WrestleMania is this weekend. It is staggering to think of the event’s place in global popular culture now, 40 years after the first WrestleMania effectively crowned Vince McMahon the forever king of professional wrestling. McMahon is not the public figure he once was, but the ambitions and achievements pinned to his creation — stadium crowds, big PPV buyrates, cities bidding for the right to host, streaming networks, and even years of uncontested control over the industry — seem small now in the post-McMahon era, as his January 26, 2024 resignation from WWE parent company TKO has granted the company two things he never could: legitimacy from the mainstream press, and belief in the company’s culture changing for the better from its fanbase, which has swung surprisingly leftward in recent years.
Perhaps you are among this progressive fanbase, drawn to WrestleMania 41 by John Cena’s heel turn and quest for a 17th world championship or CM Punk swallowing his pride hard enough to finally main event, as he may have put it in 2022, night one of a two-night buy-one-get-one extravaganza. While I can’t pretend to know how compelling these stories actually are, I can’t blame you: that is the point of wrestling promotion, and WWE is currently playing that particular game at a level even they’ve rarely reached. Not only are they reaping the benefit of business deals (the TKO merger, the WWE Network’s folding and subsequent move to Peacock Raw’s move to Netflix, the long-running deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and talent acquisitions (Cody Rhodes, CM Punk) initiated while the company was under McMahon’s control, his moribund creative direction was also given a nominal overhaul by his son-in-law Paul Levesque. The burgeoning narrative that he, his wife Stephanie McMahon, and Vince hire Nick Khan were the saviors of the company, beginning with Vince McMahon’s initial July 20, 2022 retirement from WWE in the wake of the Wall Street Journal’s report of a company investigation into secret hush-money settlements, is already the subject of so much mythology that Levesque will be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame tonight.
WWE has grown so comfortable in this narrative in the 448 days since McMahon resigned that they’ve begun to once again show their true colors. If you do as the company would like you to do and set aside “controversy” (the sex trafficking lawsuit brought against Vince McMahon and the WWE by Janel Grant) and “politics” (former COO Linda McMahon’s role in the reelection of Donald Trump, her appointment to the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice pausing if not dropping the federal probe into the allegations against Vince), the number of things WWE has done to prepare the way for an end to the most unexpected boom period is staggering. Here’s a smattering:
- Trotting out Hulk Hogan on January 6 and signing his Real American Beer brand as a rare on-mat sponsor for Raw on Netflix.
- Paul Levesque’s choosing to not only attend his mother-in-law Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearing as an active executive of WWE, but sitting directly behind her so he was constantly in frame on television and in photographs.
- Having Cody Rhodes allude to Vince McMahon in the build to his match against Cena.
- Billing Chad Gable’s faux-luchador character as hailing from “The Gulf of America.”
- Launching a Stephanie McMahon podcast with UFC’s Dana White as the premiere guest.
- Continuing to work with Pat McAfee after he spread allegations about the sex life of an 18-year-old girl on his ESPN television show.
- Continuing to work with Logan Paul.
- Continuing to host events, including the 2026 Royal Rumble, in Saudi Arabia.
- Hiring Tony Hinchcliffe to host The Roast of WrestleMania.
- Having nominally liberal or left-leaning wrestlers like Sami Zayn and CM Punk claim that the company is not about politics in press appearances.
- Having its chief creative officer, Levesque, and one of its biggest stars, Roman Reigns, explicitly praise Donald Trump in press appearances.
- Having its President, Nick Khan, and one of its biggest stars, John Cena, praise Vince McMahon (in Cena’s case by name, in Khan’s by the familiar canard of WWE as an underdog company in the fight of its life) in press appearances.
There is no evidence that the company’s culture has changed at all — several of McMahon’s longtime associates remain employed by the company — let alone for the better, and the list of poison pills the company has asked its fans to swallow just in the leadup to one of their largest-ever shows would make its former scions sweat a little. The best thing you can say about anybody working in any capacity for the company in 2025 is that they’re doing an admirable job of saying nothing. I would say worse things about the employees and wrestlers who are actively proud of Trump or forgiving of McMahon, but the truth of the matter is that this is not about them, it is about you.
You have a moral obligation to not watch this shit.
This is, I understand, not a very popular argument. Those of you who haven’t closed your browser windows and dismissed me as a tribalist or a crank may be searching for a loophole: you’re supporting your favorite wrestler and not the company, you’re using a friend’s Netflix account and are not directly financially contributing to the company, you’re planning on pirating the show which deprives them of previous minutes clocked on an official streamer. I get this. I’ve been there. But here’s the thing: all of that, even shitposting through a pirated stream of the show, gives WWE the one thing it wants: your attention. Your participation will not enrich your favorite wrestler any more than their decent-for-an-exploited-non-union-contractor’s pay already does without further enriching WWE. The minutes you clock on your mom’s Netflix account watching Raw count the same to WWE and Netflix as they would were it your account. WWE loves social media attention. All of it — every second, every minute, every hour, and every dollar — actively benefits an outfit whose only real competitor in the realm of American sports and entertainment in terms of grift and exploitation is the Ultimate Fighting Championship, its sister company under the TKO umbrella.
The only argument against WWE’s systemic rot is that Vince and Linda McMahon, the locus of most attacks (including this one) against the company, are no longer involved with it. I will concede this point, except to say that when Vince McMahon resigned from the TKO board in 2024 and Linda McMahon resigned from WWE to run for Senate in 2009, neither of them gave up their stock in the company. According to a March 13 report by Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics, Vince McMahon still holds 8,021,405 shares of TKO stock, 4.06% of the company, while Linda McMahon holds 566,770 shares, or 0.29%. Vince McMahon put his remaining sales up for sale in April of last year, but according to the 9/30/24 SEC filing reviewed by Thurston, he has not actually sold his remaining stake in the company. Were he to do so today, with TKO stock valued at $149.22 shares, he’d make $1,196,954,054.10. The price of a TKO share on January 26, 2024, the day McMahon resigned? $86.54.
In other words, few individuals have profited more from the perception that Vince and Linda McMahon have nothing to do with WWE than Vince and Linda McMahon. They both live off the fat of their land, raking in millions of dollars from the machine they used to raze their industry while their children and their lackeys do the work, and that money, in turn, is used by Vince McMahon to stonewall his accuser, and by Linda McMahon to rend asunder the fabric of global society in propping up three Trump presidential campaigns before taking point in targeting civil rights in her role as the Secretary of Education.
If this sounds like conspiratorial thinking to you, look outside the wrestling bubble to the relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who utilized his absurd wealth, derived in part from the overvaluation of Tesla, to not only buy Trump the election, but establish for himself a fiefdom within the federal government from which he has done a remarkable amount of damage to the American public and the world at large in a very short amount of time.
His reward for this, in part, is a public that hates him, a team of Republican operatives that can’t stand him, and a company in utter chaos. This is what happens to figureheads when the worm turns, especially when they seek to make themselves the main characters of history. Vince McMahon was like that once, successfully monetizing his avarice and capriciousness in creating the Mr. McMahon character in 1997, and has stunningly managed to do so again merely by keeping quiet about the company in the wake of his resignation. The competitor in him must be burning in the relative stillness of his life as it stands right now, but that is immaterial: his greatest revenge was not forcing his way back into the company he’d retired from by triggering the WWE/UFC merger, but in convincing the world that he no longer stood to gain anything from its fortunes.
He does. So does his ex-wife. And with their heirs and beneficiaries stepping on rake after rake after rake this week en route to a payday of unthinkable proportion, you have no reason, kayfabe or otherwise, to aid them any further. Leave the mental gymnastics to the Good People who draw their paychecks from World Wrestling Entertainment. Your part in the company’s legacy of atrocity can end whenever you want it to, then, now, and forever.
