In recent months an internet influencer has leveraged his success to get women's boxing on a worldwide streaming network, the Saudi royal family has launched a takeover of boxing and Dana White is scheming to hold a UFC event at the White House.
Lots of bold people still out there to blow shit up.
You’re stuck grading this by legacy prestige instead of structural power. UFC isn’t “second tier” when it’s pulling a billion-dollar ESPN deal, Saudi investment, and circling Netflix and Amazon for rights. It’s not about being as big as the NFL. It’s about being unregulated, centralized, and fully monetizable across global platforms. That’s what Ari controls. And that’s what gives him leverage.
You keep calling it small stakes, but you’re ignoring who’s now backing him. RedBird Capital isn’t in the game to lose. They’re behind the Yankees, AC Milan, and the XFL. Ari is about to close on MotoGP. He just bid for the Miami Open against Stephen Ross. Even when he loses, he’s in the room where the biggest sports assets are being moved. That’s not grifting. It’s basically top-level capital rotation.
You’re also underestimating the strategic value of control. The NFL and F1 have scale, sure, but Ari doesn’t have to deal with owners, unions, or broadcast limitations. UFC is plug-and-play content. It’s global, live, and license-ready. He owns the stage outright. That’s why he can turn it into a bipartisan tool. He doesn’t need the sport to reflect the party. He needs the optics to reflect power. And he controls the lights, the platform, the message, and the timing.
So no, I’m not overstating it. You’re just refusing to acknowledge that Ari isn’t chasing the old metrics. He’s building something more dangerous. Total control with no leash. That’s not second tier. That’s first position, just written in a language you seemingly don’t want to admit you understand fluently.
It's most definitely second tier. Compared to NBA and NFL, Premiere League etc.
That's not an insult. Of course capital is interested in a billion dollar business. That's not because of Ari. Major capital was, obviously, supporting and funding Zuffa's UFC too.
This ChatGPT mumbo jumbo about owning the stage doesn't make sense. Netflix and Amazon own the stage. TKO owns programming. How is that different from anyone else? The turnkey nature of UFC's broadcast is possibly useful to a TV executive but doesn't really speak to any broader cultural influence.
The most interesting thing about it is how politically coded its become. Most of these kinds of power brokers push back against any lean too far one way or another.
Please connect the dots here about how UFC leveraging a long standing relationship with Trump says anything to institutional power about Rahm Emanuel. I'm sure they are well aware of how a centrist Democrat operates.
Let’s get something straight. I don’t use ChatGPT to write my arguments. I use it the same way I’d use Grammarly, for spelling and formatting. So nice try.
Now to your response. You keep calling UFC second tier because you’re measuring it like it’s 2005. The game isn’t about league hierarchy anymore. It’s about control, ownership, and leverage. Ari doesn’t need 30 stadiums or a commissioner’s office to make moves. He owns the product, the pipeline, the monetization layers, and the narrative control all without oversight. That’s more valuable in today’s media landscape than fragmented prestige leagues with bloated overhead and political red tape.
You say capital was already backing Zuffa, but Ari’s the one who turned that into a $21B dollar publicly traded machine. He’s the one who bundled WWE, secured the ESPN and Saudi deals, and opened the doors for Netflix, Amazon, WBD, and ESPN to circle combat sports and sports entertainment again. He scaled what the Fertittas built and rewrote the financial model behind it. You can’t pretend that didn’t happen.
Netflix and Amazon own distribution. Ari owns the IP that forces them to come to the table. That’s the difference. Owning the stage isn’t about bandwidth. It’s about leverage. UFC is plug and play live content that doesn’t rely on scripted timelines or production headaches. That’s gold to a media buyer looking for predictable, scalable returns and Ari owns it outright.
As for the Rahm comment, you’re still stuck on partisanship. Ari isn’t trying to make UFC’s base vote for Rahm. That’s not the point. The point is he’s staging a message. I can draw Trump, and I can quietly move institutional backing toward Rahm. That’s not contradiction. That’s how political power actually moves through brokers, not ballots.
You keep saying this is second tier. I’m saying it’s the only tier that still operates with full control. Ari doesn’t need the biggest platform. He owns the most flexible one. That’s why he’s dangerous. And that’s why he’s seemingly set the stage to win.
It's a smaller, second tier niche sport. That's not a "legacy" position. It's just about how much money it commands and generates. It's not the NFL. Now, it's not rodeo either.
Obviously no one is downplaying what they've done with UFC. It's a big business. There are lots of big businesses. We live in the era of big business.
I'm not sure why you're insistent on positioning TKO as above partisan politics. It is explicitly a right wing operation and its cultural power exists almost exclusively in that realm, mostly due to the right's complete inability to penetrate any other form of popular culture.
I mentioned generative ai because its use was kind of clear. As a reader, I'm not sure that's the best direction for this site.
The reason I’m positioning TKO as above partisan politics is because Trump has four years left. That’s a hard constitutional ceiling, and there’s no clear succession plan inside the GOP. No heir apparent. No unified direction. Just scattered names with no gravitational pull. So anchoring TKO’s long-term power to Trumpism alone is shortsighted.
Ari’s play isn’t ideological. It’s transactional. That’s why he can stage Trump at a UFC event one week and rally institutional money behind Rahm Emanuel the next. It’s not about party. It’s about platform control. UFC and WWE give him direct access to both sides of the aisle through cultural relevance and media leverage. That’s not a theory. That’s a documented fact: from ESPN to Saudi deals to RedBird Capital.
And let’s respectfully clear something else up. I didn’t use generative AI to write any of my columns. I used it for spelling, formatting, and clarity. That’s it. You don’t get to claim my writing came from a machine when you’ve never studied my style or process. That’s just assumption posing as critique.
You keep trying to frame TKO through a culture war lens. I’m just showing you how it operates above it. You’re biased and locked on narrative. I’m focused on structure and analyzing control, not narrative and aesthetics. And that’s the difference between watching the story and understanding who’s actually writing it.
With respect, you don't seem to be articulating how they "operate above it" beyond just saying they do. I'd agree that most sports properties attempt to operate above the political culture wars. That's what's interesting about TKO. They are one of the only sports brands explicitly going after a right-leaning audience.
I'm not sure what cultural significance or media influence sets UFC apart from other Tier 2 sports. It has a small audience, mainly consisting of UFC fans. The major figures associated with UFC don't seem to have broken into mainstream culture, except for Conor McGregor, who was pulled into it by Floyd Mayweather. If TKO has any unusual cultural power compared to leagues like the NHL, it might be because they've become so political since 2016.
It's right coded, probably to the extent that it will take a generation to remove the taint of the overwhelming and intrusive nature of the politicking. I doubt it's duplicatable the other way, as the left has access to much more significant pop culture and sports figures. I suspect Ari and co hope to be out of the business after they score a new TV deal and someone else can attempt a rebrand.
Again, however you parse your use of AI for "clarity" and "formatting," it's pretty obvious, not because I've read your writing, but because I've been exposed to lots of ChatGPT "writing." Whether that's an ethical lapse is not for me to determine. It's good of you to admit it.
The boldness of Ari Emanuel running a UFC White House event is less about accomplishing greatness for Mixed Martial Arts than it is about trying to figure out how Rahm fits into the picture in 2028 for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Follow the money.
Turki/TKO Boxing is an expansion of the multi-monopoly swallowing everything up. For better and for worse.
Nakisa and Jake right now are looking for runway on how to proceed next. At least Nakisa is attempting to pull a couple of pages out of the Rules for Radicals playbook.
Seems to me that Saudi launched their boxing move years ago. Joshua vs Ruiz was in 2019 and almost every pertinent heavyweight fight has been there since.
Last time you guys told us Dana was irrelevant he almost immediately ended up on a dais sitting right next to two ex Presidents and was named to the board of Meta. But UFC going to the White House isn't about his long relationship with Trump? It's about a forgotten political figure from another party? If Ari is such a secretive figure who refuses to face the public (as this website premises) how will UFC being at the White House help his even more reclusive brother?
Saudi didn’t just launch boxing, they scaled it. What’s happening now is a power grab. Ari isn’t doing this for clout. He’s building infrastructure. The UFC at the White House isn’t a stunt. It’s a setup. It’s Rahm’s soft launch, backed by institutional muscle and media capital. This has nothing to do with Dana’s history or Trump. That’s surface-level noise. Ari’s not chasing headlines. He’s locking down the board while everyone else is watching the octagon.
And if you really understood how Ari moves, you’d know how much pull he threw around the Baldoni-Lively situation. He dropped Baldoni, backed Reynolds and Lively, and ran interference before most people even figured out what was happening.
Power brokers aren’t loud. They don’t play the public. And they sure as hell don’t follow scripts. Respectfully if they did, people just like you and me would see the plays before they land. But we don’t. Because sometimes a pawn has no clue how the queen moves until it’s too late.
Not seeing it doesn’t make it wrong. It just means you’re not in the room.
You keep thinking this is about a single administration. It’s not. Ari doesn’t care who’s in power. He builds with whoever gives him access. UFC at the White House is leverage. The party lines are noise. Ari has been in rooms with Trump, Kushner, Harris, and Kamala’s biggest donors all within the same election cycle. You’re asking the wrong questions because you’re looking for contradictions in the optics instead of seeing the strategy underneath.
Saudi hosting Joshua Ruiz wasn’t about Ari. That was boxing finding a checkbook. What Ari is doing now is different. He’s turning combat sports into a political asset class. You don’t need to believe in Rahm’s run. That’s not the point. The point is he’s being positioned with real capital behind him, and Ari is just setting the stage.
You’re too focused on the headline. Start watching the pattern.
UFC has really gone out of their way to position themselves as a right wing brand. Not really clear how UFC running an event at the White House for Trump helps any Democrat. It's a toxic brand on that side now. Possibly irrevocably, though who can say. How does this "launch" Rahm Emanuel?
In recent months an internet influencer has leveraged his success to get women's boxing on a worldwide streaming network, the Saudi royal family has launched a takeover of boxing and Dana White is scheming to hold a UFC event at the White House.
Lots of bold people still out there to blow shit up.
You’re stuck grading this by legacy prestige instead of structural power. UFC isn’t “second tier” when it’s pulling a billion-dollar ESPN deal, Saudi investment, and circling Netflix and Amazon for rights. It’s not about being as big as the NFL. It’s about being unregulated, centralized, and fully monetizable across global platforms. That’s what Ari controls. And that’s what gives him leverage.
You keep calling it small stakes, but you’re ignoring who’s now backing him. RedBird Capital isn’t in the game to lose. They’re behind the Yankees, AC Milan, and the XFL. Ari is about to close on MotoGP. He just bid for the Miami Open against Stephen Ross. Even when he loses, he’s in the room where the biggest sports assets are being moved. That’s not grifting. It’s basically top-level capital rotation.
You’re also underestimating the strategic value of control. The NFL and F1 have scale, sure, but Ari doesn’t have to deal with owners, unions, or broadcast limitations. UFC is plug-and-play content. It’s global, live, and license-ready. He owns the stage outright. That’s why he can turn it into a bipartisan tool. He doesn’t need the sport to reflect the party. He needs the optics to reflect power. And he controls the lights, the platform, the message, and the timing.
So no, I’m not overstating it. You’re just refusing to acknowledge that Ari isn’t chasing the old metrics. He’s building something more dangerous. Total control with no leash. That’s not second tier. That’s first position, just written in a language you seemingly don’t want to admit you understand fluently.
It's most definitely second tier. Compared to NBA and NFL, Premiere League etc.
That's not an insult. Of course capital is interested in a billion dollar business. That's not because of Ari. Major capital was, obviously, supporting and funding Zuffa's UFC too.
This ChatGPT mumbo jumbo about owning the stage doesn't make sense. Netflix and Amazon own the stage. TKO owns programming. How is that different from anyone else? The turnkey nature of UFC's broadcast is possibly useful to a TV executive but doesn't really speak to any broader cultural influence.
The most interesting thing about it is how politically coded its become. Most of these kinds of power brokers push back against any lean too far one way or another.
Please connect the dots here about how UFC leveraging a long standing relationship with Trump says anything to institutional power about Rahm Emanuel. I'm sure they are well aware of how a centrist Democrat operates.
Let’s get something straight. I don’t use ChatGPT to write my arguments. I use it the same way I’d use Grammarly, for spelling and formatting. So nice try.
Now to your response. You keep calling UFC second tier because you’re measuring it like it’s 2005. The game isn’t about league hierarchy anymore. It’s about control, ownership, and leverage. Ari doesn’t need 30 stadiums or a commissioner’s office to make moves. He owns the product, the pipeline, the monetization layers, and the narrative control all without oversight. That’s more valuable in today’s media landscape than fragmented prestige leagues with bloated overhead and political red tape.
You say capital was already backing Zuffa, but Ari’s the one who turned that into a $21B dollar publicly traded machine. He’s the one who bundled WWE, secured the ESPN and Saudi deals, and opened the doors for Netflix, Amazon, WBD, and ESPN to circle combat sports and sports entertainment again. He scaled what the Fertittas built and rewrote the financial model behind it. You can’t pretend that didn’t happen.
Netflix and Amazon own distribution. Ari owns the IP that forces them to come to the table. That’s the difference. Owning the stage isn’t about bandwidth. It’s about leverage. UFC is plug and play live content that doesn’t rely on scripted timelines or production headaches. That’s gold to a media buyer looking for predictable, scalable returns and Ari owns it outright.
As for the Rahm comment, you’re still stuck on partisanship. Ari isn’t trying to make UFC’s base vote for Rahm. That’s not the point. The point is he’s staging a message. I can draw Trump, and I can quietly move institutional backing toward Rahm. That’s not contradiction. That’s how political power actually moves through brokers, not ballots.
You keep saying this is second tier. I’m saying it’s the only tier that still operates with full control. Ari doesn’t need the biggest platform. He owns the most flexible one. That’s why he’s dangerous. And that’s why he’s seemingly set the stage to win.
It's a smaller, second tier niche sport. That's not a "legacy" position. It's just about how much money it commands and generates. It's not the NFL. Now, it's not rodeo either.
Obviously no one is downplaying what they've done with UFC. It's a big business. There are lots of big businesses. We live in the era of big business.
I'm not sure why you're insistent on positioning TKO as above partisan politics. It is explicitly a right wing operation and its cultural power exists almost exclusively in that realm, mostly due to the right's complete inability to penetrate any other form of popular culture.
I mentioned generative ai because its use was kind of clear. As a reader, I'm not sure that's the best direction for this site.
The reason I’m positioning TKO as above partisan politics is because Trump has four years left. That’s a hard constitutional ceiling, and there’s no clear succession plan inside the GOP. No heir apparent. No unified direction. Just scattered names with no gravitational pull. So anchoring TKO’s long-term power to Trumpism alone is shortsighted.
Ari’s play isn’t ideological. It’s transactional. That’s why he can stage Trump at a UFC event one week and rally institutional money behind Rahm Emanuel the next. It’s not about party. It’s about platform control. UFC and WWE give him direct access to both sides of the aisle through cultural relevance and media leverage. That’s not a theory. That’s a documented fact: from ESPN to Saudi deals to RedBird Capital.
And let’s respectfully clear something else up. I didn’t use generative AI to write any of my columns. I used it for spelling, formatting, and clarity. That’s it. You don’t get to claim my writing came from a machine when you’ve never studied my style or process. That’s just assumption posing as critique.
You keep trying to frame TKO through a culture war lens. I’m just showing you how it operates above it. You’re biased and locked on narrative. I’m focused on structure and analyzing control, not narrative and aesthetics. And that’s the difference between watching the story and understanding who’s actually writing it.
With respect, you don't seem to be articulating how they "operate above it" beyond just saying they do. I'd agree that most sports properties attempt to operate above the political culture wars. That's what's interesting about TKO. They are one of the only sports brands explicitly going after a right-leaning audience.
I'm not sure what cultural significance or media influence sets UFC apart from other Tier 2 sports. It has a small audience, mainly consisting of UFC fans. The major figures associated with UFC don't seem to have broken into mainstream culture, except for Conor McGregor, who was pulled into it by Floyd Mayweather. If TKO has any unusual cultural power compared to leagues like the NHL, it might be because they've become so political since 2016.
It's right coded, probably to the extent that it will take a generation to remove the taint of the overwhelming and intrusive nature of the politicking. I doubt it's duplicatable the other way, as the left has access to much more significant pop culture and sports figures. I suspect Ari and co hope to be out of the business after they score a new TV deal and someone else can attempt a rebrand.
Again, however you parse your use of AI for "clarity" and "formatting," it's pretty obvious, not because I've read your writing, but because I've been exposed to lots of ChatGPT "writing." Whether that's an ethical lapse is not for me to determine. It's good of you to admit it.
The boldness of Ari Emanuel running a UFC White House event is less about accomplishing greatness for Mixed Martial Arts than it is about trying to figure out how Rahm fits into the picture in 2028 for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Follow the money.
Turki/TKO Boxing is an expansion of the multi-monopoly swallowing everything up. For better and for worse.
Nakisa and Jake right now are looking for runway on how to proceed next. At least Nakisa is attempting to pull a couple of pages out of the Rules for Radicals playbook.
Seems to me that Saudi launched their boxing move years ago. Joshua vs Ruiz was in 2019 and almost every pertinent heavyweight fight has been there since.
Last time you guys told us Dana was irrelevant he almost immediately ended up on a dais sitting right next to two ex Presidents and was named to the board of Meta. But UFC going to the White House isn't about his long relationship with Trump? It's about a forgotten political figure from another party? If Ari is such a secretive figure who refuses to face the public (as this website premises) how will UFC being at the White House help his even more reclusive brother?
Rahm's not reclusive. He's getting tons of media for his Presidential aspirations.
Personally I think Ari is more about the Trump Presidency than about his brother's campaign, but he's only openly fundraising for the latter.
For the former he's doing things like brokering an intro to Trump for David Ellison.
Saudi didn’t just launch boxing, they scaled it. What’s happening now is a power grab. Ari isn’t doing this for clout. He’s building infrastructure. The UFC at the White House isn’t a stunt. It’s a setup. It’s Rahm’s soft launch, backed by institutional muscle and media capital. This has nothing to do with Dana’s history or Trump. That’s surface-level noise. Ari’s not chasing headlines. He’s locking down the board while everyone else is watching the octagon.
And if you really understood how Ari moves, you’d know how much pull he threw around the Baldoni-Lively situation. He dropped Baldoni, backed Reynolds and Lively, and ran interference before most people even figured out what was happening.
Power brokers aren’t loud. They don’t play the public. And they sure as hell don’t follow scripts. Respectfully if they did, people just like you and me would see the plays before they land. But we don’t. Because sometimes a pawn has no clue how the queen moves until it’s too late.
Not seeing it doesn’t make it wrong. It just means you’re not in the room.
Saudi hosted Joshua and Ruiz in 2019 and the Usyk/Fury fights for Ari Emanuel?
The Republican White House is continuing a longstanding relationship with UFC to..."soft launch" a doomed Presidential run for Democrat Rahm Emanuel?
You keep thinking this is about a single administration. It’s not. Ari doesn’t care who’s in power. He builds with whoever gives him access. UFC at the White House is leverage. The party lines are noise. Ari has been in rooms with Trump, Kushner, Harris, and Kamala’s biggest donors all within the same election cycle. You’re asking the wrong questions because you’re looking for contradictions in the optics instead of seeing the strategy underneath.
Saudi hosting Joshua Ruiz wasn’t about Ari. That was boxing finding a checkbook. What Ari is doing now is different. He’s turning combat sports into a political asset class. You don’t need to believe in Rahm’s run. That’s not the point. The point is he’s being positioned with real capital behind him, and Ari is just setting the stage.
You’re too focused on the headline. Start watching the pattern.
"Ari doesn't care who is in power "
"Ari is setting the stage for Rahm."
These ideas are not compatible.
UFC has really gone out of their way to position themselves as a right wing brand. Not really clear how UFC running an event at the White House for Trump helps any Democrat. It's a toxic brand on that side now. Possibly irrevocably, though who can say. How does this "launch" Rahm Emanuel?