TKO CEO Ari Emanuel says the parent company of WWE and UFC is not going to be sold, no matter who comes asking.
Emanuel made the declaration while promoting his new memoir, Roll the Calls, which was released September 22. In a recent appearance on The Town with Matthew Belloni, Belloni asked him to name the ideal buyer for TKO. Emanuel’s answer was “TKO.”
Belloni said it would surely be for sale one day. Emanuel shut that down: “No, it won’t. No. Never.” When Belloni floated Paramount and Amazon as possible buyers, Emanuel held the line: “No. No, not for sale. Never.”
Pressed on why, Emanuel pointed back to 2016, when he, Silver Lake’s Egon Durban and others “saw where sports was going and saw where the streamers were going.” He said people at the time thought the group was crazy for what it paid for IMG, and called what they bought “the two cheapest acquisitions of all time in the sports space.”
His forward-looking case leans heavily on AI. Emanuel relayed a line from his son Leo that Thursday is “baby Friday,” then said that with AI, “probably Wednesday is going to be the baby Thursday.” In his view, “there’s going to be more free time than ever,” and he expects people to spend it at sporting events and consuming sports. He added that if the economy grows at 3% GDP, there will be more money than ever on top of it.
“Sports is the greatest reality show of all time,” Emanuel said. He noted that others are now trying to buy teams while TKO owns four leagues, by his count, and called sports ownership “an incredible asset.” As for the value, he said it is “going up and to the right.”
His closing word on a sale left little room. For him and Durban, Emanuel said, “there’s no chance that that’s happening. Zero.”
TKO was created in 2023 when UFC merged with WWE. Questions about who could own WWE have surfaced before, including reporting that Saudi Arabia had the opportunity to buy WWE.
