JabronieWorld USA! Trump’s Cage of Corruption

The global sleaze behind that White House wrestling match.

Combat sports journalist Nate Wilcox on the forces behind that White House wrestling match.

The modern fight world has become a hidden epicenter of elite power players, political backscratching, and multi-billion-dollar quid pro quos.

I last wrote about Donald Trump and pro wrestling in 2016, when he appointed WWE executive and major campaign donor Linda McMahon to run the Small Business Administration. (McMahon is now the Secretary of Education.) Since then, I’ve been vaguely aware of the web of big-money connections that link Trump, the McMahons, and others. Still, I made an assumption about the upcoming wrestling match at the White House that I think a lot of people have made: that it’s all about pumping up the MAGA base and trolling the liberals. (Trumpworld probably assumes that college-educated libs consider wrestling crude or declassé; some undoubtedly do.)

Man, was I wrong. The story of professional wrestling and Trump’s inner circle involves webs of dealmaking and corruption that are global as well as national. It involves monopolization, media control, AI, and even the wars we fight.

I got a detailed briefing on the subject in this conversation with sports journalist Nate Wilcox, whose newsletter MMA Draw covers all forms of combat sports. Nate explained the ways in which he UFC, WWE, and the broader fight industry have become a nexus for some of the most consequential power deals happening in America and around the world. He walked me through the intertwined relationships between UFC president Dana White and Donald Trump, the role of Hollywood super-agent (and highly connected Democrat) Ari Emanuel — who owns the UFC through his TKO Group — and the way Emanuel has leveraged his position to broker deals connecting the Trump White House, the Ellison family’s acquisition of Paramount, and sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.

My conversation with Nate is above. What follows are some selected quotes from our talk, as well as a full transcript (lightly edited by both human hands—mine—and AI.)

QUOTES:

“Don King couldn’t get the crown prince of Saudi Arabia on the phone and raise billions of dollars the way Ari Emanuel can.”
—Nate Wilcox

“These are not fight people. It’s the exact same playbook they run in every industry. Why is a routine X-ray for your cat suddenly $700? This is why.”
—Nate Wilcox

“It’s not even genuine bigotry. It’s performed bigotry to make money. Which is, if anything, more disgusting to me than the real thing.”
—Nate Wilcox

“This is making me nostalgic for the Mafia. Those guys would kill you if you crossed them, but at least they kept their word.”
—Richard Eskow

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Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: As Monty Python would say: and now for something completely different. As you know, we cover culture and politics and a lot of topics, but we have yet to cover the world of combat sports—until right now. (But) combat sports has been on a collision course with politics for some time.

My next guest might tell me the collision has already occurred. Nate Wilcox is, among other things, a combat sports investigative journalist. His website is MMA Draw, and it’s timely to be speaking with him now because on June 14th, there is a fight event at the White House for Donald Trump’s birthday. First of all, Nate Wilcox, welcome to the program.

Nate Wilcox: Thanks for having me.

Richard Eskow: I think a lot of people don’t realize how embedded Donald Trump has been with the commercial fight world. Let’s just jump right into that. Some people may recall that before he was president, he appeared at a wrestling event — and I think he played the heel, though I can’t be certain. What’s this man’s history with combat sports?

Nate Wilcox: Well, he is in the WWE Hall of Fame. Technically, he might have been the babyface in his feud with Vince McMahon, because Vince was the one who got his head shaved at the end of it, not Trump. As a longtime casino owner, Trump has hosted a number of boxing events, including early UFC events in the early 2000s.

And since 2016, Dana White, the president and frontman of the UFC, though not really the brains or the driving force behind the organization, has been a very public and vocal supporter of Trump. That’s included introducing him at the Republican National Convention three times, campaigning with him, and hosting Trump at UFC events on multiple occasions.

And now they’re going to host this UFC White House event, which was originally set for the nation’s 250th birthday. Instead, we’re going to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. Happy birthday, USA.

Richard Eskow: For those who don’t know, UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship. It’s a mixed martial arts promotion company based in Las Vegas. I’m old enough to remember, Nate, when “fight promoter” or “wrestling promoter” was not the most prestigious profession. I’ve been to my share of fights, but I’m not saying that out of snobbery — I’m just saying I’m old enough to remember when you wouldn’t expect to see a fight promoter putting on an event at the White House. So what do you think is really driving this? To what extent is Trump genuinely drawn to the world of combat sports, and to what extent is this political posturing?

Nate Wilcox: I’d say it’s probably a cash-in of some sort. If you watch what Trump is really motivated by — the insider trading, for example. I don’t know if you’ve noticed him touting Dell stock and then it coming out that he bought Dell shares just before he started praising what a great company it was. I’m sure, though I have no direct evidence, that there’s some kind of personal profit motive for the Trump family in the UFC White House deal. I don’t know what it is, but that’s a reasonable supposition.

Politically, he has enjoyed this alliance with Dana White and the UFC for ten years, though the way they tell the story, Trump and Dana White are best friends going back twenty years. Trump was one of the first people to host a UFC event at one of his casinos in the early 2000s, when Dana White and the Fertitta brothers first bought the company. But that was the extent of it. He hosted one of their events.

By 2009, Trump was literally the frontman for their biggest competitor. A T-shirt company called Affliction that had moved into the MMA business and put on two major pay-per-views before a third was canceled at the last minute. Trump was their frontman. And this was not friendly competition. Dana White famously held up a tombstone with the names of all his competitors on it. He didn’t take that lightly.

The key thing that always gets overlooked is that the UFC was sold in 2016 to an entity headed by Ari Emanuel — sometimes called the king of Hollywood agents. He’s the head of WME, formerly the William Morris Agency, and also the Endeavor Group he built. He had a small talent agency called Endeavor in the ‘90s. Then came the show Entourage — the character Ari Gold is based on Ari Emanuel, the hard-charging Hollywood agent. And in 2016 — well, actually in 2009 —

Richard Eskow: I’m sorry to interrupt for a second, Nate, but speaking of hard-charging Hollywood power brokers — Ari’s brother is Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic Party power broker and former mayor of Chicago, which was something of a reward for his service to Obama in the White House. So the connections spread pretty far and wide, don’t they?

Nate Wilcox: Absolutely. And Rahm is the least of it — former Obama chief of staff, Biden ambassador to Japan, mayor of Chicago. Their third brother, Zeke, was also one of the architects of Biden’s COVID policies.

Richard Eskow: Right. Zeke’s a physician, yes?

Nate Wilcox: He is. Definitely a powerful family. But what’s unusual is that Ari is very much a Democratic power broker — one of the most powerful money bundlers in Hollywood. And as we know, Hollywood is one of the financial bases of the Democratic Party. Yet in the summer of 2024, Ari Emanuel was one of the first major donors to publicly call for Biden to step down. He did it at the Simon Wiesenthal Center memorial luncheon, right in front of Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg — one of the co-founders of DreamWorks. Katzenberg stormed out in a fury.

To me, it was like — and this is an old-school rock-and-roll reference — when Neil Young joined Crosby and Nash and ended up stealing the show with long guitar solos, basically upstaging Stills and Graham Nash. That’s what Ari Emanuel did. He humiliated Katzenberg and seized the title of most important Hollywood power broker on the Democratic side.

And yet, at the same time, he’s played this game where his employee, Dana White, has been a very visible Trump ally. Keep in mind: Dana White is not on the board of TKO, the company that owns the UFC. He’s not one of the key decision-makers. He’s admitted under oath that he has no involvement in fighter negotiations. Dana White is involved in TV production and in selling the product — he’s the on-camera guy — but he’s not the decision-maker.

He also never spoke out politically before 2016. Under the previous ownership, the UFC was very buttoned-down politically, focused on gaining mainstream acceptance. If fighters made rape jokes on Twitter, they were fired. If fighters made transphobic remarks, they were sanctioned or fired. If a fighter abused a domestic partner, they were fired. Dana White famously said, “You put your hands on a woman one time, that’s it, you’re done.” Unfortunately for Dana, that standard didn’t seem to apply to him when he was caught on video in a physical altercation with his wife in Mexico in 2023. She slapped him first, but anyone who watches the footage can see the situation escalated considerably from there.

Richard Eskow: And one of the reasons I bring that up — we’ll come back to Dana White in a moment. But when I started reading your work, I knew a little bit about MMA already (my son-in-law has been educating me), and I was astonished by the extent to which the centers of power in this country are deeply connected to this industry. You have Ari Emanuel in the picture. You have Larry Ellison — a Trump-adjacent billionaire — and Paramount together spending, correct me if I’m wrong, around $7.7 billion for UFC broadcast rights, which I believe exceeded the UFC’s total revenue up to that point. So there’s an enormous amount of money changing hands. You’ve got Ellison, you’ve got Emanuel, and you’ve got the President of the United States. That’s why I said in the introduction that this is a bigger deal than most people realize. Has this world become a kind of epicenter for power players and deal-making?

Nate Wilcox: Absolutely. And it’s genuinely alarming to me. I’ve been covering combat sports for over twenty years, and I’m much more comfortable with small-time shady carnies — or even someone like Don King, who was a big-time shady carny. But Don King couldn’t get the crown prince of Saudi Arabia on the phone and raise billions of dollars the way Ari Emanuel can.

And I’m glad you brought up the Ellison deal, because there’s a common misunderstanding there. Larry Ellison brags about being MAGA since 2016, but he actually stepped away from Trump after January 6th and backed Tim Scott in the 2024 primary. And that’s the kind of thing Trump remembers.

So when Ellison’s son David wanted to buy Paramount, multiple reports indicate that Ari Emanuel played a key role — both within Hollywood and in convincing Shari Redstone, who owned Paramount, to accept that David Ellison was, quote, “good Hollywood people,” given that he’d been producing Top Gun sequels with his father’s money for ten years. That was the first hurdle Ari helped Ellison clear.

The second was that Ellison appeared cageside at two UFC events hosted by Ari Emanuel. Dana White was there, but it was Ari Emanuel who was seen introducing Ellison to Trump. At one of those events, Ellison and Trump apparently had a bit of a tense exchange, and Emanuel quickly stepped in to smooth things over.

It’s widely believed that Ari Emanuel helped secure Trump’s approval for the Skydance acquisition of Paramount — and was quickly rewarded with this massive media rights deal, which was twice what the UFC had been getting from ESPN and far higher than any media analyst expected. In fact, they had already stumbled with Netflix, giving Netflix a 45-day exclusive negotiating window in early 2024 and failing to close a deal.

So Emanuel does all these favors for the Ellisons, and the Ellisons do a solid for Paramount. And it gets even stranger when you look at the South Park negotiations that Paramount entered into around the same time. I tell this story often because it so perfectly illustrates how Ari Emanuel operates.

WME represents the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They’re negotiating with Paramount — which David Ellison had just acquired. One of the two creators and their WME agent were in their office on a call with Ellison. Ellison shows up — and in his office is Ari Emanuel, literally advising Ellison on the deal. Meanwhile, the counterparty in the negotiation is someone who works for Ari Emanuel at WME. South Park then extracts an enormous sum from Paramount — widely considered a gross overpayment. What actually happened was that Ari Emanuel was, in effect, on both sides of the negotiation simultaneously. It’s really something. And I haven’t even gotten to his international connections with the sovereign wealth funds of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Richard Eskow: Before we get there — the South Park deal, okay, a lot of people thought Paramount overpaid. And the broadcast rights to the UFC, the deal Ellison and Paramount struck, a lot of people thought they paid too much for that as well. I’d heard the TV ratings were actually declining. So they pay this enormous number, and it makes you wonder: what’s the deal behind the deal? I don’t want to say money laundering, but some kind of quid pro quo that’s not visible to those of us in the real world. Is there anything to that?

Nate Wilcox: I think it’s a reasonable supposition. There’s no smoking gun — no typewritten letter establishing it. But it’s very clear that Ari Emanuel helped the Ellisons navigate a very difficult merger process, both with the Paramount acquisition and the subsequent acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And that this big UFC investment was the payoff, the reward for that.

That said, there is a legitimate business case to be made as well. Some analysts think this was the Ellisons planting a flag — we’re here to compete with Netflix. We’re not legacy media. We didn’t die in the streaming stock crash of 2022, when every studio, Paramount, Peacock, WBD, had inflated stock prices because people thought streaming was going to reshape everything. Netflix won that war, along with Google and YouTube.

So some people believe the Ellisons paid enormous sums for South Park and the UFC specifically to signal: we’re Silicon Valley money, and we’re here to compete with Netflix and Alphabet. We’re not Hollywood legacy. That’s one argument for it being a logical business decision.

But as you said, the ratings were down. ESPN was very clear that the UFC’s pay-per-view performance during its ESPN years had dropped significantly from when the deal was first signed.

The one thing in Paramount’s favor is that they’ve eliminated the pay-per-view model. Where you used to have to pay ten dollars a month for ESPN+ and then eighty dollars on top of that for the pay-per-view, now with Paramount you pay $8.99 or $15.99 a month — or you get it bundled with Walmart+ — and you get every UFC event, including the numbered events like UFC 300, UFC 305, UFC White House. They can also put those events on CBS and reach a much bigger audience than they ever did on ESPN.

Richard Eskow: I hadn’t even thought about CBS while you were talking, Nate — that’s a real point. More exposure is good for the sport. But there’s the buy decision and then there’s the price, and the price still seems questionable to me. That said, between UFC and TKO, you can trace this whole web of alliances — and you do trace it at MMA Draw. You’ve got the Trump White House, you’ve got Paramount, the sovereign wealth funds, AI, Meta — and of course Larry Ellison’s Oracle running some of the infrastructure. There’s a whole hub of interconnected interests here. Do I have that roughly right? And if so, where does Saudi Arabia fit in? We’re currently in the middle of an on-again, off-again conflict involving Saudi Arabia’s neighbors and rivals. Help me see the pattern.

Nate Wilcox: So WME bought the UFC in 2016. Then in 2023, they buy the WWE — the pro wrestling empire — from Vince McMahon, who was under duress, facing both criminal and civil charges, needing cash, and essentially pushed out by his own family from day-to-day operations. He still held a dominant stock position, and when he needed money, he sold to WME, which then formed a new company called TKO that now owns both the UFC and WWE. They’re expanding into boxing with something called Zufa Boxing — which is 60% owned by a Saudi holding company called Cella that is 100% owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Cella owns several UK football clubs, among other assets, and serves as one of the financial arms of the Saudi empire.

It gets even more interesting when you look at the Paramount financing. There was a Variety report announcing that multiple Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds were backing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — but that story was retracted within a day. It later came out that it was accurate: the Saudi, UAE, and Qatari sovereign wealth funds were all investors in Paramount, potentially owning as much as 49% of the company. Paramount filed something with the government disclosing that foreign entities might own up to 49%, which drew objections from multiple members of Congress who were not comfortable with Saudi Arabia and the UAE holding stakes in an entity that also owns CBS.

Briefly, in that original Variety report before it was pulled, it stated that Jared Kushner and Ari Emanuel were the ones who assembled the sovereign wealth financing. If you know anything about the internal rivalries among the Gulf states, that’s a remarkable achievement. The Saudis and the UAE literally tried to blockade Qatar — with Jared Kushner’s involvement — back in 2018, until someone pointed out that the U.S. had one of its largest Air Force bases in the world in Qatar. That blockade was abandoned. And the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been in open conflict since at least February, with different militia proxies under their respective control entering into open combat in Yemen.

Getting those three entities to invest together in the same deal is, by any measure, an extraordinary feat of deal-making.

There’s also the Khashoggi angle. When the Washington Post reporter was allegedly murdered on orders from Mohammed bin Salman in the Turkish consulate in Istanbul, Ari Emanuel broke a deal with MBS and returned $400 million, publicly stating he had doubled his security detail because he was so afraid of the Saudis. That was 2018. By 2024 and 2025? Water under the bridge. He’s back doing deals with the Saudis, traveling to the kingdom, and Saudi Arabia is hosting WWE and UFC events. They’re thick as thieves again. And the political acumen on display is, frankly, astonishing.

Richard Eskow: By the way — the UAE, among other things, owns Arsenal Football Club, my team. It’s Emirates Stadium now. And so you have this — remind me, Nate: back in early 2017, a source gave me audio of a Trump fundraiser speech where he was attacking Qatar and praising Saudi Arabia. And interestingly, a few days after I published that story in The Intercept, someone broke into our studio and stole a bunch of equipment — nothing of obvious value, but still. Anyway — there’s this intra-Middle East power politics layered on top of Ari Emanuel’s financial interests, which I have to assume overlap with the Ellisons’ interests and, at least tactically, with Trump’s. And all of it seems to intersect around this industry. Your beat is sitting right on top of these fault lines. There may be a window through combat sports into things happening at a level we don’t otherwise see clearly.

Nate Wilcox: I think that’s right. And some of what you’re seeing is the relative decline of Hollywood as a financial and cultural power. Ari Emanuel likes to be introduced as the king of Hollywood, and he publicly identifies with that world — he tends to downplay the UFC and WWE connection. But in 2020, he nearly lost his entire empire during COVID. No movies in theaters, the whole industry locked down. It was Dana White and the UFC that pushed to keep holding events when nobody else thought that was a good idea. They went to the UAE, held fights on what they called Fight Island. A few people got COVID, but it basically worked. And those cash flows literally kept Ari Emanuel’s empire alive.

Now he’s a billionaire — and he’s a billionaire because of revenue from the UFC and the WWE, not from Hollywood talent representation. At one point, Endeavor seemed to envision becoming a movie studio, playing both sides of the table as producers and agents. But once Hollywood imploded — not just from COVID, but from the decade-long addiction to superhero movies that trained anyone over 15 to stop going to the multiplex — the math changed. Ari was shrewd enough to recognize that live-streamed sports was a safer bet than produced TV content and theatrical films. He jumped into it in 2016, and by 2020 it was the foundation of his empire.

Endeavor stock actually failed on its initial public offering and had to go through a take-private maneuver orchestrated by a private equity fund called Silver Lake, run by Egon Durbin — the same financial engineer who took Dell private and then relisted it. The net result is that Silver Lake owns a majority of WME, and WME owns 60% of TKO. So when you buy TKO stock, you’re only buying into 40% of the actual ownership structure. The stock has doubled since 2023, partly because they settled a major monopolization class-action lawsuit brought by fighters for $375 million. They have two more of these suits pending, but once the first one settled, the market decided that problem was contained, and the stock took off. They’ve launched Zufa Boxing, they’ve lobbied for the Muhammad Ali Boxing Revival Act —

Richard Eskow: And I want to get to that. But first — it also seems like one of the reasons the fight world is such a smart investment for Ari Emanuel is that the athletes don’t receive nearly the same share of revenue as in other sports. If my figures are right, TKO pays its fighters less than 20% of revenue. Compare that to the NFL, NBA, and NHL, where the players typically receive around 48 to 49%. These are people putting their bodies on the line with short career spans, not getting anywhere close to what athletes in other major sports earn. And the classic economic explanation for that is monopsony — concentrated buyer power. I’d think these class-action suits have real merit.

Nate Wilcox: They do have merit. They settled one for nine figures, and when you pay out that kind of money in a lawsuit, that tends to suggest there was some fire behind the smoke.

In most stick-and-ball sports, athletes receive 48 to 49% of revenue — NFL, NBA, NHL alike. In boxing, superstars were getting 75 to 80% — Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, that level. The UFC became a monopsony early on, meaning they were essentially the only buyer for top-tier MMA talent from the moment they acquired Strikeforce in 2011, their last major competitor. No one has managed to establish a truly competitive MMA league anywhere in the world since then. That structural dominance lets them keep fighter wages artificially and dramatically low.

They’re now applying the same approach to the WWE. Just in the last couple of weeks, a significant number of WWE performers were cut, and others were handed 50% pay cuts. That’s the model. In fact, their CEO Mark Shapiro brags about it on quarterly shareholder calls — keeping costs down, maximizing value, “extracting value” being his preferred phrase.

And if you look at the WWE mat today versus the Vince McMahon era, when he was famously adamant about no advertising on the mat — it now looks like one of those completely logo-covered T-shirts from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. When they announced their plans for Paramount, one of the first things they touted was starting UFC Fight Nights an hour earlier. People thought: great, earlier bedtime. But no — they just added an extra hour of ads to the broadcast. It’s what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, and they are fully committed to it.

Richard Eskow: Right. And now let’s talk about the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, which passed the House on a two-thirds voice vote. My brain melted a little when I heard about it, because I’m old enough to remember when Muhammad Ali was the most widely despised public figure in mainstream America — branded a draft dodger, a radical Muslim. And now Republicans and Democrats are joining hands in the House of Representatives in his name. There’s a little future shock in that for some of us. But tell us about the act, because I think it’s an important piece of the picture.

Nate Wilcox: So essentially, the original Muhammad Ali Act was something that John McCain — not someone I admire broadly, but this was one thing I did — worked with Ali himself to pass. It made it illegal for a boxing promoter to also manage fighters, required revenue figures to be openly disclosed so that fighters and their management would know how big a pie they were splitting, and it forbade promoters from operating their own sanctioning bodies and awarding their own championship belts.

This new Muhammad Ali Boxing Revival Act would allow the UFC to do all of those things. It creates a new class of entities called UBOs — Unified Boxing Organizations — which, provided they spend a little more on ringside ambulances and fighter health insurance, are granted sweeping latitude: owning their own belts, managing fighters, promoting fights, sitting on every side of the table simultaneously. Basically, they’re being handed the legal permission to do everything the Mafia did when they controlled boxing in the 1950s and ‘60s. Sonny Liston, the man Ali dethroned for the championship, was completely controlled by the New York Mob — they managed him, promoted his fights, and handed out the belts. That’s the blueprint.

And now they’ve gotten Muhammad Ali’s widow to endorse it, secured bipartisan support, and even brought Ilhan Omar on board.

Richard Eskow: Really? Huh.

Nate Wilcox: There was only one Democrat — a congressman from Connecticut whose name I’m blanking on — who spoke out against it on the voice vote. Now it’s in front of Ted Cruz’s committee in the Senate, and it looks like smooth sailing, even though Muhammad Ali’s grandson has since come out against it, Oscar De La Hoya has come out against it, and the WBC sanctioning body is trying to lobby against it. But all of those opponents were caught completely flat-footed and didn’t even seem to realize what was happening during the first House hearings. By all accounts, there were far more TKO lobbyists in the room for those hearings than there were journalists or members of Congress.

TKO went all in. And I’ve heard, somewhat amusingly, that TKO was genuinely irritated when the bill didn’t pass on day one. The lobbyists had to go back and explain: this is Mike Johnson’s House of Representatives. Things don’t pass on day one here.

Richard Eskow: That’s not the level of service we’re paying for. It’s interesting too that Ali’s grandson came out against it — I believe Ali’s daughters are fighters, actually. I’m surprised more of the family didn’t weigh in earlier, but of course we don’t know what conversations have taken place behind the scenes.

Nate Wilcox: The family dynamics and business politics there could be very complicated. And I don’t have any insight into what angles various family members may be working. But if you have an active career in boxing, you might not want to risk going up against what appears to be the 800-pound gorilla just entering the room.

And you know, some of the ground may start shifting under everyone’s feet the way Hollywood shifted under Ari Emanuel’s last time he built an empire. You’ve now got this war in the Gulf. Will the UAE look the same in eighteen months? What does Saudi Arabia look like if the Houthis escalate and cut off access to the Red Sea? Saudi Arabia could face very serious trouble very quickly. In some ways, they’ve built this empire on sand, and we’ll see how it holds up long-term.

But so far they’ve managed to get all of these interests aligned. And they have interests in China, in Russia — they’re close to Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s point man for back-channel negotiations with figures like Witkoff and Kushner. He’s essentially Putin’s Kushner. And the UFC is very tight with him, though because of sanctions they’ve had to maintain some distance publicly. These are people who are prepared and able to do business with anyone, anywhere, regardless of what ethical minefields are in the way — as long as there’s cash at the end of the road.

Richard Eskow: If you’ve got a few more minutes, I’d like to go to sudden-death overtime.

Nate Wilcox: Sure, I’ve got a few more.

Richard Eskow: Good. There’s one more topic I didn’t want to let slip by — Dana White pushing AI technology in broadcasts. That brings in yet another center of power and influence: the AI industry, which of course has its own connections to fossil fuels and the Middle East. We could go on and on. But I’m not that familiar with the specifics here. What’s the deal with AI?

Nate Wilcox: The most public development is that Meta put Dana White on its board in early 2025. My take — and this is my opinion — is that it was a classic case of Mark Zuckerberg being behind the curve and making a bad bet. He wanted in with Trump. Elon’s in with Trump, the Ellisons are in with Trump, so he’s going to buy Trump’s best friend a seven-figure stock grant on Meta’s board to advise them on marketing AI. Anyone who knows anything about Dana White immediately saw through that. This is not an intellectually curious man, to put it mildly. He doesn’t know anything about tech. When people have pushed back on the UFC’s flagrant use of AI in promotional content, his response has literally been: shut up — it’s the future.

He looks like one of those speakers who’ve gone viral at college commencement events recently — the ones who say “AI” and get booed. Dana doesn’t seem to grasp that a lot of people deeply dislike AI. He’s been told from the penthouse suite that it’s the future, so it’s the future. What could be the problem?

I’m sure the UFC and TKO would be thrilled to generate fights with AI if people would pay them for it. Think of all the problems that solves. But it’s much more smoke than fire. I don’t believe he plays any real role on Meta’s board, which has many members. And he hasn’t even been a compelling salesman for the UFC in the last couple of years. He’s visibly checked out. They used to do touring promo circuits — two fighters, events in multiple cities, crowds of hundreds or thousands, Dana getting red-faced and enthusiastic about the next big fight. Now he’ll announce fights from his phone in a casino closet — and it’s well-documented that he’s a prolific gambler who spends most of his time in casinos, often seven nights a week — and he’ll read from a cue card, sometimes not even knowing who the fighters are.

The idea that this man is going to become a compelling evangelist for AI is pretty laughable. I don’t know if you saw him on Charlamagne Tha God before UFC 328, but he’s gotten so accustomed to limiting his media availability to friendly podcasters like Adin Ross or the Nelk Boys that when Charlamagne asked him hard questions, you could visibly watch the gears seize up. When Charlamagne asked whether his position of power helped him avoid consequences for beating his wife on camera, Dana was just sputtering. It was, as a longtime Dana White watcher, genuinely delightful to observe.

But the idea that this person has some special connection to twenty-somethings and can sell them AI they don’t want to buy — that’s simply not happening.

And the decision to make the UFC openly politically partisan, to allow racist, sexist, and transphobic fighters to make that part of their public persona — one of the most notorious cases was Colby Covington, who just retired. Before he did, he said publicly: I did all that political stuff as a hype tactic, to get attention, because I knew that’s what the UFC wanted. So it’s not even genuine bigotry. It’s performed bigotry to make money. Which is, if anything, more disgusting to me than the real thing.

Richard Eskow: It is totally disgusting — artificial bigotry to go along with the artificial intelligence. I think we’ve established that the only thing AI might conceivably improve is Dana White, and in every other context, it would be a downgrade. I’m not even sure how you’d use it effectively in the fight world, unless you’re just generating little animated bouts.

Nate Wilcox: Well, they do use it to generate broadcasters —

Richard Eskow: Right. I think however they use it, it would be annoying.

Nate Wilcox: The ads for UFC White House are 100% AI-generated — showing fighters arriving on Marine helicopters landing on the White House lawn, things like that. They probably saved themselves six figures in production costs and the security headache of actually shooting on-site. But it’s visibly, palpably AI slop.

Compare that to the NFL: when the Cardinals put out an AI-generated ad, about ten other teams immediately released their own ads specifically emphasizing that they were made by real, local, human film workers. The NFL can do that because it has multiple owners and operates as a league rather than a cartel — there’s room for internal debate and dissent. But the UFC exists in such a sealed-off bubble, and Dana White’s attitude toward MMA media and MMA fans has long been: I don’t need you, screw you. Somehow that’s worked for him because the hardcore fans are addicted and will keep spending regardless of how they’re treated. The strategy is to go after the casual audience — the people who’ll show up for UFC White House or tune in because it’s on CBS. So if you’re with a sports publication and want access? They banned ESPN writers from the WWE entirely. It’s remarkable.

Richard Eskow: And that’s what doesn’t make sense to me. You spend $7.7 billion because you want to grow your audience beyond the core fans — bring in the civilians. And then you go cheap with an obviously AI-generated ad that announces to the unconverted: this is a low-quality product. You spent $7.7 billion and then you want to save $125,000 on a photo shoot. I don’t understand the logic.

But here’s my takeaway from all of this, Nate — and I’ll have to have you back because there’s so much more to cover. My conclusion is that this is making me nostalgic for the Mafia. Those guys would kill you if you crossed them, but they were at least reliable. They stood by their deals. This current crowd just seems like a network of ruthless backstabbers who, if they miscalculate, could trigger something genuinely catastrophic. I’ll give you the last word.

Nate Wilcox: I think what we’re seeing is that TKO is an entity that has already succeeded in monopolizing MMA and pro wrestling, and is now working to do the same in boxing. And these aren’t fight people. They’re Hollywood guys, and more precisely, they’re private equity guys — the same people who’ve destroyed your local veterinary clinic, your funeral home, your doctor’s office. It’s the exact same playbook running in a different industry. Why is a routine X-ray for your cat suddenly $700? This is why. These are not fight people. They don’t know or care about fights. Dana White is phoning it in — this is not the Dana White who built the UFC from nothing into one of the major sports organizations in the world. This is a guy who’d rather be at a casino dropping a million dollars on blackjack than talking about fights.

Richard Eskow: What would Howard Cosell say about all of that? Nate Wilcox, thank you for a great conversation. You can find Nate’s writing at MMAdraw.com. I encourage you to check it out — whether you’re a fight fan or you just want to understand how our overlords are making deals these days, this industry seems to be sitting at the center of some very consequential activity. Nate, thanks for the great reporting, and thanks for coming on the program.

Nate Wilcox: Thanks for having me, Richard. My pleasure.