Ari Emanuel on the Future of Entertainment: Hollywood, AI, Creator Economy, YouTube vs Netflix

The session opens by framing Ari Emanuel as one of Hollywood's biggest power brokers and the "newest kingpin of combat sports," and notes the long-standing belief that the Entourage character Ari Gold was named after him. The first substantive question asks for a walk through the last four or five years of Endeavor's evolution: leaving, building a business, then scaling it.

The answer begins with the company's founding on March 29th, a birthday, "almost 31 years ago." The founding idea is credited to George Gilder, whose argument is summarized as a prediction of infinite distribution in which content becomes very valuable and takes many forms. From there the plan was to grow into every sector of the business.

The sequence described is: a merger with William Morris that made the industry "a two-horse race" (called one of the best deals made); the purchase of IMG with Silver Lake after Teddy Forstmann's death, which brought the company into sports; and then the realization that the global infrastructure built for production and representation could support owning assets rather than only representing them. The first such purchase named is Professional Bull Riders (transcribed as "Professional Bull Riley"), said to have been making about $3 million a year in profit and since turned into "a really nice business" that is still growing.

The UFC purchase is presented as a bet that experience negotiating daily against networks and studios would pay off. Both IMG and UFC were said to look overpriced at the time; the claim is that IMG became "the cheapest sports acquisition ever" and that a broadcast deal brought the UFC's valuation multiple down from "30 or 20 times to kind of under 10."

We then thought we could take all those assets, my big mistake here, a conglomerate.