Vince McMahon: Wrestling's ringmaster

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Madison Square Garden, New York.

It's March 31st, 1985.

Inside the arena, 19,000 fans are buzzing.

They've traveled from all over for one reason.

The inaugural WrestleMania, touted as the Super Bowl of wrestling, and there's a lot of money on the line for the man behind it.

If it flops, some say he could be out of business.

If it succeeds, it could catapult his company into the big leagues.

Match after match has fired up the crowd.

Now it's time for the main event, the fight everyone's been waiting for.

Hulk Hogan and Mr.

T, the dream team, against Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorf.

Fists, chairs, flying, but in the end, Hulk pins his opponent.

The ref counts.

One, two, three, and it's over.

Hogan and Mr.

T, exhausted but victorious, stand tall.

But will this win inside the ring translate into success outside of it?

Today we're diving into the swagger, the biceps, the spandex of American wrestling with ringmaster Vince McMahon.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

Then we play a game where we judge them whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire.

We take them from zero to their first million, then from a million onto a billion.

My name is Zing Sing, and I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And my name is Simon Jack, and I'm the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode, we have basically the kingpin of wrestling.

The huge drama, kind of half opera, half pantomime, half-baying crowd, big personalities.

It's all about the theatre of it.

Yep, and that man is none other than Vince McMahon, who is currently worth 3.1 billion.

He's the former owner of WWE, that stands for World Wrestling Entertainment, which used to be called World Wrestling Federation or WWF.

Not the Panda thing.

Not the Panda thing.

Very important distinction.

Now, Vince turned what was a niche sport into a $6.8 billion industry.

He is the man who made stars out of wrestlers whose names you already know, like Hulk Hogan, John Cena, and Dwayne The Rock.

Johnson.

What do you know about wrestling?

Well, I actually had an ex who was very into wrestling.

I'm kidding.

Could actually name iconic wrestling matches from the 90s onwards off the top of his head.

It was funny because I remember for a Brit going back to the 1980s on ITV, one of the three channels at that time, Saturday afternoon was Wrestling Day on ITV.

And you had these characters called Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy.

And

there was also a guy who pretended to be this Japanese ninja type, but his name was Kendo Nagasaki.

Right.

And he was actually, his name was Carl and he's from Leicester.

Do you know what I mean?

He wore this outfit.

Oh my god.

And it was seen as a kind of

it was sort of almost like a sport of ridicule.

Right.

They didn't really hurt each other.

It was very popular with women as well.

Women clutching their handbags, going, go on, get him, get him, whatever, like this.

I know, probably being a bit patronising there.

But that was what it was like.

But it wasn't until the 90s when Hulk Hogan, who you've already mentioned, appeared in a Rocky film that I realized that wrestling was erupting into the mainstream.

And even people who'd never watched it would know people like Hulk Hogan or The Undertaker or Bret Hart or yeah, I remember growing up with names like that.

I mean, even now, when you look at cinemas, you'll see people like The Rock and John Cena headlining films, and that probably was unthinkable back in the day of big haystacks, right?

Giant haystacks.

Giant haystacks.

Yeah, he was bigger than big, it was giant.

But let's talk about the man who made billions out of this sport.

It's more of a spectacle, if you ask me that.

A sporting spectacle.

His name was Vince McMahon.

He first made a name for himself as a TV wrestling announcer, kind of, you know, commentating on it and a promoter.

But in the 1990s, he stepped into the ring himself as the character, Mr.

McMahon, playing a ruthless, bullying, sexually aggressive boss.

Fast forward to 2024, we've had news breaking of a sexual trafficking lawsuit against Vince, and people wonder then whether there's any overlap between Vince's character as Mr.

McMahon and his real-life persona.

Vince himself has called this a predictable path of conflating the Mr.

McMahon character with my true self, Vince.

As of March 2025, that lawsuit is still ongoing.

But let's rewind all the way to the beginnings of Mr.

McMahon.

We're in North Carolina, August 24th, 1945, and Vincent Kennedy McMahon is born the second son of Vicky and Vince McMahon.

But his childhood wasn't exactly a fairy tale.

His mom left his dad when Vince was just two years old, citing desertion.

From there, Vince bounced around between different homes with his mom, her new husband, his older brother, and their two step-siblings.

And Vince himself has said his stepdad was abusive, even accusing him of beating him with a wrench from the age of six years old.

Gee, so a very, very hard childhood.

In Vincent's mind, however, he was a bad kid, lashing out in response to being made fun of.

But his schoolmates paint a different picture.

According to Vincent's biography, Ringmaster Ringmaster by Abraham Josephine Reisman, they say that Vince was popular and very sociable, very friendly, very outgoing to his peers.

But his life changed a bit when he was 12.

He reconnected then with his biological father, and this is when wrestling first entered his life because his grandfather had been a college-educated boxer, turned wrestling promoter in New York, and his father, Vince McMahon Sr., had founded a wrestling company, the World Wrestling Federation, WWF.

So Vince Sr.

was living in Washington, had a beach house in Delaware, a far cry from the sort of trailer park, tough time Vince had been spending with his mum and his siblings.

And then there was this whole, I guess you could call it crazy world of professional wrestling.

So full of theatrics, over-the-top characters, macho bravado.

You know, wrestlers back then had, as they do now, signature moves.

They had gimmicks.

Vince's favourite wrestler, Jerry Graham, was a man who would light cigars of hundred-dollar bills.

Now, Vince idolised him along with Vince Sr., his biological dad.

Vince said that he fell in love with his dad the moment they met again.

But he also added that his dad didn't actually say, I love you to him until just before he died.

Still, Vince began spending summers with his dad, quickly got into fighting.

He wrestled at school and in the streets as well.

He claimed that he and his friends used to take on groups of Marines stationed nearby.

Some of them were tough, he said, but me and my guys were street fighters.

They couldn't believe we weren't fighting fair.

I mean, it takes a kind of certain attitude to think you can take on a Marine.

Yeah, for sure.

Now, inspired by his dad, Vince also started organizing wrestling matches in his school gym.

But Vince Sr.

wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea of his son actually becoming a wrestler himself.

So at 14, Vince was packed off to military school.

It's worth saying that wrestling as a sport in schools in the US is way bigger than it is, for example, in the UK.

It's quite a normal thing for...

Do you remember the Breakfast Club?

Yes.

The movie?

The Milio Esteves character?

The Jock.

Yeah, the Jock, he's the wrestler of it.

So wrestling is a kind of, you know, thing that people did a lot in American schools.

Anyway, a couple of years later, Vince met the woman who would become both his business partner and his wife, Linda Edwards.

She was the daughter of one of his mother's friends.

And unlike Vince, Linda came from a middle-class background, had a much easier life.

Linda was 17 and Vince was 21 when they married.

And she soon joined Vince at East Carolina University and managed to squeeze her college degree into just three years so they could graduate together in 1969.

And in the early 1970s, Vince worked for his father's company, but he was also eager to carve out his own path.

He tried his hand at booking shows for musicians like Jerry Lee Lewis, but none of that quite took off.

And then one night, fate took a hand and pulled Vince from behind the scenes to behind the mic at one of his dad's wrestling TV shows.

Now, the regular announcer had just walked out after a dispute over pay, so Vince Sr.

thought, hey, why not give my son a shot?

Now, the first-time announcer was a little awkward.

Vince's delivery was stiff.

The wrestlers even laughed at him.

But they admitted he had a real knack for storylines.

And these are scripted narratives that drive things like rivalries, like character arcs of the wrestlers.

They hook people in to wrestling and keep them watching because it's like a soap opera.

Yeah, and they're long-standing.

These grievances and feuds go on for years and people really tap into them.

I won't be the first person to say that wrestling is a lot like soap opera for men.

Yeah, for sure.

You've got the recurring characters making surprise appearances.

You know, something about it is very much in line with that kind of operatic narrative that soap operas just thrive of.

And when Vince walked behind that mic, something just clicked for him.

So from that night on, he appeared as an announcer every three weeks on his dad's wrestling TV show.

But like most of our billionaires, he wanted more.

He kept trying to break through as an events promoter, and some of them were pretty unusual.

For example, one time he tried to organise an Evil Knievel Canyon jump.

Now, do you even know who Evil Knievel is?

I sort of, he's a professional daredevil, is that right?

He was a motorcyclist who used to take on death-defying jumps over like 50 buses or something.

And he would wear a kind of all-American Star-Spangled banner with a huge cape flowing behind.

It's like half Elvis Presley, half cyclist, doing death-defying things.

And there was this famous thing about a canyon jump where he was going to jump right over a canyon.

Well, he didn't even make the jump.

He had to pull his parachute.

Ticket sales were actually pretty poor.

Lender and Vince ended up losing nearly a quarter of a million dollars, but it did show that he had a a flair for drama, for trying to tell a story.

So if you haven't watched wrestling before, it's full of these terms and phrases that you might not know the meaning of.

So to help get our heads around some of these vocabulary, I'm going to test Simon's knowledge.

Are you ready for a pop question?

We'll try.

Okay, so question number one, American wrestling is all fake, true or false?

I would say it is all fake

because sometimes if you look at the real close-ups, they don't actually like land the blows that they're landing but some of them do get horribly injured as we'll find out later so it's not all you know it is a high contact sport um so i'm gonna say it's 90 fake okay

well apparently the fighting is all real so that is false so it's kind of like stage fighting or stunt work it's taken to physical extremes the story itself is created and but who will win the fight is planned how they get to that point is apparently up to the wrestlers i think that's a strange definition of real.

Well, I mean, we live in the

fighting.

I mean, that's a bit like saying stage fighting.

That's like saying that, you know, lightsabers are real or something.

Okay, well, unfortunately, we don't have Vince McMahon on Speed Dar to confirm nor deny this.

I've got a question for you.

What does Kfabe mean?

Is it when people fake it?

When they fake falling or fake punching?

It's not so much that.

It's more about the agreement of wrestlers to stay in character and the audience to know there's a storyline.

So anyone who reveals the reality behind the characters like if you step out of character you're breaking kayfabe and that's a big no-no you've got to stay in character right you can't break the fourth wall okay so this should be quite easy you probably know this what do you call the good guys and the bad guys in wrestling i have no idea oh okay so the good guys are called baby faces right because they usually tend to have quite you know quite good-looking guys you know and the bad guys are called heels heels yeah and it's all about the characters isn't it it really is so it's this kind of brazen world which just loves villains, heroes, and the audience are also a really vocal part of it.

So it's kind of like a British pantomime.

If you go to a wrestling match, people will be booing at the villains.

They'll be cheering the good guys.

They'll be shouting people's catchphrases.

Yeah, I've never actually seen one live.

I've been to boxing before, never been to wrestling.

Let's take it back down to the early 1980s where we were.

Vince and Linda are struggling, but then an opportunity comes knocking.

Vince's dad was ready to retire and you think the obvious choice to take over would be his son.

After all, Vince Jr.

had been working alongside him for years.

But Vince Sr.

wasn't just going to hand him the keys to the kingdom.

He had to convince his dad and the three other men who co-owned the company to sell him WWF.

Vince offered a million dollars paid in installments through bank loans, future profits after he'd modernized the business.

But if he missed any payments, Vince Sr.

could take the company back and anything Vince had already paid.

So tough deal.

Yeah, tough deal from his dad.

But, you know, the deal was done.

Vince had massive plans for American wrestling.

So the first thing he wanted to do was expand, but that was tricky in and of itself.

So the wrestling world at the time was split into 32 regional territories in the US.

Each one had its own promoters and its own rules, and it was all governed by an organization called the National Wrestling Alliance, the NWA.

And there was also what you can call a gentleman's agreement.

So promoters only really staged matches within their own territories.

But Vince didn't care about any of this.

He started promoting shows in other people's territories, kicking off a turf war.

So Vince claims his dad was told, stop him or he's going to end up at the bottom of the river.

Quite a soprano style threat.

But Vince wouldn't back down.

To him, this is all just healthy competition.

And the next step was some new faces.

Vince needed the best wrestlers, so he made them an offer they couldn't refuse, more money, basically.

And he started poaching stars from other territories, once again, breaking that gentleman's agreement.

His dad had followed.

Tony Atlas, great name, one of the wrestlers who made the jump, put it simply, it's a dog-eat-dog world and you have to get your bite out of it.

Speaking of talent, Vince also brought back stars that his dad had let go, such as Hulk Hogan.

So Hulk had actually been fired by Vince Sr.

for appearing in the movie Rocky 3.

But Vince Jr.

saw something his father didn't.

Hulk was becoming a household name.

Yeah, I can definitely vouch for that.

Him appearing in Rocky 3 was a big moment.

I think his wrestling character's name in that was Thunderlips, which I think is worse than Hulk Hogan.

That is almost definitely worse than Hulk Hogan.

And Hulk is this bold, brash, huge kind of guy.

He had the kind of personality Vince knew that would sell tickets.

So Hulk returned, reigniting his iconic rivalry with Andre the Giant.

I remember him too.

Yeah, so he was that French wrestler, right?

He was, I think, I looked this up because I was like, come on, how much of a giant could he be?

Turns out he was actually just over 2.2 meters tall.

What's that, 6'8?

Something like that?

6'8, I think.

He got called the 8th Wonder of the World.

But Vince wasn't just building a roster, he was making wrestling more topical.

After the 1979 US hostage crisis in Tehran, Vince capitalized on that moment with a match between the popular hero Hulk Hogan and a villainous Iron Shake.

Now, the Sheikh's character was known for taunting the crowd with his love for Iran and disdain for America, even spitting whenever he said USA.

And it tapped into real, real-world anti-Iranian sentiment.

And as it was all just a performance, the audience were given permission to unleash their own hate on the Iron Shake.

That's so interesting because Tony Atlas also said that wrestling was like an imitation of the world.

Actually, his words were, if you want to know what America is like, watch wrestling.

Interesting.

Vince was confident that wrestling could go mainstream.

Yeah, so it had been seen as this kind of outlier, low-class sport.

But Vince believed that television could help change all this.

So he started buying up wrestling TV slots that were coming up for sale, whether it was due to retirement or, I guess you could call it issues.

And by issues, we're talking about things like Georgia wrestlers causing a PR disaster by throwing pig poop at each other.

Yep, that really happened.

But Vince saw an opportunity and he swooped in.

He snagged their slot on USA Network.

Yeah, and they loved what Vince was doing with WWF so much, they gave him his own wrestling talk show.

It was called Tuesday Night Titans.

Vince described it as the Wild West in a talk show format, and he wasn't wrong.

It was a chaotic mix of skits, cooking demos, musical performances, visits to wrestlers' homes, a whole bunch of stuff.

So, really, he's trying a lot of stuff out here, throwing everything at the kitchen wall to see what stakes.

But Vince knew he needed to lean into the spectacle of wrestling to attract this broad audience, and he did just that sometimes to quite strange effect.

He called it sports entertainment.

Yeah.

Key to Vince's success was he recognises cross-promotion.

Yeah, because cross-promotion helps to elevate the appeal of wrestling.

And it was pretty soon after that a rather unusual opportunity was about to fall right into Vince's lap.

Yeah, it's the 1980s.

Big hair, bigger personalities, everything bright, bold, the music, I call that era, poodle rock.

Right.

I assume you were not a fan of the Spandex.

I have to say, I've never.

Never done knowing.

Never knowingly.

worn a knight of spandex.

I feel like it's impossible to unknowingly wear spandex.

You would know.

Okay, you're right.

Okay, fair enough.

And actually, a pop star had a huge role in making that crossover and making wrestling even more popular.

Yeah, so you know the song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Well in 1983 Cindy Lauper exploded in music with that song.

It was playful.

The video is pretty unforgettably iconic as well.

And it also featured none other than a WWF wrestler called Lou Albano playing her dad.

But you know how it goes.

The phone rings in the middle of the night.

My father says when you're going to...

Are you going to live your life right?

Something like that.

Exactly.

So Lou Albano, the first music video WWF crossover star and actually later on the video Cindy Lauper puts him in a wrestling hold which was seen as quite an empowering kind of song yeah which is not a normal fit I would say with wrestling and where wrestling went eventually anyway as we will see

pretty weird collaboration I would say this I mean how did it happen well as far as we know it started in the first-class cabin of an airline when Cindy Lauper and Lou Albano happened to be on the same flight they struck up a conversation.

And when Lauper's management asked Lou to be in her music video, he told them they'd have to ask his boss, none other than Vince McMahon, of course.

So unlike his dad, who had actually fired Hulk Hogan for daring to appear in Rocky 3, Vince was super keen.

He was all in.

Didn't want it to be just a one-off music video.

They were thinking bigger.

So together, Vince and Lauper's manager came up with Rock and Wrestling.

This is live wrestling shows, film for MTV.

MTV in its infancy at this point, so they're trying anything.

They're a new format, they're a new thing.

And the first one was called The Brawl to End It All for July 1984.

And even though the format was untested, MTV agreed, they're being experimental.

It was a low-viewing Monday slot right before the Olympics.

They figured they had nothing to lose.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what on earth was The Brawl to End It All even about?

So the storyline was that Lou and Cindy had a falling out over his sexism.

And so they decided to settle it through a wrestling match.

Both picked female wrestlers to square off in the main event of the night one of 10 matches and now female wrestling had always been seen as lower tier compared to men's matches but Vince actually saw this as a chance to get more eyes on the sport and the drama was kind of cranked up for the final match.

You know they shot Cindy in the gym pushing her fighter through training and it was huge.

The broad to end it all was a big success.

It turned out to be one of MTV's highest rated broadcasts at the time.

In fact, it proved what Vince had always believed since taking over his father's company just a year before, that there was a much wider audience for wrestling.

Now, it's not exactly clear how much money Vince made directly from the broad to end it all, but it did pave the way for bigger TV deals and events, including a partnership with NBC Sports.

WWF's gross income from 1984 was nearly $30 million.

So even after covering costs, it's safe to say Vince McMahon is officially a millionaire in 1984.

His powerhouse cross-promotion had paid off, but now he had an even bigger idea.

Vince wanted to create something that had never been done before: a Super Bowl for wrestling.

But the big question was: would it catch on?

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score, we demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

So let's trace him from a million to a billion.

Vince looked at all the other major sports.

American football has the Super Bowl.

Baseball has the World Series.

Why shouldn't wrestling have its own big annual marquee big event?

And the idea, well, it actually came to him on a quick Caribbean getaway with his wife, Linda.

Although Linda was quick to remind him, if you're thinking about work, it's not really a holiday.

No, fast forward to March 31st, 1985.

WrestleMania is live from Madison Square Garden.

Whenever I hear Madison Square Garden, I put on a different voice.

There's something about the boxing announcements.

So, Madison Square Garden.

But this wasn't just another wrestling show.

Vince pulls out all the stops.

So, Liber Archie's there.

He was this famously camp piano player singer.

And he would come out and say, I'm just going to go and slip into something a bit more comfortable and all this kind of stuff.

Okay,

but he could really play the piano.

So you've got Liber Archie there.

You've got a high-kicking line of showgirls in red.

The guest referee, only

the greatest of all time, Muhammad Ali.

Oh, yeah, and Andy Warhol, he's there too.

There's something quite Warholian about this in a way, isn't there?

There really is.

You can imagine Andy Warhol was taking notes.

It was like a kind of social experiment with him just sitting there, Andy, just watching.

Just watching with the dark glasses on.

Now, it wasn't actually just the crowd plus Andy Warhol inside the garden watching everything kick off.

So this entire extravaganza was beamed out to patch stadiums around the country as fans actually bought tickets to watch it on the big screen in person, which sounds weird now admittedly, but back then it was the norm.

So over a million people saw it via closed-circuit TV, which made it the biggest pay-per-view event of its time.

So in short, WrestleMania turned out to be a massive game-changing success.

And WrestleMania has become an annual tradition ever since.

And along the way, it sparked a long-running connection between Vince McMahon and another great showman, Donald Trump.

He actually got in on the action in 2007.

He chose Bobby Lashley to fight for him in the Battle of the Billionaires against Vince's guy, Umaga.

And in 2009, WWE played it up again.

Trump bought Monday Night Raw, only to sell it back to Vince shortly after.

So Vince had done it.

His vision of sports entertainment had taken over.

Wrestling was everywhere.

They actually call it the golden era.

And at the center of it all was one star, Hulk Hogan.

So So there were cartoons, merchandise, endorsements.

Hulk Hogan was selling everything from deodorant to cereal.

And WWF's revenues exploded.

They jumped from $63 million in 1983 to 140 million by 1990.

But as often happens when you have these massive snowballing successes, some wrestlers started asking, you know, where's all this money going?

Who's really benefiting here?

They were working brutal schedules.

They were fighting on no matter what their injuries were.

They had no health insurance, no pensions.

And that's when the wrestler, Jesse the Body Ventura, made a move.

He tried to unionise the wrestlers and almost pulled it off.

But Hulk Hogan turned out to be a bit of a fifth column there.

He snitched.

Vince called the wrestlers in one by one and told them, you show up to the meeting, you won't have a job in the morning.

So the dream of a union collapsed.

Looking back on the union attempt, Vince said the whole thing was a sham.

But interesting, this crossover between wrestling and politics, we've heard about Donald Trump's involvement there, Jesse the Bodhi Venture.

He, of course, became governor of Minnesota.

There's something about the showmanship and the platform

which lends itself to this.

It's interesting, isn't it?

The crossover between politics and I guess you could call them show business and show like show business, but also muscly men.

Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California.

That's true, of course, yeah.

Vince, though, was about to face more than just unhappy wrestlers.

The early 90s brought a wave of lawsuits and accusations.

Now, it all started on February 26, 1992.

The New York Post ran a shocking headline: WWF to face suit alleging child sex abuse.

The report accused WWF employees, including the ring announcer Mel Phillips, of sexually abusing young ring boys.

Now, these were teenagers who worked backstage at wrestling events.

And over the next few weeks, Vince McMahon and one of the alleged victims, Tom Cole, both appeared on talk shows.

Vince went on the Phil Donahue show to deny any knowledge of the abuse, and the three accused employees employees were fired, but one was later rehired.

And eventually, after Cole was paid $55,000 and given his job back, the lawsuit was dropped.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Decades later, in 2024, a new civil lawsuit was filed by five other former ringboys against Vince and Linda McMahon.

The first time they were directly named in a suit, it claimed they knew about the abuse at the time.

It also alleged that Mel Phillips, who was one of the announcers, was rehired just six weeks after being fired on the condition that he stay away from kids, which according to the lawsuit, he did not.

The lawsuit claims the five former ringboys were groomed and sexually abused.

Vince and Linda's lawyers dismissed the claims.

Vince has called them defamatory and utterly meritless, while Linda said the lawsuit contained exaggerations and misrepresentations.

As of March 2025, the case has not been resolved.

And then there was another allegation.

In April 1992, former referee Rita Chatterton appeared on The Geraldo Show, another American talk show, and accused Vince McMahon of raping her in 1986.

When asked why she waited so long to speak out, she said, you people don't understand wrestling.

Nobody talks.

It's a completely hush-hush world.

But Chatterton's claims were mostly ignored.

The statute of limitations had passed and the media brushed it off as tabloid sensationalism.

Vince even tried to sue the show that Rita appeared on, but in 2023 he paid her a multi-million dollar settlement.

His lawyer asserts, Mr.

McMahon denies and has always denied raping Miss Chatterton, and he settled the case solely to avoid the cost of litigation.

But there are more lawsuits incoming.

But if we go back to the time when those allegations were first made in November 1993, Vince McMahon was hit with another major indictment.

The U.S.

Department of Justice accused him of supplying his wrestlers with illegal anabolic steroids, even employing a doctor to keep them stocked.

Vince's lawyer claimed that Vince was provided with the steroids for his personal use as an amateur amateur bodybuilder, but denied that he distributed them to wrestlers.

If convicted, he was looking at 11 years behind bars.

So the trial kicked off in July 1994, and it was everywhere in the press.

It was fueled by the lingering war on drug stigma of the 80s.

Wrestlers took to the stand testifying that Vince had provided them with steroids.

But then came a twist.

The government star witness was none other than Hulk Hogan.

Now, by this point, Hulk had left WWF for Hollywood, and he was trying to distance himself from this whole steroid scandal.

But instead of sinking Vince on the stand, Hulk defended him and just like that Vince was found not guilty.

The case collapsed, yeah.

But all these lawsuits had taken a toll on Vince and on WWF.

Ratings were starting to slip.

And just as Vince was struggling, real competition stepped into the ring.

Ted Turner.

Ted Turner, the media mogul, founder of CNN and owner of World Championship Wrestling or WCW.

Now technically it was Ted and not Vince who first put wrestling on national TV.

But WCW never quite had the same ratings and with a fresh rebrand Turner was determined to launch something different.

He called it WCW Nitro and this went head to head with WWF Raw in a battle for ratings that would rage for the rest of the 90s.

And on just its second episode, by the way, Nitro beat WWF.

So the Monday Night Wars had just begun.

But Ted, not just after the ratings, he wanted some of Vince's wrestlers and characters too.

In a way, just like Vince had done in the 1980s, WCW started poaching some of the top stars from WWF.

Vince, of course, didn't see the irony or the similarity to his own behavior.

In a recent documentary, he accused Ted of stealing.

And when asked how that was different from his own tactics back in the 80s, Vince replied, no, Ted's philosophy was, I'm going to hurt my competitor.

That wasn't mine.

I want to compete.

And that competition was brutal.

Vince lost one of his biggest stars in what became known as the Montreal screw job.

Everything's got to have a great title, right?

I mean, you've got to hand it to them.

Whoever writes the scripts and the storylines for WWF, the whole thing, you know, hats off to you.

You should be, you should be working with Scorsese.

Yeah, or headline writing for tabloid newspapers.

So on November 9th, 1997, Brett the Hitman, Hart, was supposed to win the WWF championship, but Vince had other plans.

You see, Vince had told Hart they couldn't afford his 20-year contract anymore, so he knew that there was a chance that Hart would leave and take the WWF title with him to WCW.

Just weeks earlier, a WCW star had literally thrown a championship belt in the trash on live television.

So Vince was not going to let that happen again.

So behind Hart's back, Vince ordered the referee to ring the bell early.

Hart lost and the wrestling world was shocked by the breaking of Kayfabe and Hart left for the WCW.

That's very interesting, isn't it?

The script was there that Hart would win, da da da.

And then they basically went in and changed the ending of the highly scripted encounter.

Now that is not a sport if you ask me.

I don't think that's a sport.

That's something else.

That's basically a kind of live action soap opera as you rightly say.

So the competition is intense.

The WWF versus WCW war raged on.

Vince even mocked Turner on WWF TV calling him billionaire Ted, painting him as a ruthless tycoon crushing the little guy.

In one skit Vince's version of Turner boasted, Society is run by a a handful of billionaires.

I am one of those billionaires.

Do you realise how many lies I've destroyed?

Apparently, Ted found it amusing, but the skits were eventually stopped at the TV network's request.

Vince wouldn't be playing the underdog for very long.

No, and indeed he's on Good Bad Billionaire for a reason.

He became one of those billionaires.

So after losing this ratings battle for years, Vince had to have a change of tactics.

So if wrestling was built on the good guys, those baby faces, and bad guys, the heels, why not go all in on the bad guys?

This became known as the attitude era, said to be wrestling's darkest chapter.

The content got way more adult, more violent, more sexual, more offensive.

And in fact, if you look at it, it's pretty shocking.

There were attempted castrations.

Vince's on-screen mistress, forced to crawl on all fours, bart like a dog, then strip.

And at the centre of it all, Vince himself.

So it was really descending in a way into a kind of lurid pit of, I don't know,

scandal, I guess, or fake scandal.

It just feels like, I don't know, last last days of Rome kind of thing.

It's just becoming a parody of itself almost.

And I will say, if you look up some of those old clips, if you even just look up the altercation with his so-called mistress where she crawls around on all fours, the things he's shouting at her, I was shocked because I don't remember it being that bad when I was a kid.

But, you know, by today's standards, it is outrageous what he shouts at her.

Now, Mr.

McMahon, the character, is said to have been created around the time of the Montreal screw job.

So Vince wasn't just the host anymore.

He also appeared in the ring as the bad boss, the villain.

And his famous catchphrase was, you're fired.

And this is all a few years before Trump made it big.

But this wasn't just his story.

His actual real family got pulled in.

So his son, Shane, joined WWF at 28.

His daughter, Stephanie, she was just 23.

And Vince had plans for her.

Yeah, one storyline had Stephanie set to marry a wrestler until right before the I Do's, Triple H interrupts with video footage of him and a drugged Stephanie.

He claimed he'd already married her and consummated the marriage several times and the crowd chanted slut, slut, slut at her.

Yep.

Edifying stuff.

Pretty shocking.

Now, Triple H, the actual wrestler who staged this date rape storyline, later recorded that Vince saw the crowd reaction and just rubbed his fingers together as in, that's money.

God.

Vince himself added, I've got a big smile on my face.

That means the audience are participating.

So yes, an entire arena chanting slut is own daughter, and that was what went through his mind.

But in a bizarre twist of life imitating Archer, Stephanie actually married Triple H in real life.

They've grown close working together, but even then, she had limits.

Like when Vince suggested airing their real wedding as a pay-per-view event, she put her foot down.

And there was one other storyline she refused to touch.

Vince pitched an angle where her character would be impregnated by this Mr.

McMahon character.

Well, she shut that down.

Her take on the attitude era, it was a bit weird, but it was a different time in our business.

It feels like you've got to keep raising the ante, be more scandalous, be more extreme, be more controversial, and you sort of lose your bearings a little bit on what's acceptable.

I mean, if you're the boss of a wrestling federation and your idea of a storyline is, hey, why don't I in character impregnate my own daughter as a narrative?

Like, that is, that is taking it way too far.

It's also, I mean, what's interesting is the idea of having, you know, a woman, the wrestler, on all fours, borders barked at her, and then stripping or what have you, cheered on by a bunch of guys.

Some people have said that this, you know, could be the beginning of, could be the birth of the incel, maybe.

I mean, it certainly speaks to a kind of misogyny and desire to see women.

humiliated.

And actually, there's a Netflix documentary, and the editor of a publication called the Wrestling Observer newsletter said that wrestling catered to guys who, in his words, fantasized over hot women, but also hated them because they could never get them.

So therefore, seeing hot women demeaned was kind of cool.

Yeah.

By 1998, Vince's Gamble on the Attitude Era, however, had paid off big time.

That's right.

So WWFs turned to the dark side, supercharged their ratings and revenue.

The edgier content brought in older male fans, guys of cash to burn on special pay-per-view events.

In 97, for instance, WrestleMania pulled in 237,000 paying viewers.

A year later, it was 730,000.

Merch sales exploded.

There were magazines.

WWF revenue jumped from 81 million in 97 to 250 million by 1999.

And as we've seen in many of our stories, when revenues are expanding really quick and you're the hottest ticket and things are going particularly well, that is often the opportune time to cash in by selling shares on the stock market, doing an IPO an initial public offering so in October of 1999 WWF hit the stock market shares started at $17 they closed at 25 so up 50% on the day that made WWF's market value 1.7 billion dollars Vince and his family stake worth about $1.4 billion

now that same day another of our billionaires also went public Martha Stewart on the same day the very same day the very same day but her company raised more so the press had a field day calling it Martha's SmackDown.

That's great.

But Vince was still doing very well for himself.

By 2000, he landed at number 260 on the Forbes rich list, his net worth an estimated $1.1 billion.

So now Vince McMahon is officially a billionaire, but let's take him beyond a billion.

Vince's empire was about to hit some major bumps in the road.

Ratings were dipping, pay-per-view sales falling, and then tragedy.

It's May 1999.

Owen Hart, brother of Brett the Hitman Hart, fell to his death live on air when a stunt harness unexpectedly failed.

Now the cameras didn't show it, but the commentators told viewers what had happened.

And Vince, after Brett's body was taken away, he made the call to keep the show going.

His reasoning was, if it had been me, I'd want the show to go on.

Owen's wife, Martha Hart, actually took WWF to court for wrongful death and in 2001 an $18 million settlement.

In 2002, WWF officially became WWE and entered what was called the ruthless aggression era.

Violence, shock tactics, Vince doubled down on all of these things to win back slipping viewers.

But WWE's biggest stars, people like Dwayne The Rock Johnson, started leaving for Hollywood.

And by 2008, Vince made a total U-turn.

WWE cleaned up its act, it went forward PG, family-friendly, and it worked.

By 2019, Vince's fortune peaked at $3.2 billion.

But it came out recently that that same year, he'd paid $7.5 million to a former WWE employee who'd accused him of assaulting her after she refused to have sex with him.

Yeah.

Bringing it slightly more up to date in June 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Vince McMullen had allegedly used $3 million of company funds to keep an affair with a WWE employee quiet.

A WWE spokesperson said at the time the relationship was consensual and added that the company was taking the allegations seriously.

And it later turned out that between 2006 and 2022, Vince actually spent $14.6 million on payments to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct.

The fallout from that Wall Street Journal article, Vince stepped down as CEO and executive chairman of WWE the same month.

But just seven months later, later, in January 2023, Vince was back, this time as a board member, helping to sell the company.

CNN reported that he did it by forcing out some board members and replacing them with his own allies.

Then in September 2023, WWE merged with Ultimate Fighting Championship UFC in a massive $21 billion deal.

Vince was named executive chairman of the new company, TKO.

That's quite an important merger, that, because UFC was becoming massively, you know, it's kind of mixed martial martial arts cage fighting, if you like.

Very brutal.

But with a new brand of champions and a new whole roster of people.

And actually, UFC began to take bites out of not just wrestling, but actually traditional boxing as well.

So UFC was on the rise.

So this merger makes business sense.

And in 2024, TKO made headlines again, sealing a $5 billion deal with Netflix as the streamer ventured into live sports for the first time.

But just three days later, Vince was out of TKO.

Those initials are technical knockout.

TKO is a wrestling term in itself, just FYI.

So a lot's going on very quickly.

He resigned after a lawsuit alleged he had sexually abused and trafficked a former employee, Janelle Grant.

The claims in the lawsuit are horrific.

Janelle Grant accused Vince of physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault, and forcing her to have relations with wrestlers and other employees.

The lawsuit includes graphic text messages from Vince detailing his control over her sexual encounters and a voice message where he allegedly pressured her to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Janelle's lawyers said she filed the lawsuit not just for herself but for others afraid to speak out.

The suit says she's since been left with PTSD and suicidal ideation.

Vincent's attorney has called it a smear campaign and dismissed the claims as falsehoods.

As of March 2025, Janelle's sex trafficking case against Vince is still ongoing.

So this is the point where we have to judge our billionaire on a number of categories, which we score between 0 and 10 on things like wealth, villainy, giving back, power, etc.

So we start with wealth which is not just how much money they've actually got but what they've done with it.

So where do we rate Vince McMahon?

Well Vince actually fell off the Forbes billionaire list in the 2000s but this may have been due to lack of information about his actual fortune.

So his wealth has been estimated during this time to kind of move between one to three and a half billion dollars.

So pretty low entry-level billionaire.

So I'm going to give him a two out of ten for wealth.

I mean obviously these people are wildly rich rich, but in the galaxy of rich people that we look at, he's a very small star.

He's not even a small star.

I'd say he's a little orbiting asteroid.

He's an asteroid.

I would say one out of ten.

Sorry, Vince.

Okay, villainy.

He's part of a world that's been condemned by a lot of those who actually took part in it at the time.

Tony Atlas admitted that we abuse women, all of us did.

They were like a toy for us.

In January 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Police, released the results of their investigation saying he failed to disclose multi-million dollar settlements he'd reached with two women when he led the WWE.

There's all sorts of these things.

For me, it's sort of,

I mean, I'm going to upset some wrestling fans.

I find the whole thing just a little bit corny at best, distasteful at worst.

And also dangerous, actually, because there's this ongoing issue.

And you get this in sports like American football as well, where athletes are getting more and more concerned by the risks of issues like degenerative brain disease, which you can attribute to kind of like physical knocks on the head.

So in 2016, 50 wrestlers actually tried to sue WWE for concealing the risks of this condition, degenerative brain disease, which has been attributed to wrestling, and that WWE's exploitative business model, in their words, kept the wrestlers from knowing their rights under health and safety laws.

In 2021, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

But you know, there have been other cases such as wrestler Chris Benoit, who killed his wife, children, and then himself.

People have speculated that a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, which has been caused by repeated concussions, could be to blame.

Now, Vince doesn't believe that CTE was the cause, but WWE now has a concussion policy.

You know, I'm going to sound like a real snob here, but it sort of panders to the most base instincts.

It's not something I find particularly edifying or tasteful, but then, you know, so what?

You know, I'm not the target market.

And I guess that also doesn't quite class as villainy then.

so maybe if we go back and we look at what he's actually done in the process of creating this billion dollar brand I mean there's a lot of people he's worked with who have made quite severe allegations against him yeah and the company I feel like he scores pretty highly on villainy yeah I think you're right I think you're right I'm gonna give him a seven for villainy I think I'll give him a seven although he is a special kind of class of villainous I think to have to create a villainous character from well that's the whole thing he would say listen you're conflating conflating my character, the Mr.

McMahon character, with the real life Vince.

I mean, a lot of these are allegations, but it was found that he used company money to pay a number of settlements for

payments to women who'd accused him of sexual misconduct.

So, yeah, I think seven is about right.

Seven out of ten.

I mean, I feel like his character, Mr.

McMahon, will be disappointed that we didn't give him a higher score.

Maybe.

Giving back philanthropy.

So there isn't a lot of recent information about Vince McMahon's philanthropy um he started a foundation with his wife linda in 2006 so far it's given away 20 million dollars to education and sports charities yeah we've had lower numbers as as a percentage of people's net worth um so i'm gonna say

four

right well i think four you're much better at the percentage splits than i am so i'm gonna agree with you on four out of 10.

Well, actually, I'm going to downgrade it to three.

I mean, if we're thinking that a Bill Gates is 10 because he's given away 40 billion, which is,

you know, a huge proportion, I think he's much lower than that.

So I'm going to say give him a three for his $20 million to education and sports charities.

And then there's power.

Well, this is an interesting one because, on one hand, you know, yeah, you could argue that wrestling caters to the basis human impulses and, you know, it's not a real sport, but it is enormously popular and it's got a lot of power and pole.

So it's very, very popular in red states, that's for sure, in the US.

And Linda and Vince have donated millions to conservative groups.

Linda McMahon herself gave $15 million to Trump's

campaign financing.

So Linda was actually WWE's CEO until 2009, and then she ran for Connecticut's Senate seat as a Republican.

She invested over $100 million of her own money in 2010 and 2012.

She didn't win that time, but you may recognize her name because in 2024, she was nominated by Trump to lead the Department of Education.

And Vince and Linda have announced their separation.

They did that in November of 2024.

And remember, Vince, McBahn, and Trump have a long-standing connection.

In April 2024, Vince's spokesperson clarified they have not, however, been in regular contact.

So he doesn't have a hotline to the White House anymore.

No, and actually, it seems like Linda might be the one coming out on top in terms of power.

Yeah.

I'm going to give him a four for power.

I think I would.

Hmm.

Well, this is difficult because he did create this incredible juggernaut that single-handedly launched a lot of people's careers,

even though at the end of his storyline arc, as you might put it, he's on the down and out.

I think I would give him a four as well.

He doesn't seem to have that much power nowadays, especially given the fact that he's had to step back in such a big way from his industry.

So good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I think the thing is, my judgment on this is slightly influenced by the fact that I think that it's a sport I don't like, if it is a sport at all.

It preys on some of the basic instincts.

It pits people against each other.

It can descend into throwing pig poop at each other.

They're making them go crawl on all fours and bark like a dog whilst saying awful things.

You know,

that's not much fun, if you ask me.

Yeah, and actually, it wasn't until I looked up those old clips of the attitude era that I felt my attitude hardening, you might say, towards Vince McMahon.

Because if you look up those clips, the ones of women being abused, of crowds chanting slut, it is really difficult to stomach.

It is actually horrendous.

And I've not been shocked by something in a long time.

And to be prepared to go there in the name of ratings.

To encourage it.

Doesn't sit very well with me.

So I'm going to say Vince McMahon is a bad billionaire.

I'm going to agree.

And I think, you know, if anyone disagrees with us, just look up those clips.

I mean, they're pretty out there.

So, next week's episode, we have the first Puerto Rican billionaire.

That's right.

He could have very nearly become a huge tennis superstar, but couldn't quite make it.

Yeah.

He did, though, become richer than any tennis player ever.

So that worked out.

He had made a fortune buying and selling companies.

But he says that his business strategy came from a pivotal moment when he was searching for diapers diapers in the supermarket.

That is Orlando Bravo, Puerto Rican private equity billionaire.

Thanks for joining us.

You've been listening to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

This episode was produced by Louise Morris, our researchers Tamzin Curry, and our editor Paul Smith.

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