, primarily from his acquisition of UFC in 2016, left the privately held Endeavor saddled with $4.6 billion of debt stacked against just $3.6 billion in revenue. The game plan was to get rich and deleverage via an IPO in September 2019.
But the IPO was for suckers, and Emanuel pulled the plug on the public offering. Maybe he should have cut the price instead?
In late March, Endeavor announced layoffs. But the main problem for Endeavor is that it built its global company largely with debt. “The problem with taking on massive debt is that everything needs to go exactly right in order to eventually pay it down,” the Hollywood Reporter quoted USC adjunct professor Gene Del Vecchio as saying in an article in late March. “Revenue needs to grow considerably and consistently, and expenses need to stay under control. While Endeavor can weather a small storm, it may prove all but impossible to weather a protracted coronavirus-fueled hurricane.”
The Hollywood Reporter was even more brutal:
Whether Emanuel, 58, deserves that confidence is a matter of debate; while no one suggests he could have anticipated this disaster, some contend that his company’s aggressive acquisitions left debt-laden Endeavor especially ill-prepared to weather a storm. The company was already under pressure after a planned IPO failed last fall.
Asked how he evaluates Emanuel’s position now, one veteran studio executive replies, "That there was a natural disaster — you can’t blame him for that. You can blame him for putting himself in a position where things had to go great."
Fortunately for Ari, Dana White bulled through and continued to hold events during COVID, although this came at considerable cost in criticism from not only media but also business partners ESPN and Disney and US health authorities:
White’s attempts to keep fights going during the pandemic have drawn rebukes from powerful politicians and from his most important corporate partners, Disney and ESPN. The scrutiny, in part, reflected higher expectations of respectability from an organization that was long regarded as a lowbrow curiosity.
Dana was vindicated and released the above video mocking reporters who had criticized his decision. Notably, Disney, ESPN, and various elected officials who had also opposed the UFC’s continuation during COVID escaped criticism.
But Ari’s real genius is not building anything on his own. It’s taking someone else’s creation or ideas and supersizing them in an influence game.
Ari saw the game Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta played with UFC by constantly borrowing against it as an asset. They gobbled hundreds of millions of dollars from institutions like Deutsche Bank and paid themselves fat dividends at the cost of getting credit downgrades. But it didn’t matter in the end.
Ari grabbed UFC and their debt and was able to borrow against UFC on a supersized manner to save his Hollywood empire. That’s the icky part of all this.
So to recap, Ari had become one of the kings of Hollywood by 2010 but the whole empire would have collapsed in 2020 if not for Dana White and the UFC (what the New York Times charmingly called a “lowbrow curiosity”).
But all of that only got Ari Emanuel halfway to billionaire status. The rest came by way of purchasing an even more lowbrow curiosity, one that had already made a billionaire out of Vince McMahon: The WWE.
Ari Emanuel Is the 2nd Pro-Wrestling Billionaire
It is deliciously ironic that the King of Hollywood only became a billionaire when he acquired the one sports-adjacent company with an even more lowbrow reputation than the UFC.
Ari isn’t even the first billionaire the sports entertainment empire has minted. Vince McMahon achieved that status after taking the company public in 1999.
The irony is only heightened because the company only came up for sale when McMahon briefly lost control of the company to his family after a spate of alleged sex scandals and alleged payoffs, seized it back, and then sold out to Endeavor when yet another scandal hit that might have required massive legal spending on McMahon’s part.
Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro certainly moved fast upon acquiring the WWE, almost immediately merging it with the UFC in a spin-off company called TKO. Ari and Mark Shapiro worked their magic and got WWE a massive new deal with Netflix last year that has made the company considerably more valuable.
TKO has dramatically increased in value since its launch and has far exceeded the value of its parent company, Endeavor.
The story ain’t over, but for now the happy ending is that Ari Emanuel is a billionaire.
Ari is now a billionaire while the other talent agency players in Hollywood have had to sell off big chunks of their empires, like CAA did to Francois-Henri Pinault. Only a strongman like Bryan Freedman is left and he’s a strongman because of what a great lawyer he is. He’s the only guy that can puncture Ari’s image. Ari conquered everyone else.
Unfortunately for Ari, Bryan Freedman is a very formidable lawyer and represents many powerful media figures on the right. That’s right, the arena where one must play in the Trump era. The two power brokers are in an interesting war right now.
Will Hollywood Have Its Revenge on Ari?
Unfortunately for Ari, Bryan Freedman is representing Ari’s former client actor/director Justin Baldoni, or Justin “Bologna” as Ari referred to him in an interview with Freakonomics Live.
In the meantime, Freedman’s other clients like Megyn Kelly have been savaging Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds, and now Ari Emanuel, who claims to be “ride or die” with the couple has inserted himself into this conversation.
It will be very interesting to see if Freedman’s other clients, particularly Tucker Carlson, will choose to discuss Ari Emanuel. I don’t think that would be good for him because Trump watches Tucker Carlson and Trump is very important to Ari Emanuel. Plus there’s the Abu Dhabi factor.
Ari Emanuel’s In Trump and Musk’s Good Graces… For Now
As the tweet below illustrates, Ari Emanuel is not only one of the most powerful donors in the Democratic party, he’s also maybe the only one to also be in good graces with Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Unlike fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, Ari hasn’t tried to curry Trump’s favor with hamfisted antics like putting Dana White on the board of META or grossly overpaying for a Melania Trump special on Amazon Prime.
Ari has played a more subtle long game, allowing Dana White to publicly become one of Trump’s biggest supporters all the way back in 2016. He’s also got a long-standing business relationship with Trump as his agent:
Back in 2010, Emanuel became Trump’s agent, just months after the Hollywood power broker engineered a stunning takeover of the famed William Morris Agency. The New York real estate developer turned reality TV star was hosting “Celebrity Apprentice,” and he called Emanuel as he played golf during his company‘s annual off-site in Palm Springs.
…(Trump) wanted the man he’d taken to calling “the King of Hollywood” representing him.
Five years later, Trump announced his first run for president. After he called Mexicans “rapists” who brought drugs and crime into the country, NBC cut ties with him. Trump bought out NBC’s interest in the Miss Universe Organization and then sold Miss Universe to Emanuel’s Endeavor for an undisclosed sum. In November 2016, Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States.
Although Emanuel has not represented Trump since the latter announced his first candidacy, he was photographed meeting Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., after the 2016 election. Emanuel has downplayed the visit to those around him.
Three years later, Emanuel’s name surfaced in a trove of some 100 documents from Trump’s transition that was leaked to the political news site Axios, indicating he had been vetted for an unspecified role in the administration. A spokesperson for Endeavor declined to comment at the time.
Trump, who has called Emanuel “a very good friend of mine,” said at the start of his first administration: “Even though he’s not political, he’s political. He gets it.”