Ari Emanuel - The Anti-AI Bet

“Is the right way to think about this almost like the anti-AI bet or the AI-proof bet? AI is going to be big. Netherlands just said 4-day work weeks. Drive times now are 11 to 4 across America. Hotel bookings Thursdays way up. And there's a lot of more data points to this. So the weekend starts Thursday now and we're 2025, maybe 2027, they start Wednesday. So we're social animals. What are you going to do? You're going to watch a lot of content.”— Ari Emanuel

Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets · Culture & Society

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Digital abundance creates physical scarcity

“In a world where the marginal cost of content creation is getting close to zero, where does the value accrue? If we have 4 great bidders and maybe with 6 Wi-Fi, maybe everybody with their social platforms is a distributor through social. Let's just say we're right. The marginal cost becomes zero and you are Dwayne Johnson and you have, I don't know how many people he has on social. A lot. Are you not a distributor? For the first time, taste matters a lot.”— Ari Emanuel

Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets · Creativity & Innovation

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Zero marginal cost makes taste scarce

“This is where Egon was a great teacher. When we had IMG, I moved to the UK and I took over IMG. And nobody was telling me I had to move to the UK. I just realized, wait a second, I just spent $2.4 billion. You better fucking get your ass to the UK and understand that business. And none of those people wanted to stay because they didn't want us to win. IMG didn't want us to win. They wanted somebody else to win. He says, 'I think that Chernin, they were going to pay, I think it was $1.9 billion.”— Ari Emanuel

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Overpay to remove deal uncertainty

“COVID happens, world shuts down. Dana goes, 'We're putting the fights on.' I said, 'I got your back.' He goes, 'Get me an island.' I call my partners in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi, and Khaldoon, who owns Man City. And I said, 'We need an island and we need planes and we need testing.' Everything. Because there's not going to be an audience. We bring fighters in from Europe, we bring fighters in from the United States, we test, everybody's isolated for 2 weeks.”— Ari Emanuel

Operations & Execution · Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management

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Speed when others froze captured market

“So we bought this company on location. Jerry Cardinal first owned it with the NFL, and they were doing the premium hospitality for the Super Bowl. And we thought, wow, that's incredible because people are asking for premiums now and rich people are asking for more and more because they can get everything. So they want even specialer. And that there was tiered market, not in a bad way. Some people, I want to pay $100 and some people I'm going to pay $300.”— Ari Emanuel

Economics & Markets · Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior

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Status goods have no discovered ceiling

“What makes a great live event? There has to be a specific audience. So in art, there's a very specific audience. There's a culture around art. It's global. There's really good conversation about it. Cars, antique cars, another one of my businesses, very specific. Sports, UFC, bull riding, WWE, very specific. Taste, food festivals. So I'm in the areas that I know there's great cultural stickiness. Affinity. It's global. So one of the things that we know, why did we do Frieze?”— Ari Emanuel

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution

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Cultural affinity enables global scaling

“When we bought UFC on the current trajectory, it was 20 times. If I made the proper domestic deal, I could take the leverage down. And I thought, I just did the math. Here's how much they need it. Because of here's how much programming. Because remember at the time Fox owned these RSNs, the regional players, and they had just the spokes off the library. Cut to, we buy it. People think we're crazy. And then the world blows up. Rupert decides to sell to Disney. Those two people are not bidding.”— Ari Emanuel

Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Bet on supply chain consolidating unexpectedly

“I had a client who's a writer-director. He's got to do an outline for a project. He gave, I think, Grok or Perplexity an incredible prompt based on a piece of IP, the outline for the project. Pretty close. He said it was unbelievable. Now he's going to have to do work on it, but that would've taken months. Is your take on AI that it basically supercharges the very best people disproportionately? Yes. AI is the greatest average, which it is.”— Ari Emanuel

Technology & Engineering · Business & Entrepreneurship · Creativity & Innovation

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AI amplifies top talent advantage

“One of the things that Robbie Lance ever taught me, you know why people call me back, Robbie? Because I represent Milos Forman, who did Amadeus, and I represent Peter Shaffer. I represent Al Pacino. They'll call you back. So having a great client meant you had access. So you had to have taste and you had to get great clients. And once you did that and they continued to grow, you became more and more powerful. Relentless follow-up and communication, over-communication. I hate it.”— Ari Emanuel

Business & Entrepreneurship · Leadership & Management

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Great clients create access flywheel

“Jeff Bezos said to me, it was so good. It really did help me. He said, 'You have to, at your age, Ari, now, know when you're on the field and know when you're off the field. The problem in the past, it was helpful to a point, but you can't get really successful. I was always on the field, always.' Defined as what? 'Meaning I was always playing chess in any conversation, thinking of the angle, working the situation. And sometimes it should just be chill the fuck out.' I never realized that.”— Ari Emanuel

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Always calculating exhausts strategic capacity

“When I signed the UFC, it was on Spike. We had a whole division inside the company looking at ratings. And all of a sudden they came and showed me, here's this thing on Spike and here's the numbers. And then I realized, wow, this thing's ratings are starting to move. Eventually after doing a couple things, the organization signed with me. They were making $15 million a year from Spike. The first deal I made at Spike, I increased it to 75, something like that.”— Ari Emanuel

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets

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Data revealed 5x revenue arbitrage opportunity

“Wrestling. I was fast. I was quick. Takedowns. When you're in high school and you have to go from my size now to 132 pounds, easier when you're younger, and you have to starve yourself plus work out and go to school. And the mental fortitude of that just keeps on going in your life that you can handle that emotional pain. And that's also in business. I can handle a lot of emotional pain.”— Ari Emanuel

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Physical suffering builds business endurance

“When you think about sports, you have the beast of all beasts, NFL. NBA, global, baseball, hockey, English Premier League, Spanish League, French. They're all owned by federations and there's very few independent and very few people that know how to run them. When we were buying the UFC, Egon would say, well, the people that can pay the most are the broadcast. Well, they would ruin the sport. There's so many things that happen to run one of these things. You have to make really hard decisions.”— Ari Emanuel

Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making

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Sports leagues need operators not capital

“If I boil down your whole life, is it make shit happen over and over and over and over relentlessly? Relentlessly not taking no. When you have two older brothers that are really good at their job and a mother and a father that just push you, and there's many good things to dyslexia and any parent that has a dyslexic child, I will tell you it does get better if you hang in there. So I don't get embarrassed easily. Somebody saying no, who cares? I just keep on trying to open more doors.”— Ari Emanuel

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Embarrassment immunity breeds persistence

“What was the most extreme emotional pain you ever felt in business? This situation. The contract thing with the UFC. Because I put all the chips in the middle, $4.2 billion in the middle. Clients were investing, my biggest investors investing. I had done the calculation. I didn't see that Rupert was going to sell and we're coming to the end, contract's 4 months away. Because of that, my thyroid went on the fritz. There was so much pressure. I'd never had that physical axle.”— Ari Emanuel

Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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Extreme stress caused thyroid failure

“In the past, you had the FinCEN rule where the owners of distribution couldn't own the whole thing. Now with cable gone and broadcast not gone, but in decline, these guys are doing it and they're doing it within each other's boundaries. Sony's one of the suppliers. There's some. Before, there was a lot. Even before when I was in the business, you had tax incentives for production. There's a company called Whit Thomas and all these independents used to supply.”— Ari Emanuel

Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Vertical integration killed independent suppliers