An Inside Look at WWE's Unlikely Business Empire - VICE

This past February, Vince McMahon, the chairman and CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, hosted a segment on his weekly televised program Monday Night Raw to present the Vincent James McMahon Legacy of Excellence Award (named after his father, a wrestling man in his own right) to his daughter, Stephanie McMahon.

Wearing his trademark pinstriped suit, Vince, rigid-shouldered and gravel-voiced, stood in the ring and introduced Stephanie, who has worked for her father at WWE for nearly two decades and is currently the company's chief brand officer, as the award recipient. She made her entrance clad in a form-fitting, long-sleeved black dress, hands patched over her heart, lips curled in a modest, endearing smile.

She ducked the ropes and entered the ring. But before she could speak, music boomed through the loudspeakers and out came Shane McMahon, Vince's estranged son and Stephanie's big brother. Shane jived and backpedaled in a suit and high-top Nikes as his sister stood, mouth agape, next to their father.

Shane was a WWE executive, too, before he left the family business under shadowy and uncertain circumstances in 2009. He has claimed that he left to pursue other business ventures—"to do it on my own," as he told BuzzFeed in 2014—but two senior-level sources say that his resignation was at least partially due to a real-life power struggle with his father and sister. "There was always tension between Shane and Stephanie," a former senior-level executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me. "That tension hasn't gone away." Regardless of the reasons behind his departure, Shane had not been part of a WWE product—on television or otherwise—in the seven years since. Until now.

As Shane joined his father and sister in the ring, Vince went in for a hug. Shane held him at an arm's distance, shaking his head. The crowd roared.

"You and your husband, Triple H," Shane said, referring to Stephanie's spouse, Paul Levesque, a WWE executive and longtime wrestling personality, by his ring name, "have been really running this company into the ground. Let's take a few indicators. Let's look at the stock, let's look at ratings, let's look at the plethora of talent injuries. All under your watch"—he now looked to his father—"under your auspices"—and back to his sister—"down into the ground. Great job!"

"You're saying this in front of this packed house in Detroit, right?" Stephanie rebutted. "Because you don't know what it means to be a success, Shane. How could you? You're nothing more than a quitter." Her face pinched into a menacing, disgusted grimace. "Now get the hell out of my ring!"

Shane wet his lips. "Number one: It's your father's ring," he went on. "But one thing is for sure, Stephanie. I never lost my place in line." The storyline was gold. The crowd was drooling. "The only reason you were able to climb as far as you have thus far is because I let it happen."

And then Shane, with one hand condescendingly resting on his father's shoulder, dropped the all-too-familiar mantra that has been the foundation of WWE and the mindset of the man who runs it: "It was best for business."

Shane made his proposition: He wanted to regain positioning in his father's company by having complete control of Raw, which premiered in 1993 and is one of two weekly prime-time wrestling shows that have been the backbone of WWE since the 1980s.

"I'll give you what you want as long as you have one match, one night, against an opponent of my choosing," Vince said. Shane would wrestle, he specified, at WrestleMania, WWE's largest event of the year, which was less than two months away. "Your opponent is going to be ... The Undertaker!" Vince boomed. "And the match will be"—he leaned toward his son, his voice like grinding stones—"in Hell in a Cell!" The crowd peeled open, swelling to eruption like a rapidly inflating balloon.

Members of the McMahon family are known largely by the fictionalized versions of themselves that populate WWE angles. (Linda McMahon, a former CEO and Vince's wife, has more recently been in the news as President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Small Business Administration.) But with Shane's on-camera monologue, tendrils of fact had eerily woven themselves into the storyline. It's true that WWE has changed in dramatic ways, for better or worse, since his departure in 2009. Someone on the outside looking in—especially someone as familiar with the company as Shane—could view some of these changes as failures. What is indisputably true is that the company has undertaken an incredible push for expansion, morphing from a well-regarded (albeit slightly vulgar) television program into a multifaceted, billion-dollar entertainment juggernaut, anchored now by its largest shift on how content reaches spectators: WWE Network, an international, over-the-top streaming service.

At the wheel of it all is Vince McMahon, who has built one of the most powerful—and unlikely—empires in entertainment history; no other wrestling promotion comes anywhere close. Vince's ambition made WWE what it is today, but now, at a time of incredible industry upheaval, it's the thing that may threaten his company most.

"It would be great if this world takeover and grandiose expansion paralleled other great television ventures," said Brian Gewirtz, a former lead writer for Raw who worked at WWE from 1999 to 2015. "All that ambition is great, but it can't be the goal in and of itself."

In recent years, WWE has discovered that its position is rather vulnerable amid the tumultuous uncertainty of new media. It's no longer about a wrestling family putting out a product for wrestling fans. They may still be the only game in town, but the rules of the game have changed.

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WWE's popularity—and pro wrestling's appeal in general—is easily explained. There's drama and storytelling, there's risk of bodily harm, there's the eternal battle between good and evil. "If we are doing our jobs right and we are telling a compelling story, you'll be enthralled, you'll be caught up in that story," Stephanie McMahon told me at WrestleMania 32 in Texas last April. And she's right. According to documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, WWE enthralled more than 2 million live-event spectators in 2015.

Wrestling had always been a spectator sport—the smell of sweat in a small-town gymnasium, the cheap popcorn, the voice in your head saying, Is that real?—but Vince McMahon had grander visions for WWE when he took the company over from his father in 1982. (The promotion was called the World Wrestling Federation, or the WWF, until 2002, when a lawsuit by the World Wildlife Fund forced the company to change its name.)

Under Vince, WWE, which was founded largely as a regional affair, with promoters having territorial boundaries, began its transformation from sideshow spectacle to mainstream juggernaut. By 1984, he had found his formula: By injecting glitzy, good-guy personas like Hulk Hogan in the ring, and aligning himself with pop-culture icons who could connect with a general audience (he had Muhammad Ali fight at the first WrestleMania, in 1985; Joan Rivers announce the second; and Aretha Franklin sing during the third), his programming quickly surpassed college basketball in ratings and garnered critical acclaim.

For much-hyped events like WrestleMania, Vince implemented the pay-per-view structure, using a yearlong lead-up of weekly performances on cable television to persuade at-home spectators to shell out $50 or more for one specialized extravaganza. This business model formed the foundation of how people interacted with wrestling, and also created a significant revenue stream for the company. McMahon was at the forefront of the pay-per-view craze, and what started out as two exclusive events per year quickly expanded to more than a dozen by the mid-90s.

By that time, wrestling had become ingrained in American culture, with rival factions rising up alongside WWE. World Championship Wrestling (WCW) had grown in popularity in the 1990s and, by 1995, had its own show, Monday Nitro, which competed against McMahon's Monday Night Raw. It didn't help WWE's cause that some of their talent, including Hulk Hogan, had made the switch over to WCW, bolstering the circuit's image, which was decidedly more bad-boy and aggressive than that of the WWE. If McMahon was going to continue to sit in the driver's seat, his family-friendly, babyface-based programming needed a makeover.

WWE was already borrowing ideas from WCW, including more surprising storylines and a focus on crowd reaction. McMahon quickly realized that in a live performance like wrestling, the people in the stands are a crucial component. They play, to some extent, an even greater role than what's going on in the ring. "You really have to be engaged with the audience at all times," John Cena told me at WrestleMania 32. "You can't go out there and just perform and not pay attention to them."

In 1997, WWE entered the Attitude Era, which today garners as much nostalgia as the sport's golden age. With outlandish characters like Stone Cold Steve Austin, Triple H, and The Rock—not to mention using women as catty, over-sexualized storyline props—WWE pulled ahead as the nation's archetype of wrestling entertainment and culture. "This is a conscious effort on our part to open the creative envelope, so to speak, in order to entertain you in a more contemporary manner," Vince McMahon said while introducing the era to Raw viewers that December. "We in [WWE] think that you, the audience, are quite frankly tired of having your intelligence insulted."

Personalities with mainstream appeal like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson helped WWE reach new heights in popularity. Photo by Cooper Neill

But by 2002, with its anti-heroes aging, WWE struggled. Their stock was trading in the single digits, down from $24 per share in 1999, when the company first went public. They needed a change. As the aughts pushed on and new stars like John Cena became the

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