With 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 promo video for his All Elite Wrestling. Khan was responding to reports that World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), 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. It provided a convenient excuse for Khan to launch an attack on WWE’s new president and chief revenue officer, Nick Khan (no relation), and grab attention in the leadup to AEW’s weekly Dynamite on TNT and its May 30 Double or Nothing pay-per-view event.
“There's only room for one Khan in the wrestling business,” AEW’s 38-year-old founder and CEO sneered in the clip. “It's me, Tony Khan, not some con man from Connecticut.”
The pro wrestling business, of course, was built on such mock machismo, but Khan has shied away from actively trash talking the competition since launching AEW in 2019. Perhaps because of his babyface personality, his tone in the video came across as more tongue in cheek than piledriver. And Khan would be wise not to gloat too early. After two years of modest growth, AEW is still experiencing early growing pains while trying to avoid the grim fate of everyone else who has dared to challenge Vince McMahon’s WWE over the past four decades—but he has already made a big impact on professional wrestling.
Khan started AEW with a major investment from his father, billionaire Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, that was reported 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 Dynamite, 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.
“I don’t want to be the next ‘blank’ wrestling company of the past—fill in the blank,” Khan says of erstwhile promotions McMahon has vanquished over the years. “We love wrestling of the past, wrestling of the present and wrestling of the future... That’s what gives us a great chance to retain and gain audience share.”
A skinny stats geek who operates more with a smile than a scowl, Khan has shown little intention of crushing McMahon with a metaphorical steel chair, but his passion for wrestling runs deep. As a teen, growing up in Champaign, Illinois, he moderated internet wrestling message boards and was known to wear “Macho Man” Randy Savage costumes for Halloween—well into adulthood. All the while, he was waiting for the chance to reimagine the Spandex-addicted entertainment he loved.
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.
But McMahon, whose Stamford, Connecticut-based company controlled the Northeast, smashed that gentlemen’s agreement, intent on becoming a national and eventually global draw. He put the WWF on the USA Network and ruthlessly poached talent like Jesse Ventura, Roddy Piper and, most famously, Hulk Hogan from other territories. By the 1990s, the last serious competitor was billionaire Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, which trounced the WWF’s ratings in the “Monday Night Wars” for years. But WCW’s advantage had slipped by the turn of the millennium, and when AOL acquired Time Warner in 2000, it discarded the underperforming wrestling business. McMahon gobbled it up for a mere $4.3 million in 2001 and was finally the undisputed champion, effectively running a wrestling monopoly ever since.
In 2000, some 20 million viewers tuned in to watch the WWF’s programming every week. Although WWE—which changed its name in 2002 after a World Wildlife Fund lawsuit—makes more money now thanks to exorbitant TV rights fees and on-demand content, its weekly TV viewership averaged less than 5 million last year, according to Showbuzz Daily.
“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 watched and learned from each wrestling operation McMahon conquered, and his father encouraged the passion, even if he didn’t quite understand it. Shahid Khan’s first investment in his son’s obsession was a father-son trip to a grungy Philadelphia arena in August 1996 for a night of Extreme Championship Wrestling, a hardcore promotion that WWE absorbed seven years later. It was 13-year-old Khan’s reward for agreeing to take the entrance exam and enroll in the University of Illinois Laboratory High School.
“My dad couldn't believe what he was seeing,” Khan says. “He was like, ‘This is a mix between an underground rock show and a cult.’”
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.
By 2018, Khan knew that former WWE stars like Chris Jericho and Cody Rhodes would be free agents by the end of the year and saw a chance to pounce. All he needed was tens of millions of dollars to hire wrestlers and lay the groundwork for AEW. Shahid Khan, a Pakistani immigrant and self-made auto parts entrepreneur who has an estimated $8 billion fortune, reluctantly acquiesced.
“I absolutely didn’t think this was a good idea,” the elder Khan says. “But I told Tony, ‘Look, when I’m dead and gone, I’m going to be leaving you and your sister a lot of money. Why don’t you blow some of that while I’m alive?’”
Rhodes, who spent nine years with WWE before leaving in 2016, first met Tony Khan at a Jaguars game in the fall of 2018. The son of the late WWE Hall of Famer Dusty Rhodes, he was used to hearing naïve dreams of new wrestling promotions, but this was his first time being pitched in the owner’s suite of an NFL stadium. Khan then flew an associate to Japan, where Rhodes was working with New Japan Pro Wrestling at the time, to finalize his contract, and promised a check would be in the mail the next day if he signed. It was.
“It’s really special to see how commanding he is without being demanding,” says Rhodes, who is one of AEW’s executive vice presidents. “Wrestlers are all talk. He’s all walk.”
With enough name talent lined up—including WWE’s former announcer and talent executive Jim Ross—Khan had a product to sell, and four months after AEW’s New Year’s Day 2019 launch, he finalized a trial deal with WarnerMedia to air the broadcast on TNT. Dynamite premiered on October 2, 2019, and the two sides agreed to the $175 million extension in January 2020, taking the show through the end of 2023 and including plans for a third hour of weekly content. That expansion was put on hold by the pandemic, but on May 19, AEW announced that Rampage will premiere on August 13 and air every Friday at 10 p.m., immediately after WWE’s Smackdown ends on Fox. Both Dynamite and Rampage will move to TBS in January 2022, and four additional specials will air annually on TNT.
“It was very clear we put ourselves in the right hands,” says Brett Weitz, general manager of TNT, TBS and truTV. “For someone to have the audacity to say, ‘I'm going to go take on the biggest wrestling league in the world and see if I can be a challenger brand,’ it takes chutzpah. And he nailed it.”
The $43.75 million AEW received from TNT last year made up the largest share of its revenue, but that’s a rounding error compared to publicly traded WWE’s record $974 million in revenue in 2020. Still, AEW’s pay-per-view numbers and ticket sales are growing, and the new show will add to its coffers. Khan expects its wrestling division to be profitable this year, though an eight-figure investment in video game development will keep the company in the red for now.
As with most of his competition, Vince McMahon didn’t seem threatened by AEW at first. On a July 2019 conference call with analysts, he said he couldn’t imagine TNT would put up with “blood and guts and gory things,” without referring to his newest competitor by name. In a promo leading up to Dynamite’s debut, Rhodes suggested the remarks disparaged wrestlers’ passion and responded, “if you say we are blood and guts, I say you bet your ass we're blood and guts." AEW has since trademarked the phrase and even aired a “Blood & Guts” episode of Dynamite on May 5.
WWE’s first counterattack failed miserably. It moved the popular NXT franchise from the premium WWE Network to USA Network in the fall of 2019, but after losing the Wednesday ratings battle, NXT retreated to Tuesdays in April 2021. Since then, Dynamite has averaged almost 1 million viewers—or about half of what WWE gets for its flagship Monday night show, Raw.
While WWE revolves around “Mr. McMahon”—the cartoonish character McMahon portrays in the ring—Khan stays off camera, aside from the occasional social media promo. Rhodes says AEW doesn’t have a writers’ room like WWE and claims its in-ring promos are unscripted, an approach that’s resonating with new fans. Two years in, 54% of its viewers are under 50, larger than that share of the audience for WWE’s Raw, NXT and Smackdown.
“It’s not written as if it’s a soap opera,” says Rhodes. “Tony hired some of the best wrestlers in the world and he doesn’t change who they are.”
But if WWE lost the Wednesday night battle, it’s still winning the war. In 2020, McMahon signed a deal to move its library of content from the WWE Network to NBC’s Peacock streaming service, and WWE holds at least one pay-per-view every month, compared with AEW’s quarterly events. Its flagship WrestleMania showcase fills a football stadium every spring.
WWE is coming out of the pandemic much leaner, though. The company released more than 20 of its roughly 200 wrestlers this spring—some of whom were signed by AEW—and the budget cuts have prompted speculation that the 75-year-old McMahon is setting the company up for a sale.
AEW, by comparison, operates in the shadow of the Jaguars’ TIAA Bank Field at Daily’s Place, the 5,500-seat amphitheater attached to the stadium where it has held Dynamite throughout the pandemic. It will resume taking the show on the road in July to Miami, Dallas and Austin, Texas.
And while McMahon loves talking smack in and out of the ring—he famously got his head shaved after losing the Battle of the Billionaires to Donald Trump in 2007—Khan lets his wrestlers do the fighting. He would rather recreate the heyday of the Monday Night Wars than have a sleeper hold on wrestling as McMahon has for two decades. As Khan sees it, if AEW’s fans and TNT are satisfied, he isn’t worried about WWE.
“There’s no reason why there only needs to be one wrestling company,” Khan says, contradicting the act he put on in the AEW promo. “The wrestling business is hotter now than it's been in a long time.”
The oral one about Renee still cracks me up
right now. The graphics look like 2k18 and the animation is stiff looking as fukk.
