Mad Squabbles Show: UFC’s role in the Paramount-WBD merger

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.themmadraw.com What is the common link the UFC, Paramount, Manchester City, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Los Angeles Dodgers all share? They share ties to the same multi-billionaire world leaders who are pushing puny lower-class billionaires to the side for sports ownership. This phenomenon has been building for a decade, and you can trace some of its roots to a 2009 meeting between Ari Emanuel and Khaldoon Al Mubarak of the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala. Connie Bruck’s 2021 New Yorker article titled Ari Emanuel Takes on the World was an eerie foreshadowing of things to come in global sport. Ari Emanuel is bundling billionaires for global sport the same way he bundled millionaires for Hollywood Democrats: Egon Durban. Khaldoon Al Mubarak. David Ellison. That is the focus of this week’s Mad Squabbles podcast for The MMA Draw. There has been a month-long blizzard of media headlines regarding the Paramount/Warner Brothers Discovery merger and antitrust opposition to it. When you get down to it, what really matters to UFC fans? That’s our focus on this week’s podcast. The role of the UFC in Paramount’s global expansion is far greater than you truly appreciate. Most importantly, the TKO empire has consolidated the world’s most elite billionaires in their own Super Billionaire League of ownership and control. The Mark Walter story with the Lakers (and perhaps the Dodgers soon) highlights how quickly things are moving under the feet of billionaire sports owners. It’s why Scott Barrett’s Long Term Bull Thesis on TKO was one of the most important articles we’ve published at The MMA Draw. You’ll find out exactly why on this week’s edition of The Mad Squabbles Show with Nate Wilcox & Zach Arnold. If you listen to the show or read this far, we’d like to give you a free month’s subscription; click here to collect. On the show, Nate talked about using the password Preston, but it turns out that won’t work on Substack, so never mind about that. We did a shortened version of this for YouTube THE RECEIPTS Every document we put on screen, in the order we hit them ------------------------------------------------------------------- Everything we put on screen in this episode’s YouTube version is below, in order, with the timestamp where we get to it - so you can read the sources yourself instead of taking our word for any of it. If you only want the UFC end of the story, the eighteen-minute cut is on YouTube: 0. WHERE THIS STARTS Where the 2009 meeting between Emanuel and Khaldoon Al Mubarak of Mubadala is reported, and the piece that saw the shape of all of this before anyone was calling it a sports story. Everything below is what happened next. 1. DAVID ELLISON SAYS HE’S LEAVING CALIFORNIA 1:17 - The threat that started the whole news cycle. Worth noting who it is aimed at: not Californians. 6:23 - The 415,000-square-foot property in Austin. The lot he is supposedly buying sits next to an actual garbage dump. Not the Tesla factory. A garbage dump. 2. THE THEATRE CHAINS PICK A SIDE 6:55 - The PR war with AMC. Exhibitors are not neutral parties here and this is where they show it. 3. NEWSOM, 2028, AND WHERE HOLLYWOOD MONEY GOES 17:40 - Newsom backing the merger. Every Republican and every Democrat in California is on board except one man, and we get to him further down. 18:07 - Ari and Katzenberg over the CNN debate. 18:23 - What Ari did after Biden’s debate collapse. 18:35 - Same passage, second source. We are not relying on one outlet for this one. 18:44 - The 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival. Read the guest list. 4. ARI’S ACTUAL LEVERAGE 22:38 - The William Morris client list is the leverage. Not the capital. This is the part most of the coverage misses. 5. MEANWHILE, THE UFC RUNS ON AUTOPILOT 27:46 - A three-million-dollar gate in Sacramento. Oklahoma City does the same. It does not matter where they run it or who is on the card. 6. AND ARI IS ALREADY BUYING THE NEXT THING 31:27 - Six billion dollars for a theatre company holding West End and Broadway houses. Keep this one in mind when we argue he would drop the UFC in a heartbeat. He is not waiting around. 7. THE LAST HOLDOUT 42:16 - Everybody wants this merger done. Everybody. 42:44 - Except Rob Bonta. The lone Attorney General standing in the way, and the reason this is not finished yet. 43:04 and 43:24 - Two more on the California AG thread, for anyone who wants to follow how that office has handled this kind of thing before. 8. WHAT IT ALL MEANS FOR THE UFC 47:04 - The UFC onto Paramount+, expanding into Canada in 2027. Note what is not in this announcement: CBS. 48:19 - The stepladder. Revenue rising year over year across the seven years. This is the $7.7 billion, and it is why every other league in the world spent this offseason demanding a comparable multiple and getting told no. That is the paper trail. The argument is in the audio. Ways to listen to this episode This is a subscriber-only episode. The first six minutes are free for everyone; the full hour is for paid subscribers (but we’re giving away a month free at this link.) PAID SUBSCRIBERS The easy way is the Substack app: https://substack.com/app Install it, sign in with the email address you subscribed with, and the full episode is waiting. Prefer your usual podcast app? Set your private feed up once, and every full episode arrives automatically from then on: 1. Open https://www.themmadraw.com/account 2. Copy the URL under “Private podcast feed” 3. Paste it into Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or whatever you use. It’s tied to your account — please don’t share it. Seeing a six-minute version of this episode? That’s the public preview feed. 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