On the latest episode of My World, Jeff Jarrett was asked who is really running WWE under TKO, and broke down how he sees the chain of command between Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, and Nick Khan. You can check out his comments below:
“It’s impossible for me to say Ari’s not leading the show. But I believe Ari, in his wisdom, runs the show day to day through those three buckets — who’s overseeing creative, who’s overseeing talent, who’s overseeing production. I’m going to put Nick Khan in that role. I think he’s the closest, but Vince owned the whole thing. Ari, I think Mark Shapiro is overseeing the numbers, and Ari is probably thinking about 2027 and 2028 and 2029. I’d say the lion’s share of his head space is spent on, at a very minimum, what’s going to be going on in the next nine to 12 months. So day to day, yeah, I’ll stick with Nick Khan.”
“At the end of the day, every business is about relationships. The format of professional wrestling has not changed, and I think it’s in desperate need of change in so many ways — I’ve said that since 2011, 2012. But you have to be able to go to the decision-makers and sell them, convince them, show them you can do things differently and grow it. You look at Nick Khan: he moved into that seat from Vince, and his revenues have gone up, so it’s hard for me to argue the format needs changing when the revenues are up. We’re also in a transition — like that Mark Cuban point about the NFL making ratings irrelevant — where the metrics that matter are changing. Ratings aren’t number one anymore; it’s retention, it’s streams, and all of that gets into revenue. It’s a much more cloudy picture, and that’s where experience sitting in the seat will always trump new ideas, because they’re going to protect what’s working. The business is changing right before our very eyes, and I just think so many of us don’t really know where it’s going, which kind of makes it fun for me.”
