Tony Khan creating All Elite Wrestling (AEW) has been a net positive for the wrestling industry overall. AEW has provided wrestlers with an alternative career path, and has threatened to shake up the monopoly held in the wrestling industry by WWE for decades. While AEW is not as big as WWE in the world today, they’re the second-largest wrestling promotion across the globe.
But in 2023, there was a chance that Tony Khan could have owned both AEW and WWE. When WWE was up for a potential sale back then, there were a number of bidders who came forward. We know that WWE eventually ended up selling to Endeavor, which also owned UFC. Later, UFC and WWE were merged under a single parent company, which is known as TKO Group Holdings.
Tony Khan’s name in the bidding process was first reported by Brandon Thurston of Post Wrestling. Their full report on this subject is available here. Thurston’s report said that Base 10 (a company owned by Tony Khan) placed a $6.9 billion bid to acquire WWE.
Now the AEW President has commented on this.
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Tony Khan Comments On Bidding For WWE In 2023
Tony Khan was recently a guest on The Coach & Bro podcast, where he discussed his being part of the WWE bidding process.
Khan said he bid $6.9 billion because he believed that was a reasonable price for the wrestling promotion. He didn’t want to go any lower, because then he’d have kicked himself. Here’s what Tony Khan said:
“I was very interested in the process and if there was going to be a sale, I at least wanted to have a chance to be involved. If it had gone for any less than that, I would have really kicked myself.
While respecting the confidentiality of that, I would say that I don’t have any complaints about that process from my side that I would want to talk about right now. I do think there was some stuff to that and while respecting the confidentiality of the whole thing, I would also say that, at the time, just reiterating, if it had gone for any less, I would have beat myself up.
Why wouldn’t you put in a bid? I thought that was a very reasonable number.”
Tony Khan/Base 10’s involvement in the WWE bidding process first came to light after unredacted court files regarding the shareholders’ lawsuit against WWE and Vince McMahon were released.
Main image credit: Imago
Ishaan Sharma has been following wrestling ever since he was 8. That was over a decade ago. He loves to write about this pretend sport and has worked with online publications such as Sportskeeda and TheSportster, where he shared his insights about the wrestling business.