After WWE‘s latest round of releases was confirmed last week, WWE fans started speculating over the possibility of Vince McMahon preparing to sell the wrestling promotion. However, Brandon Thurston (who specializes in covering the business side of pro wrestling) took to Twitter last and reported that WWE investors don’t believe a sale is coming. He wrote, “I talked with 5 people in the WWE investor community in the last 24 hours about the notion that the company’s recent actions indicate they’re preparing for a sale. Not one of them thought so. Even the stock price is no-selling wrestling Twitter.”
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He then went into detail about the situation on an episode of Wrestlenomics Radio, the quotes from which were uploaded to the Wrestlenomics website on Monday. Thurston said, “I just can’t imagine Vince McMahon in his lifetime selling the company. I can’t imagine him doing anything else. This is a man who has no known hobbies, except for working out of course. I think above any amount of money, he values the control he has of the company, especially over creative, and I don’t ever see him relinquishing that as long as he has more time to do that job. All these layoffs, which are substantial to the finances of the company, but the layoffs, and the releases and the restructuring, I think they have more to do with the new WWE president and chief revenue officer Nick Khan and the new WWE chief financial officer Kristina Salen. I think it’s more about them critiquing what they’ve been handed, what they’ve inherited from the former executives, the co-presidents George Barrios and Michelle Wilson, who left in January 2020.
“Nick Khan and Kristina Salen were brought on in August 2020. This is about the new executive team reviewing what was left to them by the old executive team and saying, ‘Well, why are we doing this this way, and why do we have these employees who are doing the same job across two or three different departments? Why do we have all these wrestlers when we’re not using them all the time?’” he continued.
Do you agree with Thurston’s assessment? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
I talked with 5 people in the WWE investor community in the last 24 hours about the notion that the company’s recent actions indicate they’re preparing for a sale. Not one of them thought so. Even the stock price is no-selling wrestling Twitter. pic.twitter.com/xSXOLdn8r1
— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) June 3, 2021
