All Elite Wrestling president
Tony Khan has opened up about the financial state of his fledgling wrestling promotion and says he's proud of the fact that AEW didn't have to lay anyone off during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In
a recent interview with PW Insider, Khan clarified that AEW is a profitable company, despite
recent reports to the contrary.
“
Our wrestling company is very profitable," Khan claimed. "
The only reason I won’t net money this year on AEW in our second full year of operations, which is pretty amazing, frankly, for a startup that has had the level of investment that we’ve had behind AEW and the amount of time that this has been going, that we’ll be significantly profitable already as a venture.”
The AEW boss admitted that while he wants AEW to generate net profit, he's happy with how the company handled its finances during the pandemic.
“
I care about running a profitable business, but I also take a lot of pride in the fact that I didn’t lay people off through the pandemic. Almost everybody, we have a over 95% retention rate of people through the pandemic and I actually had significantly higher than 95%. Almost everybody that we started with is here,” he said.
Khan didn't mention WWE by name, but his statement regarding AEW's lack of pandemic layoffs could be interpreted as a dig at the bigwigs in Connecticut, who have
laid off quite a few people since the pandemic began in early 2020.
"
While a lot of people were pulling out and cutting back and not investing during the pandemic, I made an investment in people and also frankly, a huge investment in video games," Khan said, in reference to AEW's video game division, which is aiming to
launch several video games in the coming years, including a mobile game and a traditional wrestling console game inspired by the Nintendo 64 game WWF No Mercy.
so desperate
