Ari Emanuel on the Future of Entertainment: Hollywood, AI, Creator Economy, YouTube vs Netflix
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Ari Emanuel, the newest kingpin of combat sports. One of Hollywood's biggest power brokers.
It's everywhere, from the boardroom to, you know, even politics. There was another figure named Ari Gold that many people thought was named after you.
The straight-talking dealmaker has a reputation for getting what he wants. I'm back, and you're fired. Emanuel has worked tirelessly to transform Endeavor into a multi-billion dollar behemoth.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ari Emanuel.
Thank you.
Hey.
Welcome. When's the last time we saw each other at that dinner? Exactly. Yeah. Did you see that panel? Yeah.
You know Alex? Yeah, I know Alex. Yeah. I think he's great. I love this book. Yeah, the book is incredible.
Yeah.
So what's your take on what we just saw?
There's a lot to cover there on my take. Well, let's start at the beginning. Ari, you have had an incredible arc. You've built an incredible business. And recently, you've had the opportunity to merge a bunch of assets and just the thing has just taken a life of its own. Can you maybe walk us through the last four or five years of the evolution of Endeavor and your process of first leaving, building a business, then scaling it up and just all of that action, the tick-tock of it all?
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. And definitely when we bought UFC, they were like at 4.
At the time, it looked incredibly expensive.
Yeah.
And all we had to do was kind of make a broadcast deal that then took the multiple down from 20 times to kind of under 10. We then thought we could take all those assets, my big mistake here, a conglomerate. The marketplace just didn't understand it. And so we tried to take it public right before COVID. Failed. I didn't realize how hard it was to go back out. Finally got it back public. We kind of rolled all of the UFC into endeavor. And we still weren't getting
any value we then then said yes and we merged the assets a pure play was in sports sports entertainment was a better conversation with the street i mean when you started we had the traditional cable networks then we had cable it was a very higher hierarchical and easy to understand hierarchy right and then you have the streamers and now you know this afternoon we'll have neil mohan from youtube right then you have characters like the mr beast of the world who can go direct so it's very chaotic
No, it's actually just back to George Gilder. It's back to George Gilder. There's infinite distribution.
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