Both Vince McMahon and Ari Emanuel have stated publicly that Emanuel made it clear that he wanted McMahon to stay with WWE following Endeavor’s acquisition of the company to merge it with the UFC to form the TKO Holdings Group.
The CEO of Endeavor and TKO was in attendance at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference. As previously reported, Emanuel stated that there is a lot of interest in Monday Night RAW rights as their current deal with the USA Network expires next year.
After agreeing to bring back SmackDown, the USA Network is unlikely to keep RAW and NXT. RAW’s media rights are attracting a lot of attention, according to Emanuel.
While speaking at the conference, Emanuel expressed his belief that the TKO stock price fell due to a variety of factors, including Saudi Arabia’s investment in the PFL, reports of NBCU dropping out of the running for RAW’s rights, and McMahon, who is still being investigated by the feds in connection with the hush money scandal.
“I would say to you there’s plenty of interest in Raw right now. I know people are like, ‘NBC is out of the mix,’ and that’s why it went down. I think there’s three things that happened. One the reasons the stock is down is they thought Raw was the best package. I saw a 40 percent increase which was in line with expectations… Two, the P.F.L. situation and three, probably Vince (McMahon) in our deal, wanted to be able to put, at any point in time, his stock. He’s 78 years old. He’s been working at this for decades and decades so, I think those three back-to-back issues…”
(H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription)
