You know this is the longest I’ve ever been on one call, right?” says Ari Emanuel, only about an hour into our conversation. Over the past 40 years, the agent turned mogul has built an empire with much shorter calls — hundreds a day, sometimes 30 seconds long, dialed for him by an assistant on multiple lines so he never has to hear a ring or wait on hold. Agents call this “rolling the calls,” which is where he got the title of his new memoir.
In Roll the Calls, ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer (who also ghostwrote Andre Agassi’s Open and Prince Harry’s Spare), Emanuel, now 65, tells the story of how a dyslexic kid from Chicago ascended from the CAA mailroom to a job where he might negotiate an actor’s next movie role or the WWE’s next TV contract, or pitch President Trump on a film tax credit or Elon Musk on a UFC card with fighting robots. In 1995, he co-founded the agency Endeavor, which merged with William Morris, went public, and was taken private again last year. He’s still the executive chairman of WME Group and an agent for Martin Scorsese, Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Larry David, among others. He’s also the executive chair and CEO of TKO Group Holdings, the company that owns UFC and WWE. And he’s the co-founder, along with business partner Mark Shapiro, of the live-events company Mari, which owns tennis tournaments, art fairs, a car auction, and, pending approval, 70 theaters, including seven on Broadway.
Outside the business, Emanuel is still best known as the model for Ari Gold, the agent played by Jeremy Piven on Entourage. TV fans coming to Roll the Calls will find all the profanity and score-settling they’re hoping for — it may be the angriest business memoir ever written. One chapter includes a list of people who are dead to him. We spoke twice over Zoom, then he called me a third time to discuss something he’d just watched on TV.
Your book is called Roll the Calls. How many calls have you rolled today, and what was the first one?
Probably a hundred. I can’t remember which was first, but the first two were to Khaldoon in Abu Dhabi and Mark Wahlberg. I started at 5:12 a.m.
You slept in.
I did, actually. I was nervous about this interview.
With everything you’re running, you still have a roster of clients —
A big roster of clients.
How much of your day is still spent being an agent?
A lot of it. I was on the phone yesterday with Matthew Vaughn for a show he’s doing. I was on today with Pete Berg about his current movie and the next one and Mark Wahlberg about his next movie. I was texting with Dwayne Johnson about a project he wants to do. Jonah Hill about some stuff this morning. I’m dealing with some video-game rights and whether we can make movies from them. I do it all day long.
What’s the smallest thing you’re doing for somebody right now?
I’m trying to get Pat McAfee a role in a Michael Mann movie.
Is that Heat 2? Which part would he play?
Yeah, Heat 2. I’m not going to tell you what part. But he’s incredible in Pete Berg’s movie The Mosquito Bowl, and he’s really good in the Taylor Sheridan show with Stallone, Tulsa King, so I’m trying to get him into this thing.
Who’s the most recent client you’ve signed?
Noah Hawley. I’ve been calling him since the beginning of Fargo — it was a very high bar, following the Coen brothers, and what he did with the arcs, the seasons, the casting was incredible. Then he had Alien: Earth coming up.
He was at CAA. What finally got him to move?
There was a situation on Alien about his relationship with Disney. He needed certain things to happen, and he didn’t have the relationship he needed at the highest end of that place. Bob Iger was incredible, the whole team at FX was incredible, but he was doing one of their most expensive shows, with one of their biggest assets, and CAA isn’t a place that works in teams. I think I did use “Are you happy?” on that conversation.
You wrote Roll the Calls with J. R. Moehringer, whose specialty seems to be making his subjects admit they hate the thing they’re famous for. Andre Agassi hated tennis. Prince Harry hated being a prince. Did he ever try to pry something like that out of you?
I’m still interested in what I’m doing. I’m an agent, and I own businesses. The puzzle of how those things intersect intrigues me. It makes me happy. I’m no longer as pissed off as I once was. It’s not like I don’t have rage or I’m not competitive. But having transferred that rage into something else has made it more enjoyable.
I met J.R. the day Trump got elected the first time in 2016. We had a drink. I was nervous in the beginning. I didn’t know if I was going to remember all this shit. But he was so easy. We just started talking, once a month at first, and then we picked up the pace. The book was supposed to end when Endeavor went public in 2019, but we didn’t go public, so we just kept going. The book is written in my jolting manner. He wrote it how I speak, which was so nice.
The first word of the book is rage and then things escalate from there. Most self-help books say anger and grudges are self-defeating — there’s that line everybody uses that holding a grudge is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. But you’ve been drinking poison every day for 40 years, and you’re a billionaire and maybe the healthiest person alive. Can a grudge work as fuel?
I don’t believe that line. When I started, I had a plan A and no plan B. If plan A didn’t work, I was fucked. And a lot of people who were more powerful than us had their own agendas and tried to push us into them. That’s a third rail for me — somebody thinking they can manipulate me, which I hear as They think I’m dumb and I don’t see what’s going on. Whatever that thing was from the dyslexia, it got hit every time somebody thought I was stupid and I knew I wasn’t. So it’s okay to get back at people. Nobody should be able to push you around just because they’re stronger, as long as you’re doing the right thing.
I’m not a guy who sits and dwells. Shit happens, I fuck stuff up, I’ve got to move on and fix it. But somebody fucks me? Okay, you’re in the book. Not this book — the book in my head. I know you fucked me, and one day, I don’t know when, I’m definitely going to try and get you. And I think that’s healthy.
In your actual book, there’s a list of people who are dead to you forever — you say they’re in hell, guarded by Cerberus. And then there are a few you’ve made peace with. You write that in 1988, when you left CAA for a start-up called InterTalent, Mike Ovitz told you, “You’re finished in this town,” and you picked up a chair. Now you two have patched things up, but you never say how. How does somebody get off your shit list?
Mike and I talk. He’s on Mount Rushmore. And I’ve made up with Irving Azoff. I acted like a jerk there. Stupid. But certain people — no. It’s not worth my time.
Reading between the lines of the book, I see two paths to your forgiveness. Ovitz gets forgiven once he’s out of the business. And Adam Venit, who was your boss in the CAA mailroom and made you deliver scripts to Sam Elliott’s house in Malibu almost every night, gets forgiven the moment he joins you at Endeavor and brings Adam Sandler with him. So become harmless or become useful.
Wait a second. I really wasn’t mad at Adam Venit. I was frustrated with Adam. I was like, Why the hell do I have to go all the way to the depths of Malibu? And then it was business: This is a really incredible agent, he wants to come over, he has great clients, he can help grow our business. That situation was a pimple on the ass of an ant.
Mike, in the early days, he was the king. And he and Ron Meyer went after us. Then they got out of the business and we just never interfaced. Then we’d grown, and he had his run-in with CAA when he started his management company. What’s that phrase? “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And so we became friends.
So “be useful” it is.
I think that’s true with a lot of people.
There’s a story in the book from around 2003 about a young client — “handsome, solid actor, not great, but solid” — who’s never been in anything, so the best you can get him is $250,000 for a movie.
The movie’s a big hit.
So for the sequel, you go back to the studio and ask for 80 times as much, and you get it. And then he’s on a conference call with you and some other agents, giving what you call a TED Talk about how the business works: “Months ago this kid didn’t know jack shit. He was a struggling actor in a tight white T-shirt. Now he’s Warren Fucking Buffett.” You write that you got him the $20 million for a movie full of fight scenes and that on this call he’s punching your third rail.
He’s philosophizing about how the business operates. And I said, “Just because you make $20 million doesn’t mean you know what the movie business is.” Yeah, that was stupid. He’d been in the business probably as long as I’d been in the business. I’m still learning the business, and he’s dictating exactly how it works. Maybe it was a bad day. I just couldn’t do it. I knew the minute I said it: My days were numbered.
He fired you a week later. How has his career gone since then?
He’s made a lot of money. I don’t think he’s had a diversified career, but in the avenue he’s played in, he’s made money. I don’t know if he’s happy.
Everyone’s going to guess who that is.
It is what it is. I’m not going to talk about who the person is.
A bunch of times in this book, you use the same tactic: You call somebody every single day until they finally give up and say “yes” to whatever you’re asking for. You did it to get your first job at CAA, to get both of your wives to date you, to get Patrick Whitesell to join you at Endeavor, to sign Oprah and Larry David. In the stories in the book, this strategy has a 100 percent rate of success. Can you tell me about a time when it went wrong?
I’ve pounded on a lot of clients I never signed. I’ve done a lot of giftings. I sent Oprah a mirror: “Look at yourself — you’re Oprah Winfrey.” That one worked. A lot of them just didn’t happen. In the book, I’m flattering myself that it’s 100 percent. But this goes to wanting what you want and being okay with having the door slammed in your face. I’m doing it right now — I’m trying to get a situation over the line, raising money. You just have to keep turning over rocks and not be afraid to knock on the door and knock on the door and knock on the door until they answer it and give you a definitive answer. I’m okay asking for the job. I’m okay asking for the money. I don’t know if a lot of people are comfortable with that. I’m really comfortable. I don’t always get it, though.
What are you raising money for now?
I’ve got to raise another couple hundred million dollars for the ATG deal. We’re in process. A lot of people are afraid to say “Here’s what I want.” In some way, they’re ashamed of it. I’ve never had that issue. My brother Rahm, when he worked for Clinton — that dude could raise some money. I think that’s maybe inside the bloodline.
But the specific version — the daily call, first name on the sheet every morning. You ground Oprah down —
I flew to meet her at the airport.
And Larry David —
I called him every morning when he was on vacation.
Has anyone ever taken out a restraining order?
It’s how you handle those calls. If you’re self-deprecating, if you’re funny, if you say “I’m sorry” because you know it’s annoying, you get away with it. Otherwise, you’re a stalker and you should go to jail. So I combine those things. And I’m okay if the answer is “no.” I don’t like it, but I’m okay with it. I just want my day in court. A lot of people don’t like to give that “yes” or “no.”
So “maybe” is the dangerous word to say to you.
Maybe. I haven’t thought about it that way.
Why didn’t you try it on Taylor Swift? In 2014, you bought IMG for more than $2 billion. Swift had hired IMG’s marketing department to handle just her sponsorship and endorsement deals. In the book, she comes to your office with her mother and asks for nothing to change. You say “no,” because the whole point of the merger was that every client would use every part of the company, and she fires WME. Now she’s the biggest star in the world.
She was a pretty big star then too. I might be wrong, but we represented her at William Morris in the touring space, and I think we were talking about acting. Then we buy IMG, and the guy running marketing was doing the marketing for her Asian tour — wrapping planes and all this stuff. She comes in and she says, “I only want this part of your business.” And I was promoting that we had to represent people across the board. You can’t pick and choose how you want to be represented by us. Even though she was a big star and I would have loved to have had her, if I’m going to say what I say, I have to live by it — as hard as that one was. And it was hard. Lovely woman, parents were great. Our house from my first marriage is very close to hers in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, so I’d seen her there. But people wouldn’t trust my word in the company, and that was more important than anything. That was difficult.
A hundred phone calls wouldn’t have bridged that gap?
No. They had their mind made up. As disappointed as I was because of who she was, my word, my reputation, my leadership — that wasn’t something I could live with. Do you think somebody else would have done it differently?
Probably, yes. She just wanted to keep buying one thing à la carte. I bet another agency would’ve made an exception. Why wouldn’t you?
Well, then I would be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite in my life. If you’ve just taken over the company, and you’re leading, and you want people to line up behind you — it’s going to happen constantly with other clients that are really big, and you’re going to have to make those choices. I’d rather just nip it in the bud. As uncomfortable as that was, especially for my former assistant, who was very upset with me, it was the right choice, and I don’t regret it. And I’m a huge fan.
Here’s the funny thing. Looking back at it now, the one thing I don’t think I did great in that meeting was convince her about the WME side — not that I could have — that I would put a new team together that could handle it and do things she hadn’t thought about that might be beneficial to her. To give us a shot. I fucked that up. She was already sold on the IMG side; I should have sold her on the William Morris side. I was bad at it. I didn’t make the proper arguments. I wasn’t a good enough salesman. I screwed it up. Hence, she fired us.
If you were looking for an example to show the company you wouldn’t bend the rules for anyone, no matter how big, you picked a good one.
That wasn’t the intention. It would have been a lot better to represent her.
One of the themes of the book is intelligence and how bad we are at measuring it. You have dyslexia, you almost didn’t graduate from high school, and you spent years worried people thought you were stupid. And then you grew up to do a job that’s all about judging other people’s capabilities: what they can do, what they’re worth, how much to bet on them. Did being underestimated teach you something about seeing potential in other people?
I don’t know if it’s intelligence. Listen, in my house, growing up, reading and good grades were the most important thing. That was it. My therapist once said to me, “Back in the ’50s, if you were a really good businessman, you were considered intelligent.” That line hit me hard. I knew I was smart. It’s just, as Sally Shaywitz, the dyslexia researcher, says, my brain functioned in a different way.
And there are good things about it. Alex Karp said he’d have given up his arm to be able to read the way other people do, because when you read, those words become you — you absorb everybody else’s playbook. But when you’re dyslexic, you don’t, so you become a free thinker. You have great EQ because you have to. And you learn to work horizontally. From the beginning of your life, you have multiple people helping you read and get through school, just to function, so you learn how to build a team. Then you take that to the business level. That’s how I’ve operated.
You’ve now worked with geniuses in every category — Martin Scorsese, Larry David, Elon Musk, Oprah. Whose brain impressed you most?
Here’s what I’d say. Not to generalize, but a lot of them have the same quality. We all have this voice in our head, and it’s a fight, that voice. I’m successful now — I don’t have to get out of bed or do the things I do with my health. I do it because I want to keep reinforcing the muscle that says I control my destiny, not the voice in my head. For most people, the voice wins. For really successful people, the voice loses. “I’m tired, but I’m getting out of bed.” “Fuck, I don’t want to get on that plane to take that meeting in Abu Dhabi.” You just have to do it. Sometimes the voice says, “Don’t make the extra call. Don’t get up. Don’t get on the plane.” It’s easy to give in. Every person you just mentioned has that voice and just goes forward.
When was the last time the voice told you something and you said “no”?
This fucking morning. “Don’t go out and work out.” Or two weeks ago, flying to Frieze Seoul, 37 hours there and back, after a trip to the East Coast and Europe that was another 42. I’ve got the greatest life in how I travel, but it’s not fun — sleeping two hours, working. That’s the job.
One of the revelations in this book is that Endeavor was founded, in your words, on a lie. In 1995, you were at ICM with Tom Strickler and David Greenblatt, planning to quit and start your own agency. You needed Rick Rosen, ICM’s TV packaging agent, and he kept refusing — he had a wife and kids and wanted proof the new agency could make money. So your business manager drew up a balance sheet and then you “heavily embroidered” it.
I had to have him. I’m so happy he’s still in my life.
Rosen is still at WME. When did he find out about the balance sheet?
I don’t know if he knows now. Can I say something? I think this is a true story: When Disney was buying Capital Cities, their analysis said ESPN was worth very little. You can go to almost all these deals — the analysis says one thing and the reality turns out to be something else. So was the balance sheet a lie? It was a guesstimate.
In the book, you say you felt guilty every time you ran into Rosen’s wife and kids around town.
Yeah. But it didn’t matter because once we got going, it just started happening. We were making deals, money was coming in. Some clients didn’t work the first year — Shane Black didn’t get a movie made until the second — but other clients did work, and we signed new ones. So the numbers were better than the balance sheet. These things are guesstimates. In all businesses, that’s the case.
Reality outperformed the forgery.
The forgery? Wow. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. My mother’s not going to like that word.
Another admission in the book is that during the William Morris merger, in 2009, you were calling Nikki Finke every morning and dictating news items to destabilize the company you were merging with. Do you have a Nikki Finke now?
No. There was nobody like her. There’s so much information now, but back then she was the go-to — everybody read her multiple times a day. I remember Patrick coming in and saying, “They’re going to know it’s you.” And I’m like, “no.” Maybe I was trying to believe it myself, because it was pretty obvious it was me. But they didn’t. She was very good at her job. I remember her calling me when she was thinking about selling, and I said, “Economically, what does that do for you? Do you ever have to work again?” She said “no.” I said, “Then do it.”
Then she sold her website and regretted it.
Because she didn’t realize how much enjoyment she got out of it and how important it was to her.
Do you relate to that? You took Endeavor private last year and handed the agency to other people.
The agency I founded with Rick Rosen and David Greenblatt and Tom Strickler is now being run by other people, and I’m really happy about that. There’s no legacy for an executive, and I’m okay with that. I have other things now that I’m trying to figure out at TKO and at Mari. They call me every two weeks, and we have our meetings: “Here’s what I would do, and you guys go figure it out.” That’s the only way to move on. If you’re holding on because you think you’re going to have a legacy, you’re deluded.
You’re harder on Patrick Whitesell than on anyone in this book. He was your partner for 24 years. He came to Endeavor in 2001, you built the whole thing together, and when you took the company private last year, he left with a hundred million dollars and you two stopped speaking. The climax of the book is the fight over who would run the private company. As you write it, the original plan had you in charge with Patrick’s blessing, and then he walked into your office and announced that he’d be running Endeavor and you’d be running TKO. So you called the executive committee to a meeting where you said, “I have failed. I’ve had failures. I own them. But please weigh them against my successes. And then weigh them against what Patrick’s done, which is nothing. NOTHING.” Egon Durban — the Silver Lake co-CEO who has bankrolled you since 2012 — tells you it was “one of the most brutal things I’ve ever witnessed.”
It is the truth. How about this: It’s my truth. Let me be very clear. He was an incredible agent. He was an incredible partner. Incredible. But the business changed from just being an agency. He came in five years after I started the company, and he hadn’t been running the agency — I had with Mark Shapiro. I had bigger clients than him, I was running the agency, then I did everything I did with UFC and TKO. And he was going to run the company instead of me? No. Not a chance. You got the wrong Jew.
A lot of names get named in this book, but there are three I was surprised not to see: Bryan Lourd, Richard Lovett, and Kevin Huvane — the guys who have run CAA since Ovitz left in 1995. CAA has been your rival your whole career, and you’ve said plenty about Lourd in the past.
They’re not worth talking about. Listen, Mike Ovitz and Ron Meyer created that company. Lourd and Lovett and Huvane have now run it longer than Mike and Ronnie did, and what’s so remarkable about what they’ve done? They’ve represented some actors and whatever. The only remarkable thing is that one day people will figure out where their hands were on Harvey Weinstein. They sold the company, took money out of the business, didn’t leave it to the employees, didn’t give up control — I don’t even understand it. At least Patrick and I went for it. What’s the point of talking about them? They’re good agents, I guess. They’re not even on the Mount Rushmore of agents. Patrick and myself and Mark Shapiro — we’ve won.
One of your biggest targets in this book is Jeffrey Katzenberg. You say you’ve hated him since he stiffed you on a packaging fee and then tried to buy your Lakers season tickets out from under you. But you can’t seem to stop running into him: He shows up to your office unannounced, you go to the Hotel Bel-Air for dinner and he’s at the next table —
I moved tables.
Now that you’ve spent 417 pages settling that score, what happens the next time you see him?
Who gives a shit? I don’t give two shits. Not one iota do I care.
Your live-events company, Mari, is a bet on the future of work. You and Shapiro launched it last fall with more than $2 billion; you’ve bought tennis tournaments, the Frieze art fairs, a collector-car auction. The thesis is that AI is going to shrink the workweek and people will fill the time with concerts and boxing and live theater.
It’s already happening. Isn’t Bernie Sanders trying to pass a bill for a 36-hour week or something like that? A couple of countries in Europe have instituted four-day workweeks. And look at the data — we’ve had long conversations with Booking.com and all these guys. Hotel reservations. Restaurant reservations. Flights are Thursday to Sunday.
But if the week gets shorter because AI is doing more of our work, how are we going to afford tickets to all these live events? Universal basic income?
You should talk to my brother. He’s in politics. You guys can figure this one out. That’s not my job.
Your business does kind of hinge on the answer.
If you talk to Elon and you talk to Dario Amodei at Anthropic, they say the economic impact of AI is going to be substantially positive. We’ll have GDP growth of a big number. How that trickles down and what the government does — you should talk to some policy wonks. I can give you my brother’s mobile. Listen, I think there’s going to be more money in the system and less time working. And how we work is different now. Where we work is different. Do you ever turn this thing off [holds up his phone], or can you always be reached?
I can pretty much always be reached. I could work from a UFC fight if I had to.
I do work that way. I just think the system’s going to get more efficient, we’re going to be more productive, and we’re going to have more free time. I don’t have to get more detailed than that. And we’re seeing it now — at our events, at the UFC, at boxing. If you talk to Michael Rapino at Live Nation, people want to be out. Movie-theater tickets, if you talk to Adam Aron at AMC — all up. This generation wants to go out.
You’ve got your hands in a lot of pots now, and I wonder whether the newer ventures ever create conflicts of interest for you as an agent. For example, WME represents Cody Rhodes, one of WWE’s biggest stars, in film and TV. TKO owns WWE, which decides when he’s allowed to leave the ring to make a movie. What if he gets a great role but he’d have to miss WrestleMania to shoot it? Which side are you on?
I have a phrase in the back of my head, and I don’t know who told me: no conflict, no interest. Nothing is black and white. There are constantly gray zones in your life. What you have to do is overcommunicate, get everybody in a room, and figure out how to make it all work. It’s the same thing with Dwayne Johnson. He’s on the board of TKO. He does stuff for WME. He’s an incredible producer, actor, and he wrestles. There are going to be conflicts.
Who is the biggest movie star in Hollywood right now?
Probably Leo DiCaprio, still. But it’s so changed. Mark Wahlberg hasn’t had a failure on streaming — he’s top of the game. You put Dwayne Johnson in a big action movie, it’s a big hit. You put Adam Sandler in a comedy — see you later, it’s a hit. Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon: In the right stuff, they’re all major stars. Tom Cruise is a huge movie star. Huge. Still! Crazy.
Is Hollywood still capable of making a Leo? Is the star-making machine still working?
I say this to everybody. There are the social-media stars, or whatever they are, and there’s going to be more content than we’ve ever had. But as much as AI is there, you’re going to need humans to make content, and if they’re really talented, they’ll make great content, and AI will probably help them. So there are going to be new stars. They might come from social media and transition. Timothée Chalamet came up, and he’s who he is because he’s really talented. Directors will find really talented actors.
Is it a sign of a problem that so many of our young movie stars right now are the kids of other movie stars? Just for starters: Maya Hawke, Jack Quaid, Dakota Johnson, John David Washington, Margaret Qualley, Zoë Kravitz, Lily-Rose Depp —
That’s a fucking big generalization, dude. Who is Timothée Chalamet’s father?
He’s not one of them. Cooper Hoffman, Maude Apatow, Odessa A’zion, Kaia Gerber, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Lewis Pullman, Homer Gere —
How many are there? Just give me the fucking number. Is it ten? Is it 15?
More than that. I’m not saying they aren’t talented or deserving, because they all are. And I know there’s always been nepotism in Hollywood. I’m wondering whether something’s broken in the machinery that used to find the talented nobody from nowhere, the next Tom Cruise, the next Denzel Washington, the next Adam Sandler.
Sure, every business will not exist — only nepo babies will be there. Shut the fuck up. The funny thing is sometimes talented people have talented kids. Sometimes doctors have kids who go into medicine. Sometimes finance guys have kids who go into finance.
Sure. I’m just —
You know what’s best for this conversation? You and I should come back in four years and have another one on this subject.
Why? You think we’re going to have another Tom Cruise by then?
I think you’re completely smoking crack.
You’ve said AI companies should be sued for training on other people’s work without permission. When Sora existed for that brief minute, TKO sent OpenAI a letter telling it to stop using UFC and WWE footage. What would a fair deal between the AI companies and the creative industries actually look like?
The first thing that’s got to happen is you’ve got to have a conversation. All artists — starting with the actors, then music, then writers, then directors — have to figure out what their image is worth and negotiate that. You have to start with the guilds. And then you also have to bring the studios in because they own a lot of those images. I don’t have those answers, but that’s where the conversation has to start.
If an AI company wants to train on Larry David’s work — and I’ve seen plenty of AI-generated Seinfeld clips —
So have I.
How much should he get paid? And how often — every time somebody watches one?
Depending on what the usage is, then the economics come into play. If you’re using it for two seconds compared to two minutes, there’s a difference. I don’t want to give you a generic answer, but these are not simple questions. Let’s just start with the premise: He definitely should get paid. The problem is the Chinese just completely steal. All the video-AI stuff is Chinese now. They have it all dialed in.
Can AI be good for the movie stars you represent? Would you tell Mark Wahlberg or Dwayne Johnson to license digital versions of themselves so they could be in movies without ever going to a set?
Throughout time, people have talked about the demise of the movie business. The movie business is never dying. There are going to be more movies. The television business is never dying. There’s going to be more distribution — now, you have microdramas, you have podcasts. It just keeps shape-shifting. Is the cable business going away? It used to be a 95 percent share; it’ll go down. That audience will do multiple things, and if you have more time, you’ll consume more. And the economics are going to get cheaper on the production side because you’re going to have AI with great filmmakers, and therefore you’ll be able to do more.
So in theory, for somebody like Dwayne Johnson, this could be great. He doesn’t even have to show up.
And for the nepo babies, it’s going to be incredible. Incredible! When their parents die, they’re going to get royalties on their parents. It’s going to be all about the nepo babies.
You recently wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in favor of the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, which 12 state attorneys general have sued to block. Paramount is also one of your biggest customers. It pays TKO an average of a billion dollars a year for the UFC, plus a separate boxing deal. What does the merger going through, or getting blocked, mean for your own businesses?
Listen, what I want is four customers. I want Netflix. I’d love to have a great relationship with Amazon, a great relationship with Disney, and I want a fourth bidder at scale. Cable’s not going away, broadcast isn’t going away; they’re just diminished. So then it’s all about streaming. If you don’t have four bidders for the creative community, then the big guys, Amazon, Netflix, when they make you an offer, they say, “Okay, how much sponsorship do you get? We want a piece of it because we’re giving you the biggest platform.” If I don’t have a fourth bidder, I can’t do anything about that.
And the other thing: 68 countries looked at this deal — none of them doing a favor for the Trump administration — and the E.U., one of the toughest regulators, found no problems with it. The theater owners said “yes.” So if all those people are saying “yes,” and we’re all intelligent, this must be about something else. Okay, let’s say it’s about CNN. Great. Put an editorial board in there that’s half and half. They do it at The Wall Street Journal. Move the fuck on. It’s probably about certain AGs trying to run for governor. We’ve gone through six years of pain in this business between COVID and the strike. This year, we’re just starting to come back, and David Ellison is willing to make 30 movies — put it in the contract — 170 series, spend $30 billion more than anybody. I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.
In December you called Trump — while a New York Magazine reporter was interviewing him — to pitch a federal film and TV tax credit. Is it going to happen?
He’s called me. I sent him a long memo about it. I’m hoping. Film and television are some of the most important exports of the country, and everybody’s stealing production from us. That California hasn’t voted a real tax rebate to keep production here is insane. I’ve left word for Leader Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, and I talked to Adam Schiff. It seems to be moving down the right path. I also told him live events should be in it — music and the theater business because regional theater would help too. And that does inure to my benefit.
Under the version that’s been discussed, the federal credit could be stacked on top of state credits, and in some states taxpayers would end up covering close to half the budget of a movie made by Netflix, Apple, or Amazon. Why do they need the help?
I don’t know the structure of the deal yet. These things take many mutations. I can’t answer all these questions for you. I’m just a lowly guy trying to rub two nickels together, buddy.
Aren’t you the one pulling the strings on this whole thing?
I can get him on the phone if I need to, if it’s beneficial for business and for people that I know.
Near the end of the book, you call Trump the morning after the 2024 election and he says, “Come see me.” Then in June you put on a UFC fight on the South Lawn for his 80th birthday and watched it next to him. You write that he’s no longer a client and can’t make you money. So what are you getting out of the relationship?
Perfect example — the tax credit. I think it’s incredible for our industry, and I have the ability to pick up the phone to him and explain why and move things down the path. And listen — this whole thing that students won’t let people come to their campuses that they politically disagree with, that you can’t have friends on the opposite side of the aisle. If you just want to hear people in your echo chamber who only agree with you, I think that’s called a cult. Last time I checked, I’d like to live in a society as opposed to a cult. I talk to a lot of people who disagree with me, and the supermajority of the time I get something out of the conversation that changes some level of my opinion. There are ideas he has that I agree with and ideas I strongly disagree with. And if we’re not talking, what the fuck? I tell him when I disagree with him, and he laughs at me.
In the book, after Jamal Khashoggi is murdered in 2018 — on the orders, the CIA concluded, of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — you call the Saudis and tell them the $400 million their sovereign-wealth fund invested in Endeavor has blood on it. They tell you if you return it, you’ll never do business in the kingdom again. You return it anyway, and that’s the last the book says about Saudi Arabia. Since then, TKO has built a boxing league with Saudi money; WWE, which you bought in 2023, still runs premium events in Riyadh; and the UFC has fought there. What changed?
We’re in business with the Saudis. We’re in business with them on the WWE, on the UFC. We represent them on certain things; we sell them certain rights. I think MBS has done some incredible stuff — women’s rights, stopping the sponsorship of extremists. He’s trying to reform that country. I just didn’t want them to be in Endeavor financially.
So ownership is the difference?
That’s different from being in business with somebody. And as I’ve said, my brothers worked for two presidents, and when you’re the leader of a country, you have to make hard decisions. A president of the United States used drones to kill American citizens without a trial. I won’t say which one — I’ve said it in the past. I don’t think that’s cool. And I thought he was a great president. I’m not going to overlook the great things he’s done. I’m just not going to take his money to be on my cap table.
Here’s what I would say. At the time, given what happened, I just didn’t want them to be in Endeavor financially. Right now, at TKO, the current working relationship with our partners in Saudi Arabia is incredibly strong, constructive, and very collaborative.
Well, so the distinction —
Really, you’re going to keep on going after that? You can’t just say, “Thank you, let’s move on”? The boxing thing is inside TKO. Okay?
But the boxing league is co-owned with a Saudi company. By 2019, you didn’t want them on your cap table. I’m just trying to figure out where the line is.
Love you so much. I never want you to change. Yes, I think I’ve tried to clarify it to the best of my ability.
Is Rahm going to run for president in 2028?
Let me answer it this way. He worked for Clinton. He was chief of staff to Obama during the worst financial crisis in a long time and helped get us out of it. And there’s nobody putting out more policy papers, thinking about education, AI, instead of Trump derangement syndrome. Is there a better person who understands what it takes to make hard decisions? No. It’s not even close.
Is that how you’re going to pitch him to your network? The New York Times ran a story suggesting his secret weapon might be your friends — Joe Rogan, Pat McAfee, Stephen A. Smith. Are you going to work the phones for him?
You don’t have to worry about the Emanuel brothers doing everything they can to help each other. You do not ever have to have a sleepless night about that.
Your other brother, Zeke — the oncologist and bioethicist who helped write the Affordable Care Act — famously wrote an essay for The Atlantic called “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” He’s 69 now. You, on the other hand, are doing everything you can to live forever and feel good the whole time: the gut worms, the cold plunges, the fasts, the red light. Do you fight about it?
I don’t think that’s true anymore. And he didn’t say he wanted to die. He said when he turns 75, he’s no longer getting a flu shot, a COVID shot, cholesterol medication — all the things you do if you want to continue. If he continues, he continues. He might have changed. But I’m not going to ask him until he turns 70.
When I try to hack myself, I call him and say, “Can this kill me?” He tells me if it can or can’t, and if it can’t kill me, I do it. Some of it he thinks is crazy. But sometimes he comes around. I’ve been doing red-light therapy for 14, 15 years, and when I told him about it, he said, “It’s bullshit.” Now he’s started quizzing me about it. I said, “Oh really, motherfucker? Really?” I got him some red lights, and he’s doing it.
Is there anything you wanted to try that he talked you out of?
A lot of people wanted me to get involved with peptides. I’ve read every piece of research I could. Except for the GLP-1’s, a lot of this peptide stuff hasn’t been FDA-approved or tested. I put Zeke on the phone, and we went through it. No.
How long do you want to live?
I don’t want to let the old man in. You know a person when they’ve let the old man in. I don’t want to be that person.
Switching gears a little: In the book, you write that once Entourage became a hit, “people take my calls ten times faster” — they “might not want to talk to Ari Emanuel, but they sure as shit want to talk to Ari Gold.” A lot of your friends and clients have gotten a similar boost from having cartoon versions of themselves: Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dwayne Johnson as the Rock, Vince McMahon as Mr. McMahon, Trump on The Apprentice. Are you telling clients, “You need to develop a self-caricature”?
At the time, the show definitely helped me. My brother was chief of staff — there was a lot of confluence at the same time. Jeremy Piven did an incredible job playing the early Ari Emanuel. But I think you’re trying to come up with a story line here. I don’t give a shit. Whatever the fuck you want to write. No, I’m definitely not telling clients that. I don’t even know what the fuck that is. [A dog wanders into his office.] Come here. Stop, Cowboy. I’m definitely not that person anymore. But there’s a whole new generation of people seeing Entourage now. I’m just watching it for the first time. I’m on season two, episode four.
Wait. What?
When it was on, it was on Sunday nights, and I would be so anxious about it I couldn’t watch it. I watched maybe one or two and then I just couldn’t do it. I’m now watching it and laughing my ass off. For me, it was definitely helpful in my business life. Is it me or is it the character? It didn’t matter. And on the other side, it helped me realize that I didn’t want to be that guy. So emotionally, I went to another level and tried to be a little deeper than that.
Why start watching now?
Because I thought people would start talking to me about the show and I have not seen the goddamn show. My wife said, “You haven’t seen this show? You have to see the show.” Every time she said it, I’d get this anxiety. And I said, Fuck it. I now have to do my work on this character. So I’m doing it.
You write that when the show was airing, the real-life entourage, Mark Wahlberg’s guys, started hanging around your office because they had also become famous through their fictional characters and you were the only one who could identify with what they were going through. The real Johnny Drama stayed at your house for months, and one of the others drove your kids to school.
Yeah, that was Big A.
Two of them got jobs in the Endeavor mailroom and, you write, smoked weed there. Were they good employees otherwise?
No, they weren’t. They didn’t last.
There’s a very big moment coming at the end of season two, and I’d love to ask you about it. Do you mind if I spoil it?
No. No fucking way. I do not want you to because I want to be able to do it myself. I have a few more episodes. I’ll try and get to it tonight and call you back.
[The next day, he calls.]
So you finished season two. Ari’s boss comes back to the agency after previously announcing his retirement and won’t give him a contract extension, so Ari organizes a walkout to start his own agency, another agent rats him out, and he gets fired. You’ve lived versions of that story. What did you think as you were watching it?
I’m completely anxiety-ridden. The fucking thing is it’s an incredible series. Larry David called me after one of those early episodes aired and said, “That guy’s got you down.” And yes, now I have a great deal of anxiety.
Here’s a coincidence from the book. Jeff Jacobs, your friend at CAA who ratted you out to Ovitz in 1988, went on to become Entourage creator Doug Ellin’s agent — and Jacobs was sitting in the room when you sold Entourage to HBO. Ellin has said he originally wrote Ari Gold as Jacobs and then he changed the character after he watched you take over that meeting.
Jacobs ratted me out to Lee Gabler, then Gabler told Ovitz. Do you understand now why I never wanted to watch this show on Sunday nights? I can only appreciate it now.
Are you going to finish it?
Oh yeah. I’m going to finish it.
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