AEW President Tony Khan spoke with Ariel Helwani this week and was asked to address a number of topics regarding AEW. Helwani tried to ask him about the post-All Out locker room brawl and CM Punk, but Khan declined to comment. He then brought up one of the criticisms certain vocal fans have lobbed at Khan recently — his leadership style.
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“Well, like I said, I’m not Bill Watts,” Khan said. “I’m not enforcing things that way. I think the world has changed a lot. I have a lot of really good relationships with the people here. I think it’s come across in the way we’ve been able to put a great company together so quickly to build this great roster, and now we have this great track record of success. I don’t necessarily think that was the case, but I do think, you know, right now we’re in a really good place as a roster as a company.”
He was also asked if there were any leadership decisions he could go back and change. Khan famously took over as the only booker of the show a couple of months after AEW Dynamite launched in October 2019.
“No. I also don’t like looking backward,” Khan said. “You can’t really do that unless you’re going to look at how you’re going to look forward off of it. I don’t think it serves well. Also, like you said, I’m pretty busy. I don’t necessarily have the time to do that. So it’s pretty important to me, to make sure that we’re surrounded by really great people, and most importantly, I want to make sure that everybody comes to work and feels like it’s a good place to work and I want to make sure that everybody gets opportunities. But really, at the end of the day, everybody who’s come to AEW knows coming in there’s a sense of security here that they haven’t necessarily had at other wrestling promotions. A lot of the people I’ve brought in were part of layoffs and cost cutting, and not like desperate cost cutting times are tight cost cutting, it’s like record profits cost cutting. If I was making record profits, I probably wouldn’t be laying off dozens of people. So that’s some of what I’m talking about when I talk about compassion and being a good boss, and frankly, when I talk about, you know, I’m not necessarily the same guy as some person who shares a surname.”
