Tony Khan Discusses Drawing Inspiration From Vince McMahon

Tony Khan is riding high as President of AEW. The AEW debut of CM Punk and the success that followed have pushed AEW in the right direction under Khan. He also drew inspiration from a man who won’t publicly consider AEW as his competition.

Tony Khan has been at the top of AEW since day one, and the promotion reached incredible heights. Khan said while not trying to do business exactly the same, he has taken inspiration from WWE Chairman Vince McMahon.

During an appearance on the Le Batard & Friends podcast, Khan said he looks to McMahon building WWE as the brand it is today as inspiration. Khan also cited the work McMahon put in in the 1980s as a model for building AEW.

“The amount of people I’ve gone out and convinced to join AEW, signed, built relationships with that I now have under the umbrella of this company and so I tried to take a lot of inspiration from what Vince did in the ’80s building the wrestling empire and expanding it because I think that’s probably the last time anybody expanded as much as we have, and I put an asterisk on that because WCW under Eric (Bischoff) did expand a lot from a money-losing business into a business grossing hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s still a little bit different than us where we weren’t a business at all and came from scratch. But I have to give Eric and WCW a ton of credit too. Basically, for me, I have a ton of respect for the way that company was built, and that’s why I don’t want to go out of my way to trash it.”

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Khan also said that while he was inspired by McMahon, he does not want to be McMahon. Khan wants to carve out a unique identity for AEW, with Khan working at the top. We will continue covering everything he does next right here at Ringside News.

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Thanks to Wrestling Inc for the quote