Vince McMahon: Wrestling's ringmaster

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25:16So let's trace him from a million to a billion. Vince looked at all the other major sports. American football has the Super Bowl. Baseball has the World Series. Why shouldn't wrestling have its own big annual marquee big event? And the idea, well, it actually came to him on a quick Caribbean getaway with his wife, Linda. Although Linda was quick to remind him, if you're thinking about work, it's not really a holiday. No, fast forward to March 31st, 1985. WrestleMania is live from Madison Square Garden. Whenever I hear Madison Square Garden, I put on a different voice. There's something about the boxing announcers.

25:53Madison Square Garden. But this wasn't just another wrestling show. Vince pulls out all the stops. So Liberace's there. He was this famously camp piano player singer. And he would come out and say, I'm just going to go and slip into something a bit more comfortable and all this kind of stuff. It was a huge high camp. But he could really play the piano. So you've got Liberace there. You've got a high-kicking line of showgirls in red. The guest referee, only the greatest of all time, Muhammad Ali. Oh, yeah. And Andy Warhol, he's there too. There's something quite Warholian about this in a way, isn't there?

26:25It really is. You can imagine Andy Warhol was taking notes. It was like a kind of social experiment with him just sitting there, Andy, just watching. Just watching with the dark glasses on. Now, it wasn't actually just the crowd plus Andy Warhol inside the garden watching everything kick off. So this entire extravaganza was beamed out to packed stadiums around the country, as in fans actually bought tickets to watch it on the big screen in person, which sounds weird now, admittedly, but back then it was the norm. So over a million people saw it via closed circuit TV, which made it the biggest pay-per-view event of its time.

27:00So in short, WrestleMania turned out to be a massive, game-changing success. And WrestleMania has become an annual tradition ever since. And along the way, it sparked a long-running connection between Vince McMahon and another great showman, Donald Trump. He actually got in on the action in 2007. He chose Bobby Lashley to fight for him in the Battle of the Billionaires against Vince's guy, Umaga. And in 2009, WWE played it up again. Trump bought Monday Night Raw, only to sell it back to Vince shortly after. So Vince had done it. His vision of sports entertainment had taken over. Wrestling was everywhere.

27:37They actually call it the golden era. And at the centre of it all was one star, Hulk Hogan. So there were cartoons, merchandise, endorsements. Hulk Hogan was selling everything from deodorant to cereal and WWF's revenues exploded. They jumped from$63 million in 1983 to$140 million by 1990. But as often happens when you have these massive snowballing successes, some wrestlers started asking, you know, where's all this money going? Who's really benefiting here? They were working brutal schedules. They were fighting on no matter what their injuries were they had no health insurance no pensions and that's when the wrestler jesse the body ventura made a move he tried to unionize the wrestlers and almost pulled it off but hulk hogan turned out to be a bit of a fifth column there he snitched vince called the wrestlers in one by one and told them you show up to the meeting you won't have a job in the morning so the dream of a union collapse looking back on the union attempt vince said the whole thing was a sham but interesting this crossover between wrestling and politics.

28:40We've heard about Donald Trump's involvement there, Jesse the Bodaventura. He, of course, became governor of Minnesota. There's something about the showmanship and the platform which lends itself to this. It's interesting, isn't it? The crossover between politics and I guess you could call them show business, but also muscly men. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California. That's true. Of course. Yeah. Vince, though, was about to face more than just unhappy wrestlers. the early 90s brought a wave of lawsuits and accusations. Now, it all started on February 26, 1992. The New York Post ran a shocking headline, WWF to face suit alleging child sex abuse.

29:20The report accused WWF employees, including the ring announcer Mel Phillips, of sexually abusing young ring boys. Now, these were teenagers who worked backstage at wrestling events. And over the next few weeks, Vince McMahon and one of the alleged victims, Tom Cole, both appeared on talk shows. Vince went on the Phil Donahue show to deny any knowledge of the abuse and the three accused employees were fired but one was later rehired and eventually after Cole was paid$55 ,000 and given his job back the lawsuit was dropped. But that wasn't the end of it decades later in 2024 a new civil lawsuit was filed by five other former ring boys against Vince and Linda McMahon the first time they were directly named in a suit it claimed they knew about the abuse at the time.

30:05It also alleged that Mel Phillips, who was one of the announcers, was rehired just six weeks after being fired on the condition that he stay away from kids, which according to the lawsuit, he did not. The lawsuit claims the five former ring boys were groomed and sexually abused. Vince and Linda's lawyers dismissed the claims. Vince has called them defamatory and utterly meritless, while Linda said the lawsuit contained exaggerations and misrepresentations. As of March 2025, the case has not been resolved. And then there was another allegation. In April 1992, former referee Rita Chatterton appeared on the Giraudo show, another American talk show, and accused Vince McMahon of raping her in 1986.

30:48When asked why she waited so long to speak out, she said, you people don't understand wrestling. Nobody talks. It's a completely hush-hush world. But Chatterton's claims were mostly ignored. The statute of limitations had passed and the media brushed it off as tabloid sensationalism. Vince even tried to sue the show that Rita appeared on. But in 2023, he paid her a multi-million dollar settlement. His lawyer asserts, Mr McMahon denies and has always denied raping Miss Chatterton and he settled the case solely to avoid the cost of litigation. But there are more lawsuits incoming. But if we go back to the time when those allegations were first made in November 1993, Vince McMahon was hit with another major indictment.

31:30The US Department of Justice accused him of supplying his wrestlers with illegal anabolic steroids, even employing a doctor to keep them stocked. Vince's lawyer claimed that Vince was provided with the steroids for his personal use as an amateur bodybuilder, but denied that he distributed them to wrestlers. If convicted, he was looking at 11 years behind bars. So the trial kicked off in July 1994 and it was everywhere in the press. It was fueled by the lingering war on drugs stigma of the 80s. Wrestlers took to the stand testifying that Vince had provided them with steroids. But then came a twist.

32:04The government star witness was none other than Hulk Hogan. Now, by this point, Hulk had left WWF for Hollywood and he was trying to distance himself from this whole steroid scandal. But instead of sinking Vince on the stand, Hulk defended him. And just like that, Vince was found not guilty. The case collapsed, yeah. Yeah. But all these lawsuits had taken a toll on Vince and on WWF. Ratings were starting to slip. And just as Vince was struggling, real competition stepped into the ring. Ted Turner. Ted Turner, the media mogul, founder of CNN and owner of World Championship Wrestling or WCW. Now, technically, it was Ted and not Vince who first put wrestling on national TV.

32:44But WCW never quite had the same ratings. And with a fresh rebrand, Turner was determined to launch something different. He called it WCW Nitro. And this went head to head with WWF Raw in a battle for ratings that would rage for the rest of the 90s. And on just its second episode, by the way, Nitro beat WWF. So the Monday Night Wars had just begun. But Ted, not just after the ratings, he wanted some of Vince's wrestlers and characters too. In a way, just like Vince had done in the 1980s, WCW started poaching some of the top stars from WWF. Vince, of course, didn't see the irony or the similarity to his own behaviour.

33:23In a recent documentary, he accused Ted of stealing. And when asked how that was different from his own tactics back in the 80s, Vince replied, no, Ted's philosophy was, I'm going to hurt my competitor. That wasn't mine. I want to compete. And that competition was brutal. Vince lost one of his biggest stars in what became known as the Montreal Screwjob. Everything's got to have a great title, right? I mean, you've got to hand it to them. Whoever writes the scripts and the storylines for WWF, the whole thing, you know, hats off to you. You should be working with Scorsese. Yeah, or headline writing for tabloid newspapers.

33:55So on November 9th, 1997, Bret the Hitman Hart was supposed to win the WWF Championship, but Vince had other plans. You see, Vince had told Hart they couldn't afford his 20-year contract anymore. So he knew that there was a chance that Hart would leave and take the WWF title with him to WCW. Just weeks earlier, WCW star had literally thrown a championship belt in the trash on live television. So Vince was not going to let that happen again. So behind Hart's back, Vince ordered the referee to ring the bell early. Hart lost and the wrestling world was shocked by the breaking of kayfabe and Hart left for the WCW.

34:34That's very interesting, isn't it? The script was there, that Hart would win, da da da. And then they basically went in and changed the ending of the highly scripted encounter. Now, that is not a sport, if you ask me. I don't think that's a sport. That's something else. That's basically a kind of live action soap opera, as you rightly say. So the competition is intense. The WWF versus WCW war raged on. Vince even mocked Turner on WWF TV, calling him Billionaire Ted, painting him as a ruthless tycoon crushing the little guy. In one skit, Vince's version of Turner boasted, society is run by a handful of billionaires.

35:14I am one of those billionaires. Do you realise how many lives I've destroyed? Apparently, Ted found it amusing, but the skits were eventually stopped at the TV network's request. Vince wouldn't be playing the underdog for very long. No, and indeed, he's on Good, Bad, Billionaire for a reason. He became one of those billionaires. So after losing this ratings battle for years, Vince had to have a change of tactics. So if wrestling was built on the good guys, those baby faces, and bad guys, the heels. Why not go all in on the bad guys? This became known as the Attitude Era, said to be wrestling's darkest chapter.

35:48The content got way more adult, more violent, more sexual, more offensive. And in fact, if you look at it, it's pretty shocking. There were attempted castrations. Vince's on-screen mistress, forced to crawl on all fours, bark like a dog, then strip, and the centre of it all, Vince himself. So it was really descending in a way into a kind of lurid pit of, I don't know. Scandal, I guess. Or fake scandal. It just feels like, I don't know, last days of Rome kind of thing. It's just becoming a parody of itself almost. And I will say, if you look up some of those old clips, if you even just look up the altercation with his so-called mistress, where she crawls around on all fours, the things he's shouting at her, I was shocked because I don't remember it being that bad when I was a kid.

36:29But, you know, by today's standards, it is outrageous what he shouts at her. Now, Mr. McMahon, the character, is said to have been created around the time of the Montreal Screwjob. So Vince wasn't just the host anymore. He also appeared in the ring as the bad boss, the villain. And his famous catchphrase was, you're fired. And this is all a few years before Trump made it big. But this wasn't just his story. His actual real family got pulled in. So his son Shane joined WWF at 28. His daughter Stephanie, she was just 23. And Vince had plans for her. Yeah, one storyline had Stephanie set to marry a wrestler until right before the I Do's, Triple H interrupts with video footage of him and a drugged Stephanie.

37:15He claimed he'd already married her and consummated the marriage several times. And the crowd chanted slut, slut, slut at her. edifying stuff. Pretty shocking. Now, Triple H, the actual wrestler who staged this date rape storyline, later record that Vince saw the crowd reaction and just rubbed his fingers together, as in, that's money. Vince himself added, I've got a big smile on my face. That means the audience are participating. So yes, an entire arena chanting his own daughter. And that was what went through his mind. But in a bizarre twist of life-impotating art, Stephanie actually married to Triple H in real life.

37:53They've grown close working together, but even then she had limits. Like when Vince suggested airing their real wedding as a pay-per-view event, she put her foot down. And there was one other storyline she refused to touch. Vince pitched an angle where her character would be impregnated by this Mr. McMahon character. Well, she shut that down. Her take on the Attitude Era, it was a bit weird, but it was a different time in our business. It feels like you've got to keep raising the ante be more scandalous be more extreme be more controversial and you sort of lose your bearings a little bit on what's acceptable i mean if you're the boss of a wrestling federation and your idea of a storyline is hey why don't i in character impregnate my own daughter as a narrative like that is that is taking it way too far it's also i mean what's interesting is the idea of having you know the woman wrestler on all fours orders barked at her and then stripping or have you cheered on by a bunch of guys.

38:52Some people have said that this could be the beginning of, could be the birth of the incel, maybe. I mean, it certainly speaks to a kind of misogyny and desire to see women humiliated. And actually there's a Netflix documentary and the editor of a publication called the Wrestling Observer Newsletter said that wrestling catered to guys who, in his words, fantasized over hot women but also hated them because they could never get them. So therefore seeing hot women demeaned was kind of cool. Yeah. By 1998, Vince's gamble on the Attitude Era, however, had paid off big time. That's right. So WWF's turn to the dark side, supercharged their ratings and revenue.

39:33The edgier content brought in older male fans, guys of cash to burn on special pay-per-view events. In 97, for instance, WrestleMania pulled in 237 ,000 paying viewers. A year later, it was 730 ,000. Merch sales exploded. There were magazines. WWF revenue jumped from 81 million in 1997 to 250 million by 1999. And as we've seen in many of our stories, when revenues are expanding really quick and you're the hottest ticket and things are going particularly well, that is often the opportune time to cash in by selling shares on the stock market, doing an IPO, an initial public offering. So in October of 1999, WWF stock market shares started at$17.

40:20They closed at 25, so up 50 % on the day. That made WWF's market value$1.7 billion. Vince and his family stake worth about$1.4 billion. Now, that same day, another of our billionaires also went public, Martha Stewart. On the same day, the very same day. The very same day. But her company raised more, so the press had a field day, calling it Martha's Smackdown. That's great. But Vince was still doing very well for himself. By 2000, he landed at number 260 on the Forbes Rich List, his net worth an estimated$1.1 billion.

41:07So now Vince McMahon is officially a billionaire, but let's take him beyond a billion. Vince's empire was about to hit some major bumps in the road. Ratings were dipping, pay-per-view sales falling, and then tragedy. It's May 1999. Owen Hart, brother of Brett the Hitman Hart, fell to his death live on air when a stunt harness unexpectedly failed. Now, the cameras didn't show it, but the commentators told viewers what had happened. And Vince, after Brett's body was taken away, he made the call to keep the show going. His reasoning was, if it had been me, I'd want the show to go on. Owen's wife, Martha Hart, actually took WWF to court for wrongful death.

41:47And in 2001, an$18 million settlement. In 2002, WWF officially became WWE and entered what was called the Ruthless Aggression Era. Violence, shock tactics, Vince doubled down on all of these things to win back slipping viewers. But WWE's biggest stars, people like Dwayne The Rock Johnson, started leaving for Hollywood. And by 2008, Vince made a total U-turn. WWE cleaned up its act. It went forward PG, family-friendly, and it worked. By 2019, Vince's fortune peaked at$3.2 billion. But it came out recently that that same year, he'd paid$7.5 million to a former WWE employee who'd accused him of assaulting her after she refused to have sex with him.

42:32Yeah. Bringing it slightly more up to date in June 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Vince McMahon had allegedly used$3 million of company funds to keep an affair with a WWE employee, Quiet, a WWE spokesperson, said at the time the relationship was consensual and added that the company was taking the allegations seriously. And it later turned out that between 2006 and 2022, Vince actually spent$14.6 million on payments to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct. The fallout from that Wall Street Journal article? Vince slept down as CEO and executive chairman of WWE the same month.

43:11But just seven months later, in January 2023, Vince was back, this time as a board member helping to sell the company. CNN reported that he did it by forcing out some board members and replacing them with his own allies. Then in September 2023, WWE merged with Ultimate Fighting Championship, UFC, in a massive$21 billion deal. Vince was named executive chairman of the new company, TKO. No, that's quite an important merger that because UFC was becoming massively, you know, it's kind of mixed martial arts, cage fighting, if you like. Very brutal. But with a new brand of champions and a new whole roster of people.

43:49And actually UFC began to take bites out of not just wrestling, but actually traditional boxing as well. So UFC was on the rise. So this merger makes business sense. And in 2024, TKO made headlines again, sealing a$5 billion deal with Netflix as the streamer ventured into live sports for the first time. But just three days later, Vince was out of TKO. Those initials are technical knockout. TKO is a wrestling term in itself, just FYI. So a lot's going on very quickly. He resigned after a lawsuit alleged he had sexually abused and trafficked a former employee, Janelle Grant. The claims in the lawsuit are horrific.

44:25Janelle Grant accused Vince of physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault, and forcing her to have relations with wrestlers and other employees. The lawsuit includes graphic text messages from Vince detailing his control over her sexual encounters and a voice message where he allegedly pressured her to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Janelle's lawyer said she filed the lawsuit not just for herself, but for others afraid to speak care. The suit says she's since been left with PTSD and suicidal ideation. Vincent's attorney has called it a smear campaign and dismissed the claims as falsehoods.

44:57As of March 2025, Janelle's sex trafficking case against Vince is still ongoing.

45:05So this is the point where we have to judge our billionaire on a number of categories, which we score between 0 and 10 on things like wealth, villainy, giving back, power, etc. So we start with wealth, which is not just how much money they've actually got, but what they've done with it. So where do we rate Vince McMahon? Well, Vince actually fell off the Forbes billionaire list in the 2000s. But this may have been due to lack of information about his actual fortune. So his wealth has been estimated during this time to kind of move between one to three and a half billion dollars. So pretty low entry level billionaire.

45:38So I'm going to give him a two out of 10 for wealth. I mean, obviously, these people are wildly rich. But in the galaxy of rich people that we look at. He's a very small star. He's not even a small star. I'd say he's a little orbiting asteroid. He's an asteroid. I would say one out of ten. Sorry, Vince. Okay. Villainy. He's part of a world that's been condemned by a lot of those who actually took part in it at the time. Tony Atlas admitted that we abuse women. All of us did. They were like a toy for us. In January 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Police released the results of their investigation saying he failed to disclose multi-million dollar settlements he'd reached with two women when he led the WWE.

46:16There's all sorts of these things. For me, it's sort of, I mean, I'm going to upset some wrestling fans. I find the whole thing just a little bit corny at best, distasteful at worst. And also dangerous, actually, because there's this ongoing issue. And you get this in sports like American football as well, where athletes are getting more and more concerned by the risks of issues like degenerative brain disease, which you can attribute to kind of like physical knocks on the head. So in 2016, 50 wrestlers actually tried to sue WWE for concealing the risks of this condition, degenerative brain disease, which has been attributed to wrestling and that WWE's exploitative business model, in their words, kept the wrestlers from knowing their rights under health and safety laws.

47:03In 2021, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. But, you know, there have been other cases such as wrestler Chris Benoit, who killed his wife, children, and then himself. People have speculated that a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, which has been caused by repeated concussions could be to blame. Now, Vince doesn't believe that CTE was the cause, but WWE now has a concussion policy. you know I'm going to sound like a real snob here but it sort of panders to the most base instincts it's not something I find particularly edifying or tasteful but then you know so what you know I'm not the target market and I guess that also doesn't quite class as villainy then so maybe if we go back and we look at what he's actually done in the process of creating this billion dollar brand I mean there's a lot of people he's worked with who have made quite severe allegations against him and the company.

47:58I feel like he scores pretty highly on villainy. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. I'm going to give him a seven for villainy. I think I'll give him a seven. Although he is a special kind of class of villainous, I think, to have to create a villainous character from yourself. Well, that's the whole thing. He would say, listen, you're conflating my character, the Mr. McMahon character with the real life Vince. I mean, a lot of these are allegations, but it was found that he used company money to pay a number of settlements for payments to women who'd accused him of sexual misconduct.

48:28So yeah, I think seven is about right. Seven out of 10. I mean, I feel like his character, Mr. McMahon, would be disappointed that we didn't give him a higher score. Maybe. Giving back, philanthropy? So there isn't a lot of recent information about Vince McMahon's philanthropy. He started a foundation with his wife, Linda, in 2006. So far, it's given away$20 million to education and sports charities. Yeah, we've had lower numbers as a percentage of people's net worth. So I'm going to say four. Right. Well, I think four. You're much better at the percentage splits than I am. So I'm going to agree with you on four out of ten.

49:07Well, actually, I'm going to downgrade it to three. I mean, if we're thinking that Bill Gates is 10 because he's given away 40 billion, which is, you know, a huge proportion. I think he's much lower than that. So I'm going to say give him a three for his 20 million dollar to education and sports charities. And then there's power. Well, this is an interesting one because on one hand, you know, yeah, you could argue that wrestling caters to the basis human impulses. And, you know, it's not a real sport, but it is enormously popular and it's got a lot of power and pull. So it's very, very popular in red states, that's for sure, in the US.

49:42And Linda and Vince have donated millions to conservative groups. Linda McMahon herself gave$15 million to Trump's campaign financing. So Linda was actually WWE's CEO until 2009. And then she ran for Connecticut's Senate seat as a Republican. She invested over$100 million of her own money in 2010 and 2012. She didn't win that time. But you may recognize her name because in 2024, she was nominated by Trump to lead the Department of Education. And Vince and Linda have announced their separation. They did that in November of 2024. And remember, Vince McMahon and Trump have a longstanding connection in April 2024.

50:24Vince's spokesperson clarified they have not, however, been in regular contact. So he doesn't have a hotline to the White House anymore. No. And actually, it seems like Linda might be the one coming out on top in terms of power. Yeah. I'm going to give him a four for power. I think I would. Well, this is difficult because he did create this incredible juggernaut that single-handedly launched a lot of people's careers, even though at the end of his storyline arc, as you might put it, he's on the down and out. I think I would give him a four as well. He doesn't seem to have that much power nowadays, especially given the fact that he's had to step back in such a big way from his industry.

51:04so good bad or just another billionaire um i think i think the thing is my judgment on this is slightly influenced by the fact that i think that it's um a sport i don't like if it is a sport at all um it uh preys on some of the basest instincts it pits people against each other it can descend into throwing pig poop at each other they're making them go crawl on all forms and bark like a dog whilst saying awful things. You know, that's not much fun, if you ask me. Yeah. And actually, it wasn't until I looked up those old clips of the attitude era that I felt my attitude hardening, you might say, towards Vince McMahon.

51:44Because if you look up those clips, the ones of women being abused, of crowds chanting slut, it is really difficult to stomach. It is actually horrendous. And I've not been shocked by something in a long time. And to be prepared to go there in the name of ratings. To encourage it. Doesn't sit very well with me. So I'm going to say Vince McMahon is a bad billionaire. I'm going to agree. And I think, you know, if anyone disagrees with us, just look up those clips. I mean, they're pretty out there.

52:19So next week's episode, we have the first Puerto Rican billionaire. That's right. He could have very nearly become a huge tennis superstar, but couldn't quite make it. Yeah, he did, though, become richer than any tennis player ever. So that worked out. He made a fortune buying and selling companies. But he says that his business strategy came from a pivotal moment when he was searching for diapers in the supermarket. That is Orlando Bravo, Puerto Rican private equity billionaire. Thanks for joining us. You've been listening to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. This episode was produced by Louise Morris.

52:56Our researcher is Tamsin Curry and our editor, Paul Smith.

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