Vince McMahon Is Asking $9B for His Wrestling Empire

It's going viral. Ben Slickman is looking to get as much as $9 billion in a potential sale of WWE, the company he returned to this year. The asking price 37% above the company's current market value of around $6.5 billion. Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw broke that story and joins me now. So Lucas, is anyone buying? Any offers come in yet? According to people familiar with the conversation, has there been at least a couple of offers for the whole company? There was a story about a month ago that Saudi Arabia already had a deal to buy it. That was dismissed by Nick Khan, who's the CEO and a former agent at Creative Artists Agency.

But we know that there's interest from Middle Eastern investors. We know that there's interest from Endeavour, which already owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The big question in this is whether there's a lot of interest from what would be considered the strategic partners, the big media companies, Comcast, which already air some of the WWE, Fox, which air some of the WWE, Netflix, Disney and its peers. So far, it seems like the interest is more from the Saudis and Endeavour. But there are folks who say that they've gotten offers from people beyond the expected list. I'm looking at WWE's shares really jumping actually after the headlines from your reporting dropped. Why such a high valuation? What justifies it, I guess, to Vince McMahon's mind? Well, the company right now, its market cap is about six and a half.

Now, that's up a lot in part because people expect there to be a deal. But anytime you sell, you aim for a premium. So you add at least a billion or two on top of it. And that puts it in the eight to nine billion range. It doesn't seem that crazy. In terms of why the company is worth that much, it is able to deliver a very consistent audience. It delivers at least most of the time a live audience.

And there are already companies paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the rights to show this programming. If you were able to own it, you could then have a lot more control over it. You could amortize the cost over more time. And there's been sort of ongoing efforts or desires at least to take some of those characters from the regular shows and turn them into film, television, something like that. Any owner could do that as well.

Bloomberg