Endeavor Executives Anticipated Vince McMahon’s 2023 WWE Return

The executives were plotting for McMahon’s return.

There’s an exclusive story up on POST Wrestling via Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics. It has to do with Vince McMahon’s return to WWE in January 2023 being anticipated by executives at Endeavor, which is the company that went on to acquire WWE in 2023. McMahon was a part of that transaction process.

When Vince McMahon announced his resignation/retirement from WWE in 2022 after sexual misconduct allegations emerged, a top executive at Endeavor had been relaying to colleagues on the same day that McMahon would only be gone temporarily.

After McMahon’s resignation, Endeavor President and TKO Chief Operating Officer, Mark Shapiro, sent the following message to Endeavor and TKO CEO Ari Emanuel and fellow Endeavor execs (POST Wrestling included photographic evidence of the text messages):

Nick and Stephanie are going to take over the WWE for the next nine months. Vince [will] be back with a new board or he will take the company private or he will sell it/coming to us. The race is on. The courtship is on.

Vince McMahon was back in the fold of WWE less than six months later. He was back on the Board of Directors after reinstating himself by using his superior voting power as the controlling shareholder.

The text message from Shapiro was disclosed in the WWE shareholder lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court. The plaintiffs in that case allege that McMahon violated his legal and ethical obligation to act in the best interests of the shareholders, but instead of doing that, he helped move along the sale process to keep his own power.

There was communication between McMahon and Ari Emanuel throughout the backend of 2022.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are presenting the stance that McMahon and Emanuel had a friendship that would make sure McMahon stayed with WWE after the sale to Endeavor. On the other side of the spectrum, other potential suitors would have required Vince to leave WWE immediately. Vince denied that.

WWE President Nick Khan, Chief Content Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, and former executives/Board members George Barrios and Michelle Wilson are being represented by TKO’s outside counsel. They’re being accused of being on board with McMahon’s plan to preserve his power. McMahon has separate counsel.

POST/Thurston reached out to WWE, TKO, and Vince McMahon’s reps for a comment on this story, but the requests were not responded to.

As mentioned, while McMahon was publicly retired, he had been in communication with Ari Emanuel. While they were exchanging messages, Emanuel told McMahon, “I will be your greatest partner.”

It was also revealed that several days after that August 2022 exchange, Emanuel texted McMahon and said he knew that McMahon met with Jeff Sine the day prior. Sine is a senior banker at Raine Group, who served as WWE’s financial advisor in the sale to Endeavor. Included on Sine’s extensive advisory résumé is that he advised Vince McMahon on his XFL revival.

Sine chatted with McMahon and said if things were to move forward, he would like to work for McMahon and McMahon only — not Ari Emanuel or Endeavor. He told McMahon that Morgan Stanley was not prepared to represent him.

The iteration of the deal that left Endeavor with less equity was the one that would lock in McMahon’s future with the company. The shareholders are positioning the situation as other bidders would have insisted that McMahon leave WWE, but WWE’s stance is that they did not have to give up anything to assure McMahon’s future. Endeavor gave WWE more equity to keep McMahon, which asserted his importance.

The article write-up has a section about Vince McMahon texting Nick Khan about WWE creative, per the court filings. Below is a text exchange from McMahon that he copied and pasted and sent to Khan. In the copy and pasted texts was a conversation McMahon was having with Paul Levesque and Bruce Prichard about the creative for Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes’ Undisputed WWE Championship match at WrestleMania 39:

Text from me to Paul and Bruce: “Hey guys just double checking. Does Roman [Reigns] and Cody [Rhodes] know the new creative re [WrestleMania] and next year ?”

Bruce : “Not to my knowledge. I don’t know if Paul has had a conversation with either. Roman’s first appearance since we spoke is Friday in DC. Both will be there in person.”

Me to Paul: “ Paul have U “?

The shareholders in the lawsuit are not concerned with McMahon’s involvement in WWE creative, but are focused on these discussions amongst executives being relegated to the Signal chat app, which has an auto-delete function. The shareholders argue that key communications were not preserved on Signal, which would be a loophole of sorts to get around special preservation measures during mergers and acquisitions. If the messages weren’t properly maintained, it could factor into the outcome of the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs asked the court to order Nick Khan, Ari Emanuel, Paul Levesque, and Brad Blum (former WWE exec/McMahon aide) to sit down with attorneys and take screenshots of any relevant messages they have on the devices on which Signal was downloaded. The decision on that order is still pending.

The lawsuit is nearing the end of discovery.

After the TKO deal was finalized in September 2023, it secured multimillion-dollar bonuses for Nick Khan and Paul Levesque. The shareholders allege that those bonuses are what encouraged executives to go through with McMahon’s plan to keep his power.

The WWE and UFC merger under TKO guaranteed McMahon a lifetime role with TKO unless he resigned. He resigned in January 2024 after former WWE employee Janel Grant filed a sex trafficking lawsuit against McMahon, WWE, and John Laurinaitis. The former WWE exec, Laurinaitis, has since been dropped from the ongoing suit after agreeing to provide evidence for Grant’s case.

If the plaintiffs in the shareholders’ suit emerge victorious, they could recover financial damages on behalf of stockholders and financial institutions that held WWE shares during the specified period of time.

The merger lawsuit is going to trial in June 2026.