Since Vince McMahon resigned from WWE earlier this year, after he was served with a lawsuit from Janel Grant, accusing McMahon of sex trafficking and abuse, both he and WWE have kept their distance from each other. Not only has WWE and TKO Group Holdings gone to great lengths to present McMahon as a figure of the past, but McMahon himself has appeared to move on, looking to start his own entertainment company.
AdvertisementDespite that, it appears not all ties between the two sides have been severed. During an interview with CNBC's Alex Sherman, TKO's President and COO Mark Shapiro revealed he had recently been in touch with the disgraced former WWE Chairman.
"I had breakfast with him a few weeks ago, just to check in," Shapiro said. "It had been a long time, I hadn't heard from him at all. Obviously, the series on Netflix that came out. I wanted to see kind of where he was. By the way, he couldn't have been more cooperative, he couldn't have been nicer. He was a total pro at breakfast, if you will, in a one on one get together. But he's out of the business entirely.
"He doesn't make decisions, he's not on the board, he doesn't opine, we don't consult him. He's got some litigation that he's working through, and frankly, he wants the privacy and time to work through it, which is great, because in the meantime, we're going to keep building TKO and WWE, and expanding the horizon, expanding the opportunities. And by the way, he's still a shareholder. Not the shareholder he once was, but he's still a shareholder."
AdvertisementShapiro also revealed McMahon seemed quite thrilled with WWE's direction.
"[He] couldn't have been more positive," Shapiro said. "But I wasn't asking for his opinion."