The Wall Street Journal Vince McMahon Thread.

[NikoBaltimore]

16 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Damn, I forgot to mention Lars Sullivan when discussing Vince McMahon's All Scumbags Wrestling (note: name is still begin workshopped).

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fh9utbg57phwc1.jpeg

 

 

I wonder if anybody here would dare call the number for giggles.

On 4/25/2024 at 2:44 AM, Curt McGirt said:

We did the same thing with the Punk drama thread didn't we? 

Wanna make a Naked Mideon joke but I got nothing. I did just watch Dennis Knight in IWA Japan, however. He was not nude.

*crickets*

EDIT: I hate to say this and I may be cursing it all, but that was when the Punk thread ran out of steam. Let us hope this case doesn't do the same.

Yeah, that turned into one helluva music discussion that I was digging.  But the Punk thing at the time did run out of steam so with the thread still open might as well talk about something awesome.  With this one because it's a long-as-fuck legal process I'm exercising a bit of patience for once.  I just hope it doesn't go to arbitration because that will be awful for Ms. Grant.

[Matt D]

I get the Flair vulnerability. I get the Jericho vulnerability especially. I get the fact that he's a billionaire son and not our posting pal, but it seems like people likening WWE (what being the corporation who just had Vince with them to cut red tape and celebrate mergers and what not and that voted him back on the board after knowing and that had the corporate culture that allowed this stuff and still has a bunch of the same execs and staff, etc.) to Weinstein are kind of sort of on the right side of history, no?

[JLowe]

1 hour ago, Matt D said:

I get the Flair vulnerability. I get the Jericho vulnerability especially. I get the fact that he's a billionaire son and not our posting pal, but it seems like people likening WWE (what being the corporation who just had Vince with them to cut red tape and celebrate mergers and what not and that voted him back on the board after knowing and that had the corporate culture that allowed this stuff and still has a bunch of the same execs and staff, etc.) to Weinstein are kind of sort of on the right side of history, no?

Allowed him to make billions of dollars in profit, no less.

[dragonzombie]

Vince is selling off his remaining shares

https://www.sportico.com/personalities/executives/2024/vince-mcmahon-selling-last-tko-shares-1234777031/

[Eivion]

1 hour ago, Matt D said:

I get the Flair vulnerability. I get the Jericho vulnerability especially. I get the fact that he's a billionaire son and not our posting pal, but it seems like people likening WWE (what being the corporation who just had Vince with them to cut red tape and celebrate mergers and what not and that voted him back on the board after knowing and that had the corporate culture that allowed this stuff and still has a bunch of the same execs and staff, etc.) to Weinstein are kind of sort of on the right side of history, no?

Not really as long as he keeps hiring wrestlers, production, creative, and office people from WWE. It just make him look like a hypocrite.

[odessasteps]

That's the kind of thing where you had best hope there are no skeletons in either TK or Shad's closet. I don't know I'd want to pick a media fight with Endeavor and/or Ari. 

[Elsalvajeloco]

31 minutes ago, Eivion said:

Not really as long as he keeps hiring wrestlers, production, creative, and office people from WWE. It just make him look like a hypocrite.

I dunno if that makes him a hypocrite considering none of those people he hired were involved directly in what Vince is currently going through as far as we know. WWE doesn't exclusively own those wrestlers. They're "independent contractors". They also don't own staff members or personnel. Tony is in the NFL. A good portion of the people who work for the Jags have worked with other NFL franchises. In sports and entertainment, it's always been about how "our" culture is better than theirs even if it ain't true. Shit, Levesque trots out that fairly often.

 

11 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

That's the kind of thing where you had best hope there are no skeletons in either TK or Shad's closet. I don't know I'd want to pick a media fight with Endeavor and/or Ari. 

They're not going to have a media fight in the middle of a major lawsuit. That would be idiotic and disastrous. They been at this too long to do that.

[Elsalvajeloco]

1 hour ago, dragonzombie said:

Vince is selling off his remaining shares

https://www.sportico.com/personalities/executives/2

1 hour ago, dragonzombie said:

Vince is selling off his remaining shares

https://www.sportico.com/personalities/executives/2024/vince-mcmahon-selling-last-tko-shares-1234777031/

024/vince-mcmahon-selling-last-tko-shares-1234777031/

Apparently, Twitter is abuzz about the Nick Khan part of this article.

It could be a big nothing, but it won't stop the full on Brian Windhorst meme inspired "...Now why is that?" feeling going around that will cause rampant speculation.

[Eivion]

19 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

I dunno if that makes him a hypocrite considering none of those people he hired were involved directly in what Vince is currently going through as far as we know. WWE doesn't exclusively own those wrestlers. They're "independent contractors". They also don't own staff members or personnel. Tony is in the NFL. A good portion of the people who work for the Jags have worked with other NFL franchises. In sports and entertainment, it's always been about how "our" culture is better than theirs even if it ain't true. Shit, Levesque trots out that fairly often.

They might not have been, but you can't really call the entire company Weinstein without damning those people as well. That is what makes his comment hypocritical. I'm sure it wasn't his intent, but he clearly didn't think about it before he threw it out there.

[Elsalvajeloco]

1 minute ago, Eivion said:

They might not have been, but you can't really call the entire company Weinstein without damning those people as well. That is what makes his comment hypocritical. I'm sure it wasn't his intent, but he clearly didn't think about it before he threw it out there.

It doesn't really damn them. If someone calls the Boston Celtics a racist franchise, that ain't a shot at Bill Russell or Cornbread Maxwell or Rajon Rondo. That's a shot at the city of Boston, their fans, and how the organization was/is ran.

The WWE has or past tense, had a toxic culture. That part is indisputable. Whether that all ties into Vince and some mavericks, who knows? However, Vince is synonymous with WWE like Al Davis is with the Raiders. One and the same even if he is gone. Nobody thinks Vince McMahon.....and random office person #4572.

[Technico Support]

Does Hayes still work there in a high position ?  Prichard?  Any number of white guys of a certain age who came up in this business in the 70s and 80s?  Then racism and sexism is alive and well there.  Let’s not bullshit ourselves.

[Elsalvajeloco]

27 minutes ago, Technico Support said:

Does Hayes still work there in a high position ?  Prichard?  Any number of white guys of a certain age who came up in this business in the 70s and 80s?  Then racism and sexism is alive and well there.  Let’s not bullshit ourselves.

Bruce is like Kissinger or Rumsfeld. He is there until his heart just gives out at the age of 115.

[zendragon]

Bruce is Shmee to Vince's Captain Hook when they set sail aboard The Sexy Bitch!

[odessasteps]

Bruce is also Grima Wormtongue. 

[Octopus]

Guys, it’s a New HHH Era though. Steph told us. All allegations and lawsuits should be dropped. 

[JLowe]

1 hour ago, Eivion said:

They might not have been, but you can't really call the entire company Weinstein without damning those people as well. That is what makes his comment hypocritical. I'm sure it wasn't his intent, but he clearly didn't think about it before he threw it out there.

It was an open secret for decades that Weinstein was not just being a “casting couch” sex pest but was sexually assaulting women, and also sexually trafficking some women in the same way Vince has been accused of.

Vince’s casting couch/sexual assault and harassment dates back decades and he also helped cover up a lot of sexual harassment and assault from upper level employees for decades. It’s actually a very apt comparison.

[Greggulator]

3 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

Apparently, Twitter is abuzz about the Nick Khan part of this article.

It could be a big nothing, but it won't stop the full on Brian Windhorst meme inspired "...Now why is that?" feeling going around that will cause rampant speculation.

Yeah, it could be a lot of different things. I don’t know if it is a sign of an axe about to drop because “WWE president sells stock before he gets his name tied up in an indictment connected to Vince McMahon” is an absolutely awful look for Endeavor and etc. It opens up the company to all kinds of possible litigation and liability. I would think people as sharp and media savvy as the Endeavor people would be on top of that from the get go. Endeavor’s bread and butter is its talent agency and one thing agents know how to do is to bury the bodies, so to speak.  
 

NK can’t just go on Robinhood and sell his shares of TKO. Since he’s a company insider, he has to disclose his stock shares to the federal government through the SEC (which is how it ended up in this article.) To so that means you have to file all kinds of paperwork and it’s a lengthy process. And that kind of stuff always triggers some kind of review from a company’s general counsel or the like who are going to want to know why someone wants to sell their shares, and they would absolutely asking about what Nick had heard about his name connected to Vince’s lawsuit, and they likely would already know the answer because the WWE is itself a legal entity in the lawsuit, which means TKO and Endeavor are, too.(Also, without looking to see what specific SEC filing it is, it also reads like Vince and NK now have permission to sell their shares, but it almost always happens.)

The other scenarios: 

One thing that people worry about when an executive sells shares is that the executive knows something about the company’s future business and is getting out before the stock tanks. Being able to prove that level of trade on inside information is really difficult, but it always raises a lot of questions. (Or itself will trigger prices falling since investors will see that news and think something is up and will sell.) 

Or an executive could be in the process of landing a bigger job somewhere else. Or the exec could be feeling the fire if there was a shakeup on the board or he/she ended up with a new boss and they were not hitting it off or something like that. So why not sell now and get paid and then take off a few months later.

But my main hunch: NK is selling almost 250,000 shares at almost $100 a share. The guy is turning his shares into about $25 million in cold hard cash. 

[username]

People are taking the wrong view on Tony's comments: he made these as a high ranking executive of the Jacksonville Jaguars on an NFL program and NFL teams... let's say have a real poor history when it comes to dealing with sex pests. The vulnerability isn't that AEW gets caught with its pants down, it's that a Jags player/coach does something.

[zendragon]

41 minutes ago, Greggulator said:

Yeah, it could be a lot of different things. I don’t know if it is a sign of an axe about to drop because “WWE president sells stock before he gets his name tied up in an indictment connected to Vince McMahon” is an absolutely awful look for Endeavor and etc. It opens up the company to all kinds of possible litigation and liability. I would think people as sharp and media savvy as the Endeavor people would be on top of that from the get go. Endeavor’s bread and butter is its talent agency and one thing agents know how to do is to bury the bodies, so to speak.  
 

NK can’t just go on Robinhood and sell his shares of TKO. Since he’s a company insider, he has to disclose his stock shares to the federal government through the SEC (which is how it ended up in this article.) To so that means you have to file all kinds of paperwork and it’s a lengthy process. And that kind of stuff always triggers some kind of review from a company’s general counsel or the like who are going to want to know why someone wants to sell their shares, and they would absolutely asking about what Nick had heard about his name connected to Vince’s lawsuit, and they likely would already know the answer because the WWE is itself a legal entity in the lawsuit, which means TKO and Endeavor are, too.(Also, without looking to see what specific SEC filing it is, it also reads like Vince and NK now have permission to sell their shares, but it almost always happens.)

The other scenarios: 

One thing that people worry about when an executive sells shares is that the executive knows something about the company’s future business and is getting out before the stock tanks. Being able to prove that level of trade on inside information is really difficult, but it always raises a lot of questions. (Or itself will trigger prices falling since investors will see that news and think something is up and will sell.) 

Or an executive could be in the process of landing a bigger job somewhere else. Or the exec could be feeling the fire if there was a shakeup on the board or he/she ended up with a new boss and they were not hitting it off or something like that. So why not sell now and get paid and then take off a few months later.

But my main hunch: NK is selling almost 250,000 shares at almost $100 a share. The guy is turning his shares into about $25 million in cold hard cash. 

Is it possible he was brought in solely to facilitate a sale and now that its complete is cashing out and heading to greener pastures?

[JLowe]

10 minutes ago, username said:

People are taking the wrong view on Tony's comments: he made these as a high ranking executive of the Jacksonville Jaguars on an NFL program and NFL teams... let's say have a real poor history when it comes to dealing with sex pests. The vulnerability isn't that AEW gets caught with its pants down, it's that a Jags player/coach does something.

They fired Urban Meyer

[The Natural]

Meltzer:

- The big story was the Tony Khan appearance on the NFL Network promoting AEW, where he called WWE a really evil juggernaut and the Harvey Weinstein of pro wrestling. Right now I wish he wouldn't go in that direction. I wish WWE wouldn't either. But neither is going to happen. I know Khan believes this engagement is good, but I don't think that's the case. He could get away with calling Vince "Weinstein" but calling the full company that is an issue that will cause a ton of blowback. The hosts on the show weren't expecting it and were not comfortable with it. It's too bad they didn't use some of the talent in some form as NFL teams have used WWE talent in the draft public selections.

[dragonzombie]

Brandon Thurston's update on Nick Khan's stocks

https://twitter.com/BrandonThurston/status/1784247544266059854

[Zakk_Sabbath]

8 hours ago, dragonzombie said:

Brandon Thurston's update on Nick Khan's stocks

https://twitter.com/BrandonThurston/status/1784247544266059854

Lol at "His stocks have been listed since September" as though September is ancient history, and not less than a year ago, but ok.

I would bet on the truth on this being somewhere between the obvious Corporate Officer 1 "uh oh" reasons, and what Zen and Gregg said about cashing out while it's hot, and his tenure ending because the sale's done.

Khan's deal ends in August 2025, so it's certainly possible the thought process was simply based on all the things that could happen to the stock price between now and then: Netflix could become unhappy with the cost of RAW and exercise their parachute clause, the market itself could go insane (it's an election year, after all- not to mention they've got a candidate on the inside!) - anything is possible.

Definitely fuck him still, though

Edited April 28 by Zakk_Sabbath

[Infinit]

On 4/26/2024 at 9:18 PM, JLowe said:

It was an open secret for decades that Weinstein was not just being a “casting couch” sex pest but was sexually assaulting women, and also sexually trafficking some women in the same way Vince has been accused of.

Vince’s casting couch/sexual assault and harassment dates back decades and he also helped cover up a lot of sexual harassment and assault from upper level employees for decades. It’s actually a very apt comparison.

Vince also turned a blind eye to Mel Phillips and Co. And helped cover up the murder Jimmy Snuka committed.

[piranesi]

On 4/26/2024 at 8:38 AM, Zakk_Sabbath said:

I thought HD-DVD was going to take off because it had Xbox support and Blu-ray players were prohibitively expensive (until PS3 came out) -  we've all been there

I stayed out of the stock market after 2008 because “the big meltdown is coming.”  Then I finally gave up and got back in, in early Feb 2020…