(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Every Wednesday, Tony Khan sets up his makeshift office in the dark. On this particular evening in September, he’s at Arthur Ashe Stadium in the Queens borough of New York, maneuvering through a maze of scaffolding beneath a stage to get to his chair propped in front of a screen with 15 camera feeds. Khan scans between his scribbled notes and the pro wrestlers punching, grappling and suplexing each other in front of nearly 14,000 raucous fans, checking the clock for the upcoming commercial break and, with it, a rare lull in the drama. Pro wrestling is, after all, as much a sport as an elaborately plotted soap opera.
For four years, Khan’s All Elite Wrestling LLC, or AEW, has operated as an upstart rival to World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., deploying its own brand of predetermined mayhem to convert die-hard fans and seduce onetime viewers for whom WWE had become just another PG-rated borefest. Khan’s formula? More blood spilled, more folding chairs smashed, more swearing and more nuanced storylines. “You genuinely get the feel that AEW is written by a fan for fans,” says Tom Campbell of industry site Cultaholic Wrestling.
Inside the ring, Canadian wrestling legend and former WWE firebrand Chris Jericho, whose character is a narcissistic rock star with flowing blond hair, tries to wallop the chiseled Swiss hero Claudio Castagnoli in the skull with a baseball bat. He fails, but when the referee’s back is conveniently turned, he kicks his opponent square in the nether regions. Castagnoli is helpless as Jericho delivers his finishing maneuver, a spinning elbow to the face. New champion! That’s how it goes in the scripted world of pro wrestling, where the villains are just as important as the heroes. As Jericho returns backstage, Khan rips off his headset and pounces on his sweat-drenched star to give him a hug. “I f---ing loved it!” he yells, before scurrying off to man his station for the next match.
Khan, who has the wispy build and frenetic energy of a teenager, is the most well-funded benefactor in decades to take on the WWE hegemony. His father is Shahid Khan, the Pakistani-American owner of the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars and the English Premier League’s Fulham FC, who made his fortune building Flex-N-Gate into a nearly $10 billion US auto-parts manufacturer. After moving to the US as a teen, Shahid worked his way up from washing dishes to buying out his former employer Flex-N-Gate in 1980. Today it’s one of the largest privately held companies in the US, and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegs the Khan family’s net worth at $7.6 billion. When Tony told his father he was going to hatch a WWE competitor, his father’s reaction: Are you nuts?
Khan’s professional experience until then had mostly consisted of working on his dad’s sports teams, taking roles as the Jaguars’ chief football strategy officer and then as vice chairman and director of football operations at Fulham. With his obsessiveness for analytics and almost-annoying optimism, he earned a reputation as slightly more than your average nepo baby. (He still holds both roles.) Bankrolled by Khan’s family fortune, AEW was his first swing at building his own business from scratch—a business long dominated by a single towering brand, WWE, and its chief architect, Vince McMahon.
Khan has spent tens of millions of dollars luring top stars such as Jericho, a six-time WWE world champion, and Castagnoli, a seven-time WWE tag-team champion, creating a fierce fight for talent that’s been as dramatic at times as the plotlines in the ring. Wrestling stars have been pinging between the upstart and the incumbent, chasing dollars, autonomy and validation. Khan has also been sourcing talent from the indie circuit, where thousands of wrestlers perform for tiny paychecks and a few dozen people in venues such as nightclubs and bingo halls. In March, Khan acquired the small but respected pro wrestling company Ring of Honor from Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. for an undisclosed sum, adding a new crop of wrestlers, some intellectual property and an extensive video library. AEW is also considering starting a streaming service, likely through a deal with its broadcast partner, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., according to a person familiar with management’s thinking, who asked not to be named. Last year, AEW broke $100 million in annual revenue for the first time, the person says.
As its new rival gains ground, WWE finds itself more volatile than ever. McMahon, who bought WWE’s predecessor from his dad in the 1980s, transformed it from a regional attraction to a $6.3 billion empire. In July, after the revealed that he had secretly paid $12 million in hush money payments to settle allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity, his board of directors opened an investigation, and McMahon announced his abrupt retirement. Six months later, it seems he’s changed his mind. In early January, as controlling shareholder, he proclaimed himself chairman again, booted three board members and replaced them with allies. Two more quit in the aftermath. Now his daughter and heir apparent, Stephanie McMahon, has left the business and her role as co-chief executive officer, leaving Nick Khan (no relation to Tony) in charge. In the weeks since, WWE has hired financial advisers to explore strategic options. Investor groups are also suing over McMahon’s surprise return and sex scandal.
WWE declined to talk to about the saga. In a letter sent to the board in December, McMahon said he left WWE to give space for the investigation, but it was critical for him to return to lead the exploration of a possible sale and negotiate new media rights deals. “No one has a greater interest in the long-term success of WWE—or is more aligned with all WWE shareholders—than me.” McMahon’s lawyer released a statement in January regarding the latest settlement stating that the wrestling executive denied sexually assaulting the accuser and “settled the case solely to avoid the cost of litigation.”
Pro wrestling is a business with billions of dollars in broadcast rights at stake. WWE made nearly $1.1 billion in revenue last fiscal year, dwarfing its new rival by more than tenfold. But AEW’s viewership has crept up, breaking a million on several episodes, or about half that of WWE’s top show. Both WWE’s and AEW’s rights packages are expiring soon, setting up a crucial showdown between potential suitors that range from Fox Corp. to Amazon.com Inc. Analysts say Comcast Corp. could end up paying more than $2 billion to renew the arrangement it has with WWE to put its content on NBC’s Peacock streaming service. Khan has promised that whatever deal replaces AEW’s current one will be “historic.” “One of the few areas in which media investors remain bullish is in sports rights,” says Bloomberg Intelligence’s Geetha Ranganathan.
Still, there’s no shortage of skepticism about Khan’s chops. Podcast hosts, former wrestling executives and ex-staffers say AEW is run by a rich kid spending daddy’s cash. Jaguars defensive end Yannick Ngakoue once called him out in public as a “spoiled brat” before getting traded away. “Tony has a tendency to ricochet off walls and say stupid shit, because he doesn’t really understand much about the industry, really,” legendary wrestling TV producer Eric Bischoff, who’s worked with AEW, told industry publication in November. “He’s a wrestling fan with a lot of money.”
Khan, who’s 40, knows his credibility is in question “on a daily basis.” But AEW wrestlers are unanimous about his dedication. They say he’s a wrestling nut who’s excited about everything, all the time, running from arenas to meetings, involved in every last detail, from scripts to sets, from contracts to bookings. Stay in your seat after a live show goes off the air, and you’ll see Khan and his mop of brown hair pop onstage as a hype man, pumping up fans to stay for additional matches. Backstage he perpetually shouts: “Let’s f---ing go!”
It’s not easy getting new people to watch pro wrestling. Haters deride it as fake fighting or just don’t understand why anyone would watch a “sport” with prearranged victors. Even for the willing, the barrier to entry is high. You have to learn some basics to follow the storylines, and you may have to fully suspend your disbelief.
A wrestling match is akin to an operatic dance, combining choreography with improvisation. Fights are outlined beforehand by the wrestlers, producers and referees, with the highest-impact moves—a powerbomb through a table, a moonsault off the top turnbuckle—designed to evoke especially rowdy reactions from the crowd. Performers are constantly communicating with one another, whispering their next moves. The ref’s in on it, too, discreetly giving warnings about timing and sharing instructions from backstage to slow down, rush the finish or alter plans entirely. Winners are preselected by bookers to fit long-term storylines, and finishing sequences are often meticulously arranged. The narratives can run over months or even years, not unlike how characters scheme across multiple episodes before finally meeting in battle.
The average AEW viewer is more of a wrestling nerd than the casual WWE fan, many of whom don’t care to learn the textbook’s worth of insider slang that might enrich their understanding of what’s happening in the ring. Wrestling jargon rivals the most abstruse corporate-speak. Take this lingo jambalaya: “On the go-home show, the babyface got a huge pop as he delivered a worked-shoot promo, chiding his opponent as a glorified jobber who’s garnered massive heat for botching spots ever since he turned heel and left the stable.”
Get all that? AEW fans did.
If there’s one term that explains wrestling culture, it’s “kayfabe” (KAY-fayb), which is the portrayal of staged events as true. The term, which Merriam-Webster speculates is derived from either carnival slang or from a pig-Latinized version of “be fake,” is the basis of all pro wrestling shows going back to the early 1900s. In the ’50s and ’60s, wrestlers such as Bruno Sammartino and Abdullah the Butcher would never break kayfabe, staying in character even if spotted in the wild.
Nowadays the lines are blurrier, and hardcore fans know wrestlers by both their on-screen names and their real ones. The inability at times to tell reality from kayfabe only increases engagement, leaving fans to debate what’s part of the show and what isn’t. (The injuries are often real. Former WWE champion Big E suffered a broken neck when he landed on his head during a match in March.)
Often it’s a bit of both, a dynamic that can bleed into the higher-level corporate spectacle, too. On live TV in November, AEW world champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman, whose character is a Burberry-scarf-wearing Long Island douche, grabbed a microphone and brought up his real-life contract talks. When his AEW deal expires, he told the crowd, he’d go with whoever offered him the most cash. He name-dropped both Khans, Tony and WWE CEO Nick. “I pray to God the right Khan foots the bill, and Lord knows I am not talking about Tony,” Friedman said with a smirk, drawing boos from the AEW crowd. “I am talking about my boy, jolly old St. Nick.”
Wrestling hasn’t had a legitimate power struggle since its last billionaire tapped out two decades ago. In 1988, as CNN and TBS were ascending, Ted Turner figured taking on WWE would be the best way to expand his broadcast empire. He acquired a regional wrestling company, invested millions in it and devoted five hours of prime-time cable TV each week to the newly branded World Championship Wrestling, or WCW. McMahon had expanded his family business by squashing regional players to create a national powerhouse around larger-than-life stars such as Hulk Hogan and André the Giant. But by the early ’90s, the old acts had grown stale, and the new ones were dull. WCW came in with ample funds and an edge, stealing fans with a wild and unpredictable show led by stars poached from McMahon, including Hogan.
What followed was the fabled Monday Night Wars, a ratings showdown between Turner and McMahon that lasted through the ’90s. At the time, Khan was in high school in suburban Illinois, and pro wrestling’s popularity was skyrocketing. He collected tapes of indie shows, posted on forums and glued himself to the TV every time “Stone Cold” Steve Austin or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson appeared on to open a can of whoop-ass or lay the smackdown. Powered by Austin, Johnson and other stars, WWE resoundingly won the wars, buying WCW in 2001 for the meager sum of $2.5 million.
Khan fantasized about running a wrestling business but instead got a finance degree and joined the Jaguars after his dad bought the NFL franchise in 2011 for $760 million. The younger Khan, then in his 20s, was entrusted with its analytics department, supplying the coaching staff with data such as player speed indexes and play-call percentages. “I couldn’t have walked in and started a department like this had I not been my father’s son,” he admitted to a local paper at the time.
The idea for AEW came to Khan in early 2018. After watching the Jaguars lose a playoff game, he went to a party in Beverly Hills, where he ran into Kevin Reilly, then the president of TNT and TBS, and found out Reilly was considering bidding big money for a WWE rights package. Reilly eventually lost out to Fox, which paid more than $200 million per year for a two-hour broadcast window, but Khan saw the deal as proof of demand. “I did believe that, for less than that, we could launch an aggressive expansion of a startup wrestling company,” he says.
Before he could line up a broadcast agreement, though, he needed wrestlers. He learned that some major stars’ contracts were about to expire: Jericho, for one. A number of wrestlers, such as Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks, who were signed to organizations in Japan, would also be hitting the market. Cody Rhodes, son of wrestling legend Dusty Rhodes, was available on the independent circuit. Khan courted each one, meeting Jericho while he was on tour with his band, visiting the Bucks at a wrestling show in London and hosting Rhodes in the owner’s box at a Jaguars game. By fall, he’d persuaded them to form his core roster and committed to millions of dollars in salaries.
Khan also brought in WWE champion Dean Ambrose, now known as Jon Moxley in AEW. When Khan showed up at Moxley’s home in Las Vegas, the wrestler was skeptical. Rich benefactors typically just want to meet, take wrestlers out to a strip club and throw cash around, he says. “I didn’t know if it was gonna be an old guy in a suit, a mob boss, an eccentric dude in a Hugh Hefner robe or what.” Instead, the guy at the door was in jeans and a hoodie, and they talked about pro wrestling for hours. “I told him at my kitchen table that night: If this is what you’re doing, then I’m in,” Moxley says.
As 2018 came to a close, AEW had everything lined up except a TV deal, the prerequisite for an actual business. Around Christmas, Khan had several arguments with his father about whether the enterprise could work. Shahid, who declined to talk to , wasn’t sold, Khan recalls, but “he ended up saying something along the lines of ‘I guess you’re going to inherit half of this money, and if you want to start blowing it now, fine.’ ”
Khan decided to risk blowing more of his inheritance five months later, with an event aptly named Double or Nothing—nine matches at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Paradise, Nevada. Eleven thousand people bought tickets, and more than 100,000 spent $49.99 to watch on pay-per-view. The wrestling press ate it up, and ESPN and CBS Sports covered it, too. “The competition has arrived,” declared Canadian blog Slam Wrestling. “It only took 18 long years but the day is finally here.”
That same month, AEW finally secured a broadcast-TV slot, signing an agreement with Warner Media LLC to air shows on TNT prime time. TNT put AEW on Wednesdays, immediately bringing Khan head-to-head against McMahon. Although WWE’s marquee shows, and , run on Mondays and Fridays, Wednesday nights were allocated to its smaller brand NXT, which features up-and-coming wrestlers and former indie stars trying to get promoted to the main roster. AEW’s two-hour weekly show, , premiered in October 2019, and the inaugural episode drew 1.4 million viewers, sparking a back-and-forth Wednesday-night ratings war that would persist for two years.
Khan won nearly every week, until a lackluster December made him reconsider his creative process. The writing on AEW’s first shows was done by committee, with top wrestlers included in the meetings, leading to some disjointed storytelling. Khan axed that approach, taking full control of the narratives. “I felt like we needed to really reevaluate the way we presented the show,” he says.
At WWE headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, executives monitored their new competitor’s progress and wondered aloud what to do. Bryan Danielson, one of WWE’s top stars, says that in early 2020 McMahon called him and asked a question that shocked the wrestler: “Do you see anything that AEW’s doing better than us?” Danielson, at home on paternity leave, spent the next two weeks watching every morsel of AEW programming and came to a conclusion: AEW committed more time to and placed more on the craft of fighting in the ring. WWE’s shows were often marked by long segments of characters on the microphone and short matches. “It feels like you’re watching a wrestling show without any wrestling,” Danielson told McMahon.
During the pandemic lockdowns, WWE and AEW shows got stranger and stranger, with wrestlers beating each other up in themed matches in vacant arenas. One WWE event had an Eye for an Eye Match, where the winner was determined by whoever plucked the other’s eye out first. (Spoiler: Seth Rollins plucked Rey Mysterio Jr.’s “eye” from its socket—in kayfabe, thankfully.) AEW tried to stage something called an Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match, but it fizzled out with only a few sparklers going off. A Stadium Stampede Match, in which a wrestler backflipped off a goalpost in the Jaguars’ empty football stadium, fared much better, with critics lauding it as wrestling at its “chaotic finest.”
As Khan sees it, there’s room for two giant wrestling organizations to compete alongside each other globally, not unlike Coca-Cola and Pepsi or McDonald’s and Burger King. “An easy thing for people to understand is the idea of a challenger brand,” he says. “What’s Burger King’s marketing? It’s basically ‘Hey, guys, Burger King’s great. McDonald’s sucks.’ ”
By April 2021, after falling behind in the ratings, McMahon was done fighting over Wednesdays. WWE extended its agreement with USA Network and moved NXT to Tuesdays. Soon after, Khan would further encroach on McMahon’s turf, adding a second show to his lineup to air right after ends on Friday nights. By then, Danielson’s WWE contract was up. He decided to sign with AEW.
Britt Baker wouldn’t be able to wrestle for WWE. The problem isn’t her skills or shtick—it’s her day job. After Khan recruited her from the indie wrestling scene in 2021, she catapulted to stardom as Dr. Britt Baker, D.M.D., becoming famous for her swagger and bloody performances. In real life, Baker had also recently gotten her dentistry degree, and she was determined to straddle her two careers. WWE wrestlers have been fired for having side hustles, whereas Baker is allowed to fly home to Florida after a match so she can work on teeth the next day. “I had a cut on my head. I had a black eye. I looked a mess,” she says of a recent day back at her office. “Some of my patients asked, ‘What happened to you?’ ”
Refugees from WWE say that Khan has given them more power over their careers than they’ve ever had and that his flexibility has been essential to attracting and holding on to talent. Moxley and Danielson both cherish the creative freedom, like no longer having to read scripts in the ring as they did in WWE. That’s not to say everyone at AEW is happy. Cody Rhodes, one of Khan’s original signings who also served as executive vice president (the industry has a peculiar tradition of its wrestlers doubling as execs), jumped ship after helping build the business for three years. Rhodes’s exit caused an uproar among the “dirt sheets,” the tabloid-style wrestling newsletters, blogs and magazines that chronicle all the backstage drama. But by summer, when the McMahon scandal broke, the dirt sheets had something far juicier to gossip about. Khan tweeted, fueling the fire: “I’m grateful to now be the longest-tenured CEO in pro wrestling.”
Khan wouldn’t say whether he thinks McMahon’s surprise return is good or bad for AEW. In a securities filing after McMahon’s initial departure, WWE admitted that the changes at the top of its management structure were “extensive” and that its CEO’s exit could impact its bottom line. With the 77-year-old executive back, investors are upbeat; shares spiked in January to their highest level since 2019.
But WWE’s TV agreement is set for renewal in 2024, and the company is gunning for its most lucrative media deal yet. At a Wells Fargo & Co. summit in November, its executives said WWE is looking at the marketplace for its pay-per-views—now rebranded as “premium live events” since they’re streamed on NBC’s Peacock for a subscription fee—in several international regions as it preps for talks in the US. Of course, that equation might change if McMahon does end up selling the business, which could fetch up to $8 billion and would likely happen in the next six months, according to analyst estimates. Media giants such as Comcast and Walt Disney Co. have been floated as possible buyers, and WWE has denied reports that a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund is in the running. Could Tony Khan’s family buy it outright? It’s possible, but the price is likely too steep without partners to help finance it.
AEW’s television contract, which was for $175 million according to the , expires at the end of the year, with an option for 2024. Meanwhile, Khan is gearing up to release , AEW’s first video game, later this year, to compete with the long-running franchise. As usual, he hasn’t been stingy with funds, spending tens of millions of dollars to produce and market the game—and tens of millions more signing new wrestling talent, according to a person familiar with the company’s financials, who asked not to be named. In November, Khan brought in Jeff Jarrett—a ’90s pro wrestler and veteran wrestling exec who at age 55 still hits the occasional foe over the head with an acoustic guitar—as director of business development. Double J’s job is to expand AEW’s live events in smaller markets, mainly nontelevised “house shows” at local venues across the US. Its first tour will debut in Troy, Ohio in March.
One week after the show in Queens, AEW’s traveling crew is preparing for its next televised match on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia. Several hours before the wrestlers go on air, the vibe isn’t all that different from backstage at a theater. In costume or in street clothes, wrestlers chat with each other in the hallways or grab a bite from the catering room. Those soon to compete find a quiet corner amid the clutter of production equipment to plan and practice moves.
AEW used to list planned matches on a whiteboard, but it had to stop when the info began leaking to the public. After a show in September, the dirt sheets caught wind of a backstage brawl between several executives and the big-money former WWE star CM Punk, complete with chair-throwing and biting. It was a real fight, the reported. Was it, or was it kayfabe?
(Updates with information about the first “house show” tour location in 37th paragraph. An earlier version of the story corrected the release date of ‘Fight Forever’ in 37th paragraph.)
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