You don’t need an MBA to understand the value proposition of live sports in the future. According to legendary Hollywood executive and current UFC frontman Ari Emanuel, you don’t even need a good understanding of it live sports.
If you want to know why live sports is a good investment, all you have to do is reach into your pocket.
“At one point, Tiger said that the first time he won, people clapped; [but the] second When he won, the phones were on and people were there shoutEmanuel said, illustrating his broader point by pointing to the cell phone next to his left hand.
“That comes through That thing,” he said. “You want to show how great your life is. And also because That The thing loosens you up, you want a place where you can have a great experience with other people.”
This was Emanuel’s opening salvo in a fascinating interview on the Invest like the best podcast in which Emanuel discussed, among other things, why the sports world presents one of the few ‘AI-proof’ investments in the world.
Among those who know him, Emanuel is perhaps best understood as a human lightning rod. In one lifetime, he was a hugely successful Hollywood agent who served as an inspiration Entourage‘s Ari Gold. In another case, he was the prolific investor and entertainment executive behind the Hollywood super agency Adventure. He then began a third life as a sports owner in 2016, purchasing a majority stake in the UFC for $4.2 billion – an alleged overpayment for which he was roundly mocked.
It wasn’t long before Emanuel was the one laughing. Under his leadership, the UFC increased its revenues from $15 million in 2003 to more than $1.3 million. billion in 2023.
While Emanuel’s cutthroat style and dealings with the Saudi Public Investment Fund haven’t endeared him to everyone, his institutional knowledge of events and the media at the helm of the UFC has proven to be fairly bulletproof. Emanuel oversaw the UFC’s ingenious streaming and cable deal with ESPN, which correctly timed the demise of the cable TV model and provided a blueprint for sports leagues in the streaming age. He later led a frenzied push into the UAE-based Covid “bubble,” which made the UFC the only professional sports league operating during the early years of the pandemic, fueling an already explosive period of growth.
Now Emanuel’s attention is turned to the looming specter of artificial intelligence, and its potentially revolutionary effects on the company are what he knows best.
In the revolution promised by AI evangelists like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the world is rushing toward “artificial general intelligence”, or “AGI” – a phenomenon where AI becomes smart enough to replace most human work. If If researchers succeed in creating AGI in Altman and Amodei’s image, it will prove powerful enough to transform the economy as we know it: lowering the cost of goods and services, reducing the time and difficulty of white-collar work, and dramatically expanding access to leisure.
“AI is becoming… big. I think that’s a fair conclusion,” Emanuel said. “There are a lot of smart people spending a lot of money on it, and they’re smarter than me. The Netherlands has just switched to a four-day working week. Driving times are now 11-4 across America. Thursday hotel bookings are up dramatically – and there are many more data points. The weekend now starts on Thursday and we are in 2025. Maybe in 2027 it starts on Wednesday.”
Enter: Live sports. Emanuel has always had an intuition for the special power of a crowd. Part of it comes from his memory of Tiger Woods. The community that comes from watching Woods’ struggle, and the social capital that comes from recording and sharing that experience with others? In Emanuel’s story: That’It’s the kind of experience that AI can’t replicate.
“That bodes well for music, live sports and live events,” he said. “This is condition.”
And as Emanuel knows all too well: where status exists, there is also profit.
“We are social animals,” Emanuel said. “You come to a UFC fight, you’re a social guy. What are you going to do? You’re going to watch a lot of content – David Ellison’s conclusion – there’s going to be more content than ever, and it costs zero. You’re going to concerts, you’re going to stand-up, you’re going to live events. The value of that is just [two thumbs in the air] because there’s only so much of it. So that’s my whole guess.”
Of course, Emanuel’s thinking is exactly that: a bet. There is no telling whether we will achieve the world of AGI promised by the AI evangelists (who themselves have a financial incentive to believe in such optimistic arguments), just as there is no predicting that live events will be a value-add in a world with more free time. Emanuel’s hypothesis rests on the success of a series other hypotheses.
In many ways, this is a microcosm of this moment for the biggest economic gamble of the post-internet world. The range of outcomes still possible for AI is much broader than evangelists or critics would like to admit, while the extent of progress already made remains opaque. Are our current chatbots already creating a more efficient world, or are they just helping a legion of white-collar workers have an active voice in their email correspondence? Is AI the technology that will prove smarter than human civilization, or is it too stupid to trust the answers it provides to even simple questions? Your answers to these questions—and your beliefs about what those answers mean—depend largely on the orientation of your financial portfolio and your willingness to trust many of the same executives responsible for the proliferation of modern social media.
The possible and the political are difficult to disentangle, which is part of what makes AI so divisive. For the skeptics, it is outrageous to live as if AI will become as revolutionary as its creators envision; for the optimists it is scandalous not on.
It is this gap that provides opportunities for executives like Ari Emanuel. And right now his money goes to live events.
“I don’t know how to write an algorithm, I don’t know how to build a data center, I’m not in the chip business,” Emanuel said. “I just know how to create great live events, and live is the opposite of AI.”
You can watch Emanuel’s full version Invest like the best interview via the link below.
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