With AEW, the 38-year-old CEO has built the first real threat to Vince McMahon’s WWE in more than two decades. Inside the billionaire vs. billionaire smackdown.
ith his arms crossed against a black Jacksonville Jaguars polo shirt and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, Tony Khan wore a mischievous but hardly intimidating grin in a recent. Khan was responding to reports that World Wrestling Entertainment , his nascent company’s chief competitor, is in talks to partner with New Japan Pro Wrestling, a move that would muscle in on AEW’s relationship with the smaller promotion.
to be up to $100 million. Its first three months on TNT were successful enough to secure a four-year, $175 million deal with WarnerMedia to air Wednesday night, a title he picked a quarter-century ago when he sketched out episodes in his junior high notebook. The two-hour program has shaken pro wrestling’s power structure by going head-to-head with—and beating—McMahon’s WWE, and AEW will be launching a new weekly show on Fridays in August.
Perhaps fatefully, Khan was born in 1982, the same year McMahon bought out his father’s stake in what was then called the World Wrestling Federation. Pro wrestling was essentially a regional business back then, and promotions largely respected each other’s boundaries. “I'm glad that WCW failed because it created a vacancy for us to come in and succeed,” Khan says, “but it made it a fairly bleak period for the wrestling business.”
Khan kept watching WWE while he attended the University of Illinois and then worked at a biofuels company, biding his time as his father pursued his own dream of NFL ownership. When Shahid Khan bought the Jaguars in 2012, he entrusted Tony to start the franchise’s analytics department and gave him a similar role with his English soccer club Fulham in 2015.
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