UFC

“We do like, 43, 44 events a year. When we bought the company, we were doing five, which seemed like a lot.”

“When new technology comes out, we always try to be first or one of the first to use it, but the show is dialed now.”

“So all we bought when we bought the company. Was those three letters UFC and old wooden octagon and some contracts that we have, that we had obligations to. And maybe it was eight or nine. That's it, eight or nine contracts. We have almost a thousand guys unde…”

“All the ancillary stuff was sold off to Lionsgate because the old owner was trying to stay alive. So to show you People can't wrap their head around this now. How much people didn't believe in the UFC? We went back to Lionsgate, and we bought the rights back f…”

“Well, I called him back and said, I think we can sell it six, seven, maybe eight million in that ballpark.”

“At that time it wasn't allowed on pay-per-view. You as a grown adult didn't have the right to purchase it on pay-per-view porn. Was on pay-per-view. Okay. But the UFC was not allowed on pay-per-view.”

“So at the time, it's the last ten million dollar investment we're going to make in the UFC.”

“And Spike TV execs took us out in the alley of the arena, and we did a deal on a napkin.”

“But if they would have paid for it, We wouldn't have been in the position that we were in where we own a hundred percent of everything.”

“The DVD business, at the time the DVDs exploded, that's really when we started making some real money.”

“And then he tells us that he built the UFC, and if we don't like the offer he's making, he'll just build another one. That's literally what he said.”

“There is no committee here. There is no whatever. This is a dictatorship. 100% of dictatorship. And. I'm listening to how loud the music is, if it's loud enough, if it's not, and things are happening in-house, and I'm watching what's happening on TV. All of th…”

“We sell for four point oh two five billion, right? No TV deal. We're coming up to the end of our Fox deal. We have no TV deal. Nothing.”

“Spike, thirty-five million dollar deal. Fox, hundred million dollar deal. ESPN, three billion dollar deal. And now here we are, 7.7 for seven years.”

“Nobody was saying, no, we're not going to work during COVID. Too dangerous and we're scared. I'm not saying people weren't scared. Everybody was willing to go. Men, women, everybody.”

“I said, I'll never, ever fucking come to your arena again. Just so you know that, you know, cause we were doing MSG in Brooklyn. I said, I will never hold another fucking fight in your arena ever again.”

“Iger says, I'll pay you every fucking dime, no matter how much COVID lasts, whether you do no events, or you put on all 44.”

“It was the only true bubble that existed in sports at that time. All the other ones were bullshit.”

“It started with, I posted a video supporting Trump on my social media. And they called and they said, you need to take that down. And I said, are you out of your fucking mind? Who the fuck are you to call me and tell me who to vote for? It's not coming down an…”

“And then coming out of COVID and that whole woke era, I was like, I'm only going to be in business with people that I'm aligned with.”

“These guys who report on what we're doing that have no clue what we're doing. Why would I want to hear any of the, anything they would have to say? They're zeros. They've literally never done anything in their life, especially in this business. Why would I lis…”

“First of all, Joe Rogan did the first 12 fights for us for free, right?”

“And for anybody, I don't give a fuck how much money you have sponsored or whatever. Yeah, no, nothing's happening to Joe Rogan.”

“They were making fifteen million dollars a year from spike. And I think the first deal I made at spike was I increased it to 75, something like that. And we made a video game deal, which they never had, you know, after 20 years, you know, it was, we moved it t…”

“When we bought UFC on the current trajectory, it was 20 times. If I made the proper domestic deal, I could take, take the leverage down.”

“Comcast didn't want it. Warners didn't want it. And Paramount had not decided what they were going to be.”

“ESPN fires John Skipper, who was always shining me on that he wanted it. He never wanted it. Bob Iger and Kevin Mayer say we want it cause we're going to go direct.”

“Oh, I mean, our pay-per-views were getting like a million views. I mean, it was insane.”

“Cause you know, I put all the chips in the middle for four, four, 4.2 billion dollars in the middle. Clients were investing my biggest investors investing.”

“Well, we sent the bad letter to Sam. Like stop using the UFC and the WWE and so on.”

“In the Super Bowl, go to Tiffany's and get a blue football and have 10 people with you and get a lecture from Peyton Manning and walk on the field pregame and come out with the team and be on the stage for weigh-ins at the UFC and sit at the table with Dana Wh…”

“And if we do that, I think fighters are going to make more money because right now you don't know any great fighters. It's not like you can't name one. We think we can do that. And then boxers will make more money.”

“So if we do that now, I think it can be as big or bigger than the UFC and the WWE and they're big.”

“One, he loves it. He loves it. I mean, he really does love combat sports. Two is, he's not scared... He is just like a unique individual that, you know, He's not partisan. He's loyal. He has a vision. He backs your play. If you back, you know, he's just that g…”

“I went up to see the robots, because I want to do A UFC fight with his robots and the robots.”

“There's no competition to UFC and there's no competition to WWE. Like, the number two MMA, you know, promotions, whether it's PFL, like Bellator, like these were companies that are literally on the brink of bankruptcy, and like, they're like, not just like in …”

“And of course, since then, they both signed major, major, like streaming deals way bigger than, you know, people thought they would sign like billion dollar a year plus streaming deals.”

“So, beginning in 2026, all UFC events will stream on Paramount Plus with select events also airing on CBS.”

“The fact that it's doing so as part of a deal that will essentially double the roughly five hundred and fifty million per year the UFC currently receives from ESPN likely only made that calculation easier.”

“I think that's also free money. I think that we live in clown world and there will be a UFC fight there.”

“Some fighters have been overly reliant on the UFC to promote them. And so their only incentive is to promote the next fight. So if you don't have a fight on The schedule, you're not fighting that week. You're, you pretty much have to promote yourself.”

“Because I think that by the end of the next four years, UFC will be baseball will have to have sort of stepped aside. No longer America's pastime. America's pastime is combat and combat sports.”

“Like that, that was the goal of the UFC. It was to Not to drive downloads, not even really to build out brand awareness, but to put Autopilot on the map and differentiate us from our competitors to be like, that's a cool company that I like because they're swi…”

“We literally did send a fake Pelosi to the fight. She was sitting there in the front row with Mike Malak. There's all these pieces of content around her. The New York post already kind of took it up. They created an article about it.”

“So when it comes to sponsorship of events, the best sponsorships are kind of the ones that you're like, why are they sponsoring it? Like, why is this, you know, trading app sponsoring this UFC fight?”

“As silly as this sounds, I do think that Dana White is on my Mount Rushmore of startup founders.”

“They went forty million dollars in the hole before turning this thing around, turning it into a ten billion dollar company.”

“World champion outside the UFC, which isn't really world champion. You're not the number one guy in the world. It is world champion, but it's not, you're not the number one guy in the world.”

“No, no salary. You only get paid if you fight, you know. And it's usually, you can sign a four fight deal, you can sign a six fight deal, an eight fight deal, and It'll be, say, you know, two years or six fights. Whatever happens sooner.”

“That happened with the UFC. I got four fights in, and they said, hey, We're doing a new deal. You deserve more.”

“I don't know if I'm going to make zero dollars for the next three months, or I can make a million dollars in the next month. I don't know. You know, I might fight next week. I might fight a year from now, you know.”

“NBA all the way to MLB are somewhere between 51 and 45%. UFC is 13 to 14%.”

“Bellator was the most well-funded competitor to UFC. It was funded by Viacom. They put hundreds of millions of dollars into this thing. It failed. And they just sold it for, you know less than what they put, what they invested into it. They sold it for a hundr…”

“Basically these two brands have over 95% market share in their market. This is total monopoly. More than Google has in the search market.”

“All the fighters are independent contractors. They don't even pay them salaries. There's no guaranteed salaries. Independent contractors who make about 15 to 17% of the overall revenue goes to the fighters. Way less than every other sport. No teams. No, no, no…”

“I think it won't impact the business at all. I think it's actually going to make the business better because the people who are behind them are going to be harder behind them, and I think, but I do think it will scare institutional money and that's basically m…”

“The NFL, which is the biggest, most profitable sports league in the United States, biggest, most profitable league, has twenty nine million followers. The UFC has thirty nine million followers because they are better at social media and they're better at story…”

“It could. It could. That is, I would put that as the number one risk to shift the economics of the business.”

“That's a, that's publicly known. They were actually, you know, paying for that airtime. So the original Ultimate Fighter and then all, all that was broadcast on Spike back in the day. Yeah, they were not only funding their own production, but they were paying …”

“Con Connor was, you know, I'd say Just under a hundred, right? When it's all said and done.”