Mark Shapiro wants to sell WWE tickets at UFC prices
The King of the Manosphere says Vince McMahon didn't maximize the business.
TKO COO Mark Shapiro apparently has a different definition of the word hubris than most dictionaries.
In TKO World, hubris means a lack of greed.
Complacency is bad. Greed is good. We have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, especially when the insiders are in control of the various classes of stock shares.
According to TKO, we includes you. Anyone who doesn’t share Mr. Shapiro’s vision isn’t a true business partner.
With news breaking Wednesday night — from Turki Alalshikh’s side, no less, reportedly in a now-deleted Snapchat video — that Wrestlemania will be heading to Saudi Arabia in 2027, it looks like Riyadh Season is here to stay for all your WWE and UFC content needs.
When WME Group sells out, they really sell out. Comedy festivals in Saudi Arabia. Six Kings tennis exhibition on Netflix. And now Vince McMahon’s greatest invention, Wrestlemania.
The irony is that Vince McMahon is really the only guy in the fight business you could call The Turki Whisperer. If Turki really leaked the Wrestlemania news behind the back of TKO executives as a flex, we have one hell of a political turf battle.
The executives and lobbyists in the TKO C-Suite are the most important people in fight sport. How should fans feel about that?
It doesn’t matter what fans think!
Thanks, Rock, for those words of encouragement.
At The MMA Draw, we often mock and ridicule Mark Shapiro for his obsession with value extraction and cost savings. He pushes process first because TKO has a multi-monopoly fight shop no one else has ever constructed. Conflating process with substance. One size fits all when it comes to the corporate playbook.
Despite the fact that WWE & UFC are dramatically different audiences politically and demographically, the Kings of Hollywood want a universal plan to treat all cattle fans the same — regardless of income or socioeconomic status.
And no one knows how to spread verbal flatulence in a room better than Mark Shapiro at a business conference, talking to the very institutional players who own a piece of TKO stock or debt. His performance for Wednesday’s Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco was a thing of beauty.
You knew the conversation was going to hell in a handbasket when Mark Shapiro spouted this fan-friendly gem:
“We know we have a lot of room [raising ticket prices] because Vince McMahon was primarily pricing tickets for families and wasn’t totally focused on maxing the opportunity there.
“And now that we've seen what we can do with UFC, we're replicating that in terms of ticket yield and holding back and advanced sales when it comes to on location on the WWE side. And it's really working out well.”
Get ready for $4,000 seats at Madison Square Garden and $20,000 seats for Wrestlemania. Just remember who the real stars of WWE are. They’re wearing Giorgio Armani sport coats.
Wonder why Mark Shapiro continues to criticize Vince McMahon, The Businessman? There’s a motive and purpose behind it.
What is behind Shapiro’s dirty trick?