Ari Emanuel

I think he's great.

I love this book.

Yeah, the book is incredible.

Yeah.

March 29th, when I first came here, I was making 15 cents a mile when I moved to LA.

Went to work at CIA, et cetera, then started the company March 29th on my birthday, almost 31 years ago.

Had this idea about where content was going from George Gilder, who wrote this book like I have for television, and said there's gonna be infinite distribution and then content's gonna be really, really valuable.

And there's going to be many forms of content.

And so we kind of went out and started growing the business and trying to get into every sector of the business.

Made a two horse race with when we quote unquote merged with William Morris.

I think one of my best deals actually, that merger.

And then when Teddy Forsman passed away, bought IMG with Silver Lake who had come into the company and then we were in sports.

And then we realized it was all in the representation business and then realized that because of what we built, the infrastructure we built and the global scale we had and the production and representation, we could start owning some of the assets as opposed to just representing them and kind of put them through our filters and kind of create more value.

And so the first thing we did is we bought this company called Professional Bull Riley that was, I think, making,

$3 million a year in profit.

We turned it into a really nice business.

It's still growing.

And then because of that, and we negotiated every day against networks and studios, the UFC came up and we said, okay, let's take a big swing.

The funny thing is when we bought IMG, they say we overpaid.

It was the cheapest sports acquisition ever happened.