UFC
A mixed martial arts league run by Dana White and owned by TKO.
The UFC nearly died when events cost about $2M against roughly $10M in revenue. The Fertittas kept funding it, including a last $10M on The Ultimate Fighter, and it sold for $4.025B in 2016. TV deals grew from $35M at Spike to $7.7B at Paramount. Lesson: stay solvent through the near-death phase, back one distribution bet, and keep the live product honest.
What was said about UFC
1How the UFC nearly died and The Ultimate Fighter saved it
The owners slept on selling and chose to keep going. Four years in, events cost about $2M each, five a year, against roughly $10M in revenue, and Lorenzo Fertitta asked Dana White to find a buyer. White put the price at six to eight million. The next morning Fertitta called back: "Let's keep going."
The company later sold for $4.025 billion in 2016. White says that if they had sold, he would have found another way into the business the next day: "I just keep going until it does work."
Buying back every ancillary right let the brand make money later. The Fertittas bought only the letters UFC, an old wooden octagon and eight or nine fighter contracts, because the previous owner had sold merchandise, library, video game and DVD rights to Lionsgate to stay alive. They paid roughly $2.5 to 3 million to buy those rights back.
White says Lionsgate probably thought they were idiots. He contrasts it with Shannon Lee, who still cannot buy back her father Bruce Lee's film rights. Today almost 1,000 fighters are under contract.
A taped reality show was a Trojan horse onto free TV. The UFC was barred from pay-per-view and free TV looked impossible, so around 2004 or 2005 White built a reality format with taped fights that cautious networks felt they could cut. It let fans know the fighters before they fought.
The show built Forrest Griffin into a pay-per-view star and had Chuck Liddell as a coach. Season 34 is now running, and White reuses the format: Power Slap's reality show has 50 million YouTube views, and he did the same for UFC BJJ.
Paying for production themselves made Spike a no-risk yes. Spike TV passed at first, then took The Ultimate Fighter once the UFC covered production and Spike only supplied airtime. It was the owners' last $10M investment; if it failed, the company was finished. It became a runaway hit.
At the Bonnar vs. Griffin finale the crowd stomped and chanted "one more round," White gave both fighters contracts on the spot, and the renewal was a few bullet points and a handshake in an alley. Spike was a young men's network that had already lost money on content, which made a free show easy to accept.
2Dana White's fan-first production
Never edit a fight; let fans judge it, and admit bad ones. White saw The Contender, the most expensive reality show of its time, fail because it edited its fights. The UFC production adds "bells and whistles," then hands the torch to the fighters, and White tells the audience when a fight was bad.
He grew up watching promoters call bad fights great and CEOs read lawyer-written statements, and refuses to do either. David Senra points founders to White's post-fight press conferences as the model of a founder as storyteller, a job that can't be handed to a hired Chief Storyteller.
He fired the inherited crew and built a team wired like him. The first crew were Showtime boxing staff working on the side; when they ignored his instruction on filming an interview, White fired all of them and brought in a new crew. Today he rarely changes anything in screenings.
Turnover is low in key roles, including head of production Craig Borsari. "You have to have a bunch of sick animals that are just wired the way you are."
White runs every live show by phone, with no committee. He sits ringside watching a screen, not the fight, with a phone to the production truck, calling what to keep and what never to do again. He calls it a dictatorship.
His producer Zach tries new things and gets a verdict from White in real time.
Few events early gave room to learn production by trial and error. With no production experience, the owners ran five events a year at first and tried WWE-style pyro and fireworks before settling on a simpler, technology-driven show. The UFC now runs 43 or 44 events a year.
The first event had to be staged roughly two and a half to three weeks after the purchase. White still tries to be first, or among the first, to adopt new technology.
A great live event turns each attendee into a recruiter. White says the UFC grew fast by touring the US and the world with a live show people love, while also being strong on TV. Nobody leaves swearing off another event, and each new fan brings five to ten more.
The first event after the purchase, at the Trump Taj Mahal, sold 3,500 tickets and drew 5,000 with comps. Applying the same live playbook made Power Slap profitable from its first event.
3Leaving Spike for Fox
Telling founders they're replaceable pushed the UFC to Fox. Ari Emanuel asked Spike only to double the fee for its highest-rated show. Spike's head (named by White as Phil Dauman) answered that the network had made the UFC and would build another; the UFC moved to Fox, and the deal went from $35M at Spike to $100M at Fox.
Ari: "You don't insult somebody from what they created." He says Dana didn't show anger but was boiling, and that the Spike executive later wrecked his company. White calls the exit something that happened for a reason.
4Endeavor's $4.2 billion purchase and the ESPN deal
Owning sports, not just representing them, was the thesis behind the buy. Ari Emanuel, Egon Durban and Mark Shapiro bet that streaming would move to ad-supported plans and need sports to keep viewers engaged, so they added owned sports assets to the agency. That thesis led to the $4.2 billion UFC purchase, called the most expensive deal in sports history.
Ari had moved the UFC to Fox earlier and expected Fox to renew, until Rupert Murdoch sold to Disney and that dead end led him to buy the UFC. "One of the things that keeps people engaged was sports."
Asking the seller to name his number anchored the price. Before Lorenzo Fertitta took other calls, Ari asked what number he saw with his eyes closed; it started with a four. Ari had known the company 20 years and already run the license-fee math.
Dana White urged the Fertittas to sell to someone who loved the business, so Ari paid a little less than rival bids. Michael Dell supplied preferred equity and KKR's founders backed Durban. S2 gives the sale price as $4.025 billion.
After closing, the expected buyers vanished and they held anyway. Brexit shook banking, Fox's sale to Disney removed the natural buyer, and an Amazon deal negotiated for four months fell from about $260 million to about $140 million. Ari got physically sick from stress, with clients' money in the deal too.
Durban stayed steady because he believed in sports and distribution; Ari says he "took my hand and walked me through everything." ESPN's John Skipper strung them along and Netflix was not yet in sports. "We put all the chips in the middle of the table."
ESPN's new chief needed direct-to-consumer content and paid the asking price. When Kevin Mayer replaced Skipper, he sent a WhatsApp agreeing to $300 million while Ari was mid-pitch to Viacom; Ari slid the phone to Shapiro and ended the meeting. Ari then pushed ESPN to buy the pay-per-views too, making a seven-year deal worth almost $4 billion, close to the purchase price.
The deal took about three and a half months, with four months to spare against Ari's pro forma. Bob Iger had not realized the pay-per-views were available; ESPN bought them the following Monday. S2 lists the ESPN deal at $3B.
Dana White refused eight ESPN episodes with no other buyer. ESPN offered eight episodes on ESPN and the rest on ESPN Plus; White said "I'm not doing unless we have 10." Ari yelled at Mayer that stars need ESPN exposure to sell the paywall, and ESPN came back with ten.
Ari later learned that Bob Iger, who started in boxing, told Jimmy Pitaro to give them the ten.
Critics called a peak at every deal, and each one grew. After the 2016 sale with no TV deal lined up, critics said the buyers overpaid; White says the same was said at Spike, Fox, ESPN and Paramount. Deals went from $35M at Spike to $100M at Fox, $3B at ESPN and $7.7B over seven years at Paramount.
Netflix was in the Paramount talks throughout; White says the Ellisons won near the end by saying "we want everything." He expects the market to return to a few global channels.
5Dana White's habits with staff, partners and new bets
Through COVID he kept every employee and kept putting on fights. Iger promised to pay whether the UFC held none or all 44 events, but White reasoned ESPN would cut the UFC first if it didn't deliver. Within a couple of weeks he built a bubble on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.
As the only live sport available, the UFC drew very strong numbers for ESPN and the business grew.
Give creators full access and no instructions. White concluded traditional media lost trust and young creators now hold influence, so anyone can film what they like at his events.
He owns or runs nine brands, including UFC, Power Slap, boxing, WWE and PBR. "Film what you want, create what you want."
He partners only with aligned people and stays loyal to his own. White dropped a long-time sponsor that demanded he remove a video supporting Trump, and refused sponsors who asked him to cut Joe Rogan. Rogan called the first 12 fights for free and split early radio tours with White.
Rogan and White alternated radio drops from 6:00 a.m. in East Coast markets for years, because fighters were bad on radio. White calls loyalty the most important thing to him.
He under-exploited DVDs, so he now chases every new medium. Compilations like Ultimate Knockouts and Ultimate Submissions sold like crazy and brought in millions, but White assumed DVDs would last forever. "I would've murdered the DVD era."
He once dismissed a streaming demo that buffered after five or ten seconds. He now follows each new medium, including streaming and AI.
Power Slap came from noticing he watched slap fights to the end. In 2017 White saw slap fights from Russia and Poland on Instagram and stayed to see who won; the Fertittas put up $3M, and it was profitable from the first event.
After it took off, Michael Rubin offered $10M for whatever White did next, unseen.
Building an Empire with Risk, Rage & 200 Phone Calls A Day | Ari Emanuel, WME & TKO
Bought for $4.2 billion, called the most expensive deal in sports history, it then drew a seven-year ESPN deal worth almost the same amount. Ari asked the Fertittas to name a number, held through Brexit and the Fox sale to Disney, and won ten ESPN episodes.
Telling founders they're replaceable pushed the UFC to Fox. Ari Emanuel asked Spike only to double the fee for its highest-rated show. Spike's head (named by White as Phil Dauman) answered that the network had made the UFC and would build another; the UFC moved to Fox, and the deal went from $35M at Spike to $100M at Fox.
Ari: "You don't insult somebody from what they created." He says Dana didn't show anger but was boiling, and that the Spike executive later wrecked his company. White calls the exit something that happened for a reason.
Owning sports, not just representing them, was the thesis behind the buy. Ari Emanuel, Egon Durban and Mark Shapiro bet that streaming would move to ad-supported plans and need sports to keep viewers engaged, so they added owned sports assets to the agency. That thesis led to the $4.2 billion UFC purchase, called the most expensive deal in sports history.
Ari had moved the UFC to Fox earlier and expected Fox to renew, until Rupert Murdoch sold to Disney and that dead end led him to buy the UFC. "One of the things that keeps people engaged was sports."
Asking the seller to name his number anchored the price. Before Lorenzo Fertitta took other calls, Ari asked what number he saw with his eyes closed; it started with a four. Ari had known the company 20 years and already run the license-fee math.
Dana White urged the Fertittas to sell to someone who loved the business, so Ari paid a little less than rival bids. Michael Dell supplied preferred equity and KKR's founders backed Durban. S2 gives the sale price as $4.025 billion.
After closing, the expected buyers vanished and they held anyway. Brexit shook banking, Fox's sale to Disney removed the natural buyer, and an Amazon deal negotiated for four months fell from about $260 million to about $140 million. Ari got physically sick from stress, with clients' money in the deal too.
Durban stayed steady because he believed in sports and distribution; Ari says he "took my hand and walked me through everything." ESPN's John Skipper strung them along and Netflix was not yet in sports. "We put all the chips in the middle of the table."
ESPN's new chief needed direct-to-consumer content and paid the asking price. When Kevin Mayer replaced Skipper, he sent a WhatsApp agreeing to $300 million while Ari was mid-pitch to Viacom; Ari slid the phone to Shapiro and ended the meeting. Ari then pushed ESPN to buy the pay-per-views too, making a seven-year deal worth almost $4 billion, close to the purchase price.
The deal took about three and a half months, with four months to spare against Ari's pro forma. Bob Iger had not realized the pay-per-views were available; ESPN bought them the following Monday. S2 lists the ESPN deal at $3B.
Dana White refused eight ESPN episodes with no other buyer. ESPN offered eight episodes on ESPN and the rest on ESPN Plus; White said "I'm not doing unless we have 10." Ari yelled at Mayer that stars need ESPN exposure to sell the paywall, and ESPN came back with ten.
Ari later learned that Bob Iger, who started in boxing, told Jimmy Pitaro to give them the ten.
Dana White: The Man Behind the UFC
Bought for $2M and sold for $4.025B in 2016, it nearly died when events cost about $2M each against roughly $10M in revenue. Now it runs 43 or 44 events a year with almost 1,000 fighters, and its TV deals grew from $35M at Spike to $7.7B at Paramount.
The owners slept on selling and chose to keep going. Four years in, events cost about $2M each, five a year, against roughly $10M in revenue, and Lorenzo Fertitta asked Dana White to find a buyer. White put the price at six to eight million. The next morning Fertitta called back: "Let's keep going."
The company later sold for $4.025 billion in 2016. White says that if they had sold, he would have found another way into the business the next day: "I just keep going until it does work."
Buying back every ancillary right let the brand make money later. The Fertittas bought only the letters UFC, an old wooden octagon and eight or nine fighter contracts, because the previous owner had sold merchandise, library, video game and DVD rights to Lionsgate to stay alive. They paid roughly $2.5 to 3 million to buy those rights back.
White says Lionsgate probably thought they were idiots. He contrasts it with Shannon Lee, who still cannot buy back her father Bruce Lee's film rights. Today almost 1,000 fighters are under contract.
A taped reality show was a Trojan horse onto free TV. The UFC was barred from pay-per-view and free TV looked impossible, so around 2004 or 2005 White built a reality format with taped fights that cautious networks felt they could cut. It let fans know the fighters before they fought.
The show built Forrest Griffin into a pay-per-view star and had Chuck Liddell as a coach. Season 34 is now running, and White reuses the format: Power Slap's reality show has 50 million YouTube views, and he did the same for UFC BJJ.
Paying for production themselves made Spike a no-risk yes. Spike TV passed at first, then took The Ultimate Fighter once the UFC covered production and Spike only supplied airtime. It was the owners' last $10M investment; if it failed, the company was finished. It became a runaway hit.
At the Bonnar vs. Griffin finale the crowd stomped and chanted "one more round," White gave both fighters contracts on the spot, and the renewal was a few bullet points and a handshake in an alley. Spike was a young men's network that had already lost money on content, which made a free show easy to accept.
Never edit a fight; let fans judge it, and admit bad ones. White saw The Contender, the most expensive reality show of its time, fail because it edited its fights. The UFC production adds "bells and whistles," then hands the torch to the fighters, and White tells the audience when a fight was bad.
He grew up watching promoters call bad fights great and CEOs read lawyer-written statements, and refuses to do either. David Senra points founders to White's post-fight press conferences as the model of a founder as storyteller, a job that can't be handed to a hired Chief Storyteller.
He fired the inherited crew and built a team wired like him. The first crew were Showtime boxing staff working on the side; when they ignored his instruction on filming an interview, White fired all of them and brought in a new crew. Today he rarely changes anything in screenings.
Turnover is low in key roles, including head of production Craig Borsari. "You have to have a bunch of sick animals that are just wired the way you are."
White runs every live show by phone, with no committee. He sits ringside watching a screen, not the fight, with a phone to the production truck, calling what to keep and what never to do again. He calls it a dictatorship.
His producer Zach tries new things and gets a verdict from White in real time.
Few events early gave room to learn production by trial and error. With no production experience, the owners ran five events a year at first and tried WWE-style pyro and fireworks before settling on a simpler, technology-driven show. The UFC now runs 43 or 44 events a year.
The first event had to be staged roughly two and a half to three weeks after the purchase. White still tries to be first, or among the first, to adopt new technology.
A great live event turns each attendee into a recruiter. White says the UFC grew fast by touring the US and the world with a live show people love, while also being strong on TV. Nobody leaves swearing off another event, and each new fan brings five to ten more.
The first event after the purchase, at the Trump Taj Mahal, sold 3,500 tickets and drew 5,000 with comps. Applying the same live playbook made Power Slap profitable from its first event.
Telling founders they're replaceable pushed the UFC to Fox. Ari Emanuel asked Spike only to double the fee for its highest-rated show. Spike's head (named by White as Phil Dauman) answered that the network had made the UFC and would build another; the UFC moved to Fox, and the deal went from $35M at Spike to $100M at Fox.
Ari: "You don't insult somebody from what they created." He says Dana didn't show anger but was boiling, and that the Spike executive later wrecked his company. White calls the exit something that happened for a reason.
Asking the seller to name his number anchored the price. Before Lorenzo Fertitta took other calls, Ari asked what number he saw with his eyes closed; it started with a four. Ari had known the company 20 years and already run the license-fee math.
Dana White urged the Fertittas to sell to someone who loved the business, so Ari paid a little less than rival bids. Michael Dell supplied preferred equity and KKR's founders backed Durban. S2 gives the sale price as $4.025 billion.
ESPN's new chief needed direct-to-consumer content and paid the asking price. When Kevin Mayer replaced Skipper, he sent a WhatsApp agreeing to $300 million while Ari was mid-pitch to Viacom; Ari slid the phone to Shapiro and ended the meeting. Ari then pushed ESPN to buy the pay-per-views too, making a seven-year deal worth almost $4 billion, close to the purchase price.
The deal took about three and a half months, with four months to spare against Ari's pro forma. Bob Iger had not realized the pay-per-views were available; ESPN bought them the following Monday. S2 lists the ESPN deal at $3B.
Critics called a peak at every deal, and each one grew. After the 2016 sale with no TV deal lined up, critics said the buyers overpaid; White says the same was said at Spike, Fox, ESPN and Paramount. Deals went from $35M at Spike to $100M at Fox, $3B at ESPN and $7.7B over seven years at Paramount.
Netflix was in the Paramount talks throughout; White says the Ellisons won near the end by saying "we want everything." He expects the market to return to a few global channels.
Through COVID he kept every employee and kept putting on fights. Iger promised to pay whether the UFC held none or all 44 events, but White reasoned ESPN would cut the UFC first if it didn't deliver. Within a couple of weeks he built a bubble on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.
As the only live sport available, the UFC drew very strong numbers for ESPN and the business grew.
Give creators full access and no instructions. White concluded traditional media lost trust and young creators now hold influence, so anyone can film what they like at his events.
He owns or runs nine brands, including UFC, Power Slap, boxing, WWE and PBR. "Film what you want, create what you want."
He partners only with aligned people and stays loyal to his own. White dropped a long-time sponsor that demanded he remove a video supporting Trump, and refused sponsors who asked him to cut Joe Rogan. Rogan called the first 12 fights for free and split early radio tours with White.
Rogan and White alternated radio drops from 6:00 a.m. in East Coast markets for years, because fighters were bad on radio. White calls loyalty the most important thing to him.
He under-exploited DVDs, so he now chases every new medium. Compilations like Ultimate Knockouts and Ultimate Submissions sold like crazy and brought in millions, but White assumed DVDs would last forever. "I would've murdered the DVD era."
He once dismissed a streaming demo that buffered after five or ten seconds. He now follows each new medium, including streaming and AI.
Power Slap came from noticing he watched slap fights to the end. In 2017 White saw slap fights from Russia and Poland on Instagram and stayed to see who won; the Fertittas put up $3M, and it was profitable from the first event.
After it took off, Michael Rubin offered $10M for whatever White did next, unseen.
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