What is the "narrow disagreement" between Vince McMahon & TKO?
Surprise! A last-minute dispute in the WWE Delaware shareholder settlement.
Two months ago, TKO (along with Vince McMahon + Nick Khan) supposedly settled a very contentious WWE shareholders lawsuit in Delaware. Lots of dirty secrets were revealed about Ari Emanuel’s acquisition of WWE from his former Endeavor client.
Delaware judge J. Travis Laster busted WWE on evidence spoliation related to discovery in the case and applied Delaware’s version of Rule 37(e) sanctions. The kind of sanctions Las Vegas Federal judge Richard Boulware is mulling over right now regarding UFC antitrust litigation.
Right before going to trial in June 2026, TKO entered into settlement talks with WWE shareholders who claimed they didn’t get paid enough when Vince accepted Ari’s bid for WWE.
This WWE settlement was announced two months ago and killed any further media headlines regarding the case. The world moved on. Certainty, right?
Except… it turns out that there are two very interesting and vigorously ongoing disputes.
There’s a disclosure fight between journalist Brandon Thurston and TKO over access to case records now that there’s a settlement in place. So far, Judge Laster has largely ruled in favor of TKO under the guise of “trade secrets.” One record in particular that TKO argued against disclosing was WWE’s Memorandum of Understanding with Netflix.
But there’s an even more important development that has completely flown under the radar:
There’s still no finalized settlement.
Two months after TKO and Vince McMahon promised to settle the WWE shareholder case, a settlement has still not been finalized. What on Earth is going on?
We did a little research into Delaware court records and applied our (prescient) past analysis on this case to hypothesize what is really going on.
Why would the billionaires at TKO be knifing each other over settling a case that they initially agreed to? It turns out that despite the non-stop multi-year pro-wrestling Youtube clickbait campaigns about a Vince/Ari WWE reunion, not everything is so warm and fuzzy.
You don’t have to take my word for it, either.
