Inside TKO: How Ari Emanuel Built The World's Most Valuable Sports And Entertainment Property
Ari Emanuel’s TKO Group Holdings (NYSE: $TKO) has emerged as the most powerful pure-play combat sports and live entertainment company in the world.
Founded in 2023 through the merger of UFC and WWE, TKO has since expanded aggressively, acquiring IMG, On Location, and Professional Bull Riders (PBR) in an all-stock deal valued at $3.25 billion. Together, these properties now reach 1 billion households across 210 countries and territories, organize more than 500 live events annually with 3 million ticketed fans, and have secured more than $15 billion in long-term media rights agreements with Paramount, Netflix, and ESPN.
In 2025, TKO generated $4.735 billion in revenue and $1.585 billion in Adjusted EBITDA — a 47% year-over-year increase in profitability — with margins expanding more than 11 percentage points to 33%. The company swung from a net loss of $245.8 million in 2024 to net income of $546.2 million, generated $1.159 billion in free cash flow, and returned in excess of $1.3 billion to shareholders.
As a result, TKO’s publicly traded stock hit an all-time high last week and is now up 42% over the last 12 months, more than double the S&P 500’s 20% return.
TKO is a company that I have been following closely since 2023. Full disclosure, I own some TKO stock, but it's an immaterial part of my portfolio, and the reason I own it is that I believe in Ari Emanuel’s “anti-AI” vision. We did a deep dive on this a few months ago, but, in short, Emanuel has been buying up live sports assets because he believes the value of human connection and shared experiences will increase as AI transforms content creation and frees up leisure time.
So for today’s newsletter, I’m going to walk you through TKO’s business. We’ll start with the basics, including how the company generates revenue and which segments are driving its growth. But then I want to go deeper, breaking down TKO’s competitive moat, media rights architecture, and some of the emerging trends investors believe could eventually make this a $30 billion-plus company.
Let’s get into it…