Vince McMahon sells back $311 million in TKO stock to Endeavor
Stacy Perman April 8, 2024
Wrestling legend Vince McMahon has cashed out $311 million worth of his stock in TKO Group Holdings, the public company formed last April after Endeavor acquired World Wrestling Entertainment and merged it with the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
It was the third time in five months that
McMahon the WWE founder
has sold off large chunks of his TKO holdings, totaling approximately $1.5 billion.
According to SEC documents
filings
filed on Monday, beginning April 4, McMahon entered into a pair of stock sale agreements.
In the first, Endeavor
, the parent company of TKO
agreed to purchase 1.64 million shares of McMahon’s Class A common stock, worth $146.2 million
,
at $89.01 a share.
Three days later, TKO agreed to purchase 1.85 million of McMahon’s shares in the company, also at $89.01 per share, for $165 million.
The company plans to retire the shares of the common stock and fund the TKO share purchase using some $150 million from a revolving credit facility, according to the filings.
Last November, McMahon sold $700 million worth of his TKO shares, followed by
another an additional
In January, McMahon
, WWE’s founder,
resigned as executive chairman of the board of TKO
Group
one day after a former
former
WWE employee, Janel Grant, sued the company, McMahon and former head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, alleging sexual assault, trafficking and emotional abuse.
McMahon denied the allegations.
The sell-off signals that McMahon is unwinding his financial ties to TKO, amid his ongoing legal woes.
In 2022, an investigation by WWEs board found that McMahon made at least $14.6 million in payments between 2006 and 2022 for alleged misconduct, according to regulatory filings.
The settlements were made to women, including WWE employees, who alleged that McMahon initiated unwanted sexual contact and coerced women into performing sexual acts on him; in one case a woman claimed that McMahon sent her unsolicited nude photos of himself, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
McMahons alleged misconduct is the subject of ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice. Last year, WWE disclosed in a regulatory filing that federal law enforcement agents served McMahon with a grand jury subpoena and a search warrant in July.
I am confident that the governments investigation will be resolved without any findings of wrongdoing, McMahon said last year in a statement to The Times.
The
Endeavor
Group
, the entertainment giant headed by Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel,
still
retains controlling ownership of TKO.
Last week Endeavor announced a deal to go private by its largest investor, Silver Lake, after a three-year run as a public company. The company said it was being acquired at an equity value of $13 billion.
