Tony Khan has publicly confirmed that he met with Shane McMahon for several hours at a Dallas airport and has raised questions about how a photo from that meeting ended up circulating publicly. Khan addressed the meeting during an interview on The Coach and Bro Show, taped the night before tonight's AEW Dynamite.
"I had one really pleasant conversation with Shane," Khan said. "Shane reached out to me and said, 'I'd love to get together.' I was going to be in Dallas. We had a nice conversation. We talked for a few hours in the airport."
The photo that came out from the meeting drew attention at the time, and Khan was direct about his view of how it got out. "I know I had nothing to do with it — it's very unusual," he said.
"I'm in a lot of rooms with a lot of people. I only had that happen to me one time. In the photo, I'm very surprised when the person walked into the room. I noticed he wasn't as surprised in the photo as I was. So maybe there was something there."
Shane McMahon had previously confirmed on the record that he met with AEW, while making clear the interest was not in an on-screen wrestling role with WWE.
Khan's comments suggest the meeting was at least partly unplanned on his part and that the leaked photo was sent by someone other than him. When the hosts raised the idea of Khan taking on an authority figure role in AEW programming, he used the NFL as his frame of reference.
"Commissioner Roger Goodell is a huge part of the game, instrumental to the NFL, but it's not like every time I watch NFL football the commissioner needs to be all over the show," Khan said. "I think people generally kind of know that I'm the commissioner of AEW, but I also don't think that's necessarily a role that you want to see on TV."
