AEW President and CEO Tony Khan recently spoke with Yahoo! Finance about various topics, including the possibility of stepping back into a wrestling ring. This follows an angle from over a year ago, where he was attacked by The Elite during AEW Dynamite in April 2024.
Khan said, “I really don’t want to get into the ring and I like to think of myself as the commissioner is more of a device. One time I was attacked and I am very lucky to be sitting here with you right now Brian. One year ago, I survived the deadliest move in pro wrestling, the spike piledriver … I don’t want to necessarily get into the ring, my one time I got tricked and attacked in the ring is enough to keep me out for life.”
On AEW’s audience across TBS, TNT, and Max:
“We have a huge audience. We’ve got a great partnership with Warner Brothers Discovery … this is the first year of the simulcast, so now the show every Wednesday night it’s simulcast TBS and Max, every Saturday night, TNT and Max, so the company keeps growing, expanding, we have a huge audience. AEW’s on in over 150 countries worldwide, millions of people watch the show every week all over the planet.”
On realizing there was an opportunity to launch a challenger brand in 2018:
“In 2018, I was looking at the pro wrestling landscape and I realized there was a real opportunity to launch a challenger brand in this business … we’re having a really great year, it feels like 2025 is in a lot of ways the best year we’ve had.”
On growing AEW’s business with their programming being simulcast on Max:
“We grew the business so much with the simulcast, we brought in new audience with Max and streaming but also we’ve been able to grow our cable audience year-over-year … a lot of people thought when you start simulcasting AEW on Wednesday nights and Saturday nights, oh okay well a lot of people they’re still going to watch the show, but people are going to migrate to streaming. Well actually, our cable audience when we started simulcasting went up and we have a great audience on Max streaming every week too.”
You can check out Khan’s comments in the video below.
