The Anti‑AI Bet: Why Live Sports Will Become More Valuable As Everything Else Gets Cheaper
Ari Emanuel has spent billions acquiring live sports and entertainment assets. Now, he's betting that AI-boosted productivity gains will help demand soar, sending prices higher.
In between dad duty and holiday chores this weekend, I listened to the latest episode of the Invest Like The Best podcast with Ari Emanuel. The whole episode is worth a listen — Patrick O’Shaughnessy is a phenomenal interviewer, and Ari discusses the art of dealmaking, using his phone as a weapon, and his relationship with Dana White.
But specifically, one part of the conversation caught my attention. About 20 minutes into the interview, Ari mentions his “Anti-AI” bet. The TL;DR is that Ari has spent billions of dollars acquiring live sports assets like the UFC, WWE, Professional Bull Riders (PBR), and several major tennis tournaments because he believes the value of in-person events will rise as AI transforms content creation and frees up leisure time.
“The Netherlands just went to four-day work weeks. Drive times are now 11 am to 4 pm across America. Hotel bookings on Thursdays are way up. There are a lot more data points to this, but the weekend now starts on Thursday in 2025, maybe by 2027 it will start on Wednesday. We are social animals. What are you going to do? You are going to watch a lot of content because there will be a lot more content and it will cost zero (to make). You’re going to be going to concerts, going to stand-up, sporting events, or my live events that I just bought. So the value of that has to go up because there is only so much. That’s my bet.”
It’s easy to say that Ari is just talking up his book here. After all, the man who serves as the real-life inspiration for Entourage’s Ari Gold stands to make the GDP of a small nation if his vision for the future is correct. But that doesn't mean he is wrong either.
In fact, Ari’s vision for the future is quickly becoming the consensus among the brightest minds in sports. Pretty much every major sports investor I have talked to over the last year — streaming executives, team owners, private equity investors — believes AI will meaningfully increase the value of live sports and entertainment.
This thesis rests on three interconnected pillars: 1) AI-driven productivity gains are freeing up significant leisure time, particularly for high-income, skilled workers, 2) AI is commoditizing traditional content through cost compression and oversupply, and 3) live sports represent scarce, authentic, communal experiences that can’t be replicated by AI, making them increasingly valuable in a world drowning in synthetic content.
Part I: The AI Productivity Revolution And The Liberation Of Time
The first part of Ari’s thesis is simple: the rise of artificial intelligence will create measurable productivity gains, translating directly into more free time for workers.
While AI is still in its early stages, we are already seeing this play out in real time. A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis revealed that workers using generative AI saved an average of 5.4% of their work hours in a typical week. For a standard 40-hour workweek, this translates to 2.2 hours of time savings per week. If you expand to AI power users (think: people who use AI daily), highly skilled workers across business, finance, management, and mathematics are saving 6+ hours per week.