Ariel Emanuel has an instruction for the people who connect his telephone calls: keep them coming. In October 2026, explaining the title of his memoir, Roll the Calls, he described shouting the order as he walks toward his office. The conversations begin before he reaches his desk. In the car, he calls the office and asks for more. A useful relationship might start with something he has read, turn into a meeting and eventually lead somewhere neither person expected.
It is an appealingly old-fashioned piece of machinery for a career spent rearranging modern entertainment. Somewhere, someone answers a telephone. At the other end is Ari Emanuel, with a question, a proposal or a reason to try again. The equipment has changed considerably since he began. The underlying appetite for another conversation has survived.
Look at his businesses now and that appetite acquires a larger setting. Emanuel is executive chair and CEO of TKO, which owns UFC and WWE. He is executive chairman of WME Group. His newer company, MARI, brings together art fairs, tennis tournaments, collector-car auctions and theater ticketing. He has spent three decades moving closer to the moment when an audience decides something is worth its time.
Upstairs from the cheeseburgers
His first surroundings encouraged an opinion. Born in Chicago in 1961 and raised in Wilmette, Emanuel grew up with brothers Rahm and Ezekiel in a family where politics came home to dinner. Their mother, Marsha, was active in the civil-rights movement. Current affairs were material for discussion, and discussion could be a contact sport. In that household, having something to say was a practical skill.
Macalester College came next; he graduated in 1983. There was a brief spell playing professional racquetball, followed by work for theatrical agent Robert Lantz in New York. The sequence is wonderfully resistant to a tidy career diagram. A racquetball court, a theatrical office, then Hollywood: several ways of discovering how other people respond under pressure.
In 1987, Emanuel joined Creative Artists Agency as a trainee. He later worked at InterTalent and International Creative Management. These were places to learn the talent business, but they also supplied colleagues. In March 1995, he co-founded Endeavor with Tom Strickler, Rick Rosen and David Greenblatt. The launch fell on his 34th birthday. Their Los Angeles office sat above an Islands restaurant, where the afternoon air carried the smell of cheeseburgers.
Every corporate origin deserves one detail that resists the subsequent grandeur. The cheeseburgers do the job nicely. Before the public listings and international sports portfolios, there were partners, clients to win and an upstairs office. The work depended on persuading people to take a chance on a new agency.
When the agent bought the occasion
An agency brings people together around a project. An actor needs a role; a director needs a script; a production needs money. Assembling those interests teaches a particular kind of business judgment. You have to understand what each party wants, which refusal is final and which conversation still has somewhere to go. Emanuel carried that education into transactions involving whole companies.
In 2009, Endeavor merged with William Morris Agency, an institution founded in 1898. Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell became co-chief executives of the combined WME. The younger firm acquired a different scale and a century of institutional history. For a business built on relationships, the merger also brought the difficult task of putting different professional cultures under one roof.
The next expansion crossed another boundary. Silver Lake invested in WME in 2012, and the firm acquired IMG in 2014. IMG brought an extensive sports and events business. Emanuel had wanted the company for years; an earlier approach to its owner, Ted Forstmann, had gone nowhere. The eventual deal, valued at $2.4 billion, gave that persistence a corporate address.
Then came UFC in 2016, acquired by a WME-IMG-led group of investors. The buyers already knew the organization through representation work. Ownership widened the assignment: they would help operate and develop the property itself, with Dana White remaining part of its leadership. An agent’s relationship with a performer had become an investment in the stage, the schedule and the commercial rights surrounding it.
UFC and WWE combined under TKO in September 2023, with Emanuel as CEO. He became executive chair the following February. The two properties have distinct performances, traditions and audiences. Together they gave the company two recurring calendars around which viewers, broadcasters, sponsors and host cities could make plans.
The audience moves; the appointment stays
That calendar matters when the distribution business changes. WWE’s Raw moved to Netflix in January 2025. The agreement had been announced a year earlier, with an initial ten-year term and a value exceeding $5 billion. WWE president Nick Khan described a competitive market for the rights and the appeal of becoming a regular live offering on Netflix.
For a viewer, the change could be as ordinary as opening a different app on Monday night. For the companies, it connected an established weekly habit with a global subscription service. The first Netflix episode registered 4.9 million global Live+1 views. That figure came with a specific measurement and territory coverage; it was an opening-night result rather than a complete verdict on the partnership.
UFC followed another route to streaming. In August 2025, Paramount and TKO announced a seven-year U.S. agreement beginning in 2026, with an average annual value of $1.1 billion. It covered 13 numbered events and 30 Fight Nights annually. The arrangement brought those events to Paramount+ without a separate pay-per-view charge, with selected numbered events also on CBS.
Average annual contract value
Both deals help explain the attraction of owning an occasion people already anticipate. A streaming service needs reasons for people to subscribe and return. An event owner needs distribution and payment. Emanuel’s companies sit where those needs meet, although the bargaining still depends on executives, operating teams and audiences doing their respective parts.
TKO expanded its capabilities in February 2025 by acquiring IMG, hospitality business On Location and Professional Bull Riders from Endeavor. The combination added sports marketing, production and premium experiences around the events. There are several possible purchases hidden inside an evening out, from the broadcast a viewer watches at home to the hospitality package someone buys at the venue.
A second company built around showing up
The corporate arrangement changed again in March 2025. Silver Lake completed its acquisition of Endeavor, taking the company private. Its representation businesses adopted the WME Group name, and Emanuel moved from Endeavor CEO to WME Group executive chairman. He retained his TKO responsibilities. The distinctions matter: the agency group and the publicly traded sports company have related histories and different jobs.
Later that year, MARI supplied another expression of his interests. Its launch brought together the Miami and Madrid Open tennis tournaments, Frieze and Barrett-Jackson. TodayTix followed in October. A collector inspecting a car and a theatergoer finding a seat may have little to discuss over dinner. Each has nonetheless chosen an experience with a particular date, setting and community around it.
In August 2026, MARI announced an agreement to acquire ATG Entertainment from Providence Equity, subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions. The proposed purchase covers a theater business with 70 venues across Britain, the United States, Germany and Spain, including Broadway and West End houses. It reaches back, in an unexpectedly direct line, to Emanuel’s early work for Lantz.
“This is a long-term bet on where live goes next.”
Ariel Emanuel · announcing the ATG agreement, August 2026
The stated plans include preserving and modernizing theaters, improving the audience experience and supporting new productions. Those are demanding, physical promises. A venue has doors, seats, maintenance needs and a neighborhood outside. The purchase would require attention to all the things a spectator reasonably expects to work before the curtain rises.
Emanuel also gives the live-events argument a social dimension. In an October 2026 conversation, he recalled watching the Cubs alongside someone whose politics differed from his. They could still cheer for the same team. His belief that events can bring people together sits comfortably beside the commercial ambition. A shared afternoon can be both a human pleasure and something a business sells.
The character gets a microphone
For many people, Emanuel arrived first through someone else’s performance. He inspired Ari Gold, the agent played by Jeremy Piven in Entourage. Television gave his professional reputation a recognizable face and a repeatable voice. It also ensured that any account of his work would have to make room for a fictional colleague who never attended a board meeting.
Now he has his own public formats. Knopf published Roll the Calls on September 22, 2026. Bob Odenkirk, a longtime client, narrates the audiobook. The casting has a pleasing logic: after years of Emanuel speaking on a performer’s behalf, the performer gets to speak for him.
He also co-hosts Rushmore with music manager Ben Persky, inviting guests to argue about the people and moments worthy of an imaginary monument. Its second season was announced for October 2026. A career spent arranging conversations has acquired a show where the conversation is the product.
There are quieter clues to his taste. Asked what he would do in another field, Emanuel chose “Leadoff hitter for the Chicago Cubs.” He names comedies including Anchorman, Ghostbusters and The Jerk as films he returns to. His art interests include work by Mark Bradford, Kara Walker and Noah Davis. The dealmaker also has preferences that cannot be expressed as a transaction multiple.
The Cubs answer is especially useful. A leadoff hitter wants to get something started, reach the next base and give the people behind him a chance. Emanuel has built several businesses by finding another person to call. His current wager is on what happens when enough of those people decide to show up.