"I’m not trying to run other companies out of business"- AEW boss Tony Khan explains difference between him and Vince McMahon
AEW President Tony Khan has opened up on the difference between him and WWE Chairman Vince McMahon.
Khan took on a massive project by creating AEW and building it up as competition for WWE.
The 38-year-old has often been compared to the once-young Vince McMahon, who made WWE a juggernaut in the wrestling business. Khan, however, believes he is different from the WWE boss.
AEW has done quite well for itself in the two years it has been on TV. The product is great, the roster is stacked and most importantly, other companies have been given a chance to benefit.
Tony Khan, on the Le Batard and Friends – South Beach Sessions podcast, said this was the difference between himself and Vince McMahon.
The AEW President acknowledged that Vince McMahon's style of running the business worked for him, but he wants to do it differently.
“I’m trying to do it a very different way, and I’m not trying to run all the other wrestling companies out of business. I’m not trying to take out every regional wrestling company, and eat their lunch and put them out of business. I don’t think that makes sense. He took a very different approach, and it worked for him really well, but he was all over the place, and [took] tons of meetings and he made lots of deals. And I’ve tried to do that over the past three years," said Tony Khan. (h/t: WrestlingInc)
He cited Vince McMahon's work in the 80s and even mentioned Eric Bischoff for making WCW profitable.
“The amount of people I’ve gone out and convinced to join AEW, signed, built relationships with that I now have under the umbrella of this company and so I tried to take a lot of inspiration from what Vince did in the ’80s building the wrestling empire and expanding it because I think that’s probably the last time anybody expanded as much as we have, and I put an asterisk on that because WCW under Eric [Bischoff] did expand a lot from a money-losing business into a business grossing hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s still a little bit different than us where we weren’t a business at all and came from scratch," said Tony Khan.
Tony Khan and AEW recently unveiled their biggest acquisition to date in the form of CM Punk
When it was announced on AEW Dynamite a few weeks ago that the second episode of Rampage would take place in Chicago at the United Center, it was more or less confirmed that CM Punk was joining the promotion
AEW never officially advertised CM Punk for the show but the arena sold out purely on the hype of his return to pro wrestling. The Voice of the Voiceless did show up to a thunderous ovation and Tony Khan couldn't be happier.
CM Punk revealed in the post-Rampage media scrum that he and Tony Khan had been in conversation for over a year and a half and said he only joined the company after being convinced of Tony Khan's vision for AEW.
The signing of CM Punk was the most newsworthy event in AEW history, and he might not be the last with Daniel Bryan reportedly on his way.