TKO exec recently met with Vince McMahon, says he is very ‘positive’ about WWE’s current direction

A day after TKO announced their quarterly earnings, one of the company’s higher-ups said in a new interview that he has been in contact with Vince McMahon and that the former chairman is positive about WWE’s direction.

TKO chief operating officer Mark Shapiro talked with CNBC’s Alex Sherman and was asked about McMahon who is still under federal investigation for the hush money scandal in addition to the primary subject of the Janel Grant lawsuit.

Shapiro revealed he had breakfast with McMahon recently “just to check in” following the recent Netflix docuseries drop. He said he hadn’t heard from McMahon at all and “wanted to see where he was” with everything.

“He’s got some litigation that he’s working through, and frankly, he wants the privacy and the time to work through it which is great, because in the meantime we’re going to keep building TKO and WWE,” he said, later adding, “He couldn’t have been more cooperative. He couldn’t have been nicer. I mean, he was a total pro at breakfast, if you will.”

He reaffirmed that McMahon has nothing to do with TKO, makes no decisions, and is not asked for opinions even though he remains a shareholder. He said McMahon “couldn’t have been more positive” about the direction of WWE, but specifically said he wasn’t asked for his opinion.

As recently as March of this year, Shapiro went on record to say McMahon was not returning to TKO.

McMahon shut down PBR being part of TKO launch

Shapiro also revealed that McMahon didn’t want the Professional Bull Riding group in TKO upon the creation of the company. He wanted to focus on just WWE and UFC to start and “didn’t want to confuse the messaging.” He said McMahon wasn’t against PBR ever joining TKO (which it did two weeks ago an inter-company acquisition), but just not at the onset.

Shapiro said it was a compromise and that when it came to TKO, McMahon had to do some things Ari Emanuel, Dana White and Shapiro wanted and vice versa.

Ads on Netflix

Shapiro also said when it comes to Netflix advertising on WWE Raw, dynamic/personalized advertising (focused on users based on data vs. general broad ads) will be in place for year two but not year one. He said the manual advertising is already “filled up.” He also said Netflix could be in the mix for UFC TV rights when those come up next year.