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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
Ari Emanuel, the newest kingpin of combat sports, one of Hollywood's biggest power brokers.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:09)
It's everywhere from the boardroom to even politics. There was another figure named Ari Gold that many people thought was named after you.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:17)
The straight-talking deal maker has a reputation for getting what he wants.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:21)
I'm back and you're fired.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:23)
Emanuel has worked tirelessly to transform endeavor into a multi-billion dollar behemoth.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:29)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Ari Emanuel.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:40)
Thank you.

**Ari Emanuel** (0:42)
When's the last time we saw each other at that dinner? Exactly. Yeah.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:46)
Did you see that panel?

**Ari Emanuel** (0:47)
Yeah.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:50)
You know Alex?

**Ari Emanuel** (0:51)
Yeah, I know him. I think he's great. I love this book.

**David Friedberg** (0:56)
Yeah, the book is incredible.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:57)
So what's your take on what we just saw?

**Ari Emanuel** (1:00)
There's a lot to cover there on my tape.

**David Friedberg** (1:03)
So let's start at the beginning. Ari, you have had an incredible arc. You've built an incredible business. And recently, you've had the opportunity to merge a bunch of assets. And just the thing has just taken a life of its own. Can you maybe walk us through the last four or five years of the evolution of Endeavor and your process of first leaving, building a business, then scaling it up, and just all of that action, the TikTok of it all?

**Ari Emanuel** (1:32)
So March 29th, when I first came here, I was making 15 cents a mile when I moved to LA. Went to work at CIA, et cetera, then started the company March 29th on my birthday 30, almost 31 years ago. Had this idea about where content was going from George Gilder, who wrote this book like that for television and said there's going to be infinite distribution and then content's going to be really, really valuable and there's going to be many forms of content. And so we kind of went out and started growing the business and trying to get into every sector of the business. Made a two horse race with when we, quote unquote, merged with William Morris.
I think one of my best deals, actually, that merger. And then when Teddy Forsman passed away, bought IMG with Silver Lake, who had come into the company, and then we were in sports. And then we realized it was all in the representation business, and then realized that because of what we built, the infrastructure we built and the global scale we had, and the production and representation, we could start owning some of the assets, as opposed to just representing them, and kind of put them through our filters, and kind of create more value. And so the first thing we did is we bought this company called Professional Bull Rally, that was, I think, making $3 million a year in profit. We turned it into a really nice business. It's still growing. And then because of that, and we had negotiated, we negotiated every day against networks and studios. The UFC came up and we said, okay, let's take a big swing. The funny thing is, when we bought IMG, they say we overpaid. It was the cheapest sports acquisition ever happened. And definitely when we bought UFC, they were like at 4.3.

**David Friedberg** (3:35)
At the time, it looked incredibly expensive.

**Ari Emanuel** (3:37)
And all we had to do is kind of make a broadcast deal that then took the multiple down from 20 times to kind of under 10 We then thought we could take all those assets, my big mistake here, a conglomerate. The marketplace just didn't understand it.

**David Friedberg** (3:53)
Yeah.

**Ari Emanuel** (3:54)
And so we tried to take it public right before COVID. Failed. I didn't realize how hard it was to go back out. Finally got it back public. We kind of rolled all of the UFC into Endeavor. And we still weren't getting any value. We then, Vince said yes, and we merged the assets. A pure play was in sports. Sports entertainment was a better conversation with the street.

**David Friedberg** (4:19)
I mean, when you started, we had the traditional cable networks, then we had cable. It was a very hierarchical and easy to understand hierarchy. And then you have the streamers. And now, this afternoon, we'll have Neil Mohan from YouTube. Then you have characters like the Mr. Beast of the world who can go direct. So it's very chaotic.

**Ari Emanuel** (4:39)
No, it's actually just back to George Gilder.

**David Friedberg** (4:41)
It's back to George Gilder.