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FORBES PROFILES AEW AND TONY KHAN

All Elite Wrestling and its President Tony Khan were profiled by Forbes today at this link.

The article noted that the company recently made an eight-figure investment into the video game side of the business and that investment has put the company in the red currently.  It also noted that TNT paid the company $43 million in 2020 for programming and that with the new programming coming in, Khan expects to be profitable this year as the WarnerMedia deal is paying the company $175 million over four years.  The current TV deal is believed to end in December 2023.

The article features a number of quotes from those in and around AEW, including Khan and his father Shahid Khan as well as covering Tony's love of professional wrestling growing up, including a visit to the original ECW as a reward for agreeing to take the entrance exam and enroll in the University of Illinois Laboratory High School.

When discussing Tony Khan's decision to launch AEW, requiring "tens of millions of dollars" to build the infrastructure and hire talent, Shahid Khan commented, "I absolutely didn’t think this was a good idea...But I told Tony, ‘Look, when I’m dead and gone, I’m going to be leaving you and your sister a lot of money. Why don’t you blow some of that while I’m alive?’”

On Tony Khan as a boss, Cody Rhodes commented, "It’s really special to see how commanding he is without being demanding. Wrestlers are all talk. He’s all walk.”

On AEW's relationship with TNT, Brett Weitz, general manager of TNT, TBS and truTV, commented, "It was very clear we put ourselves in the right hands.  For someone to have the audacity to say, ‘I'm going to go take on the biggest wrestling league in the world and see if I can be a challenger brand,’ it takes chutzpah. And he nailed it.”

A big portion of the piece focuses on Tony Khan taking on WWE.  “There’s no reason why there only needs to be one wrestling company,” Khan said “The wrestling business is hotter now than it's been in a long time.”

The piece is well worth reading at this link.

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