(2021-04-20) Ari Emanuel Takes On The World

Ari Emanuel Takes on the World. Emanuel, who inspired the manic Ari Gold character on the TV show “Entourage,” is almost a caricature of a Hollywood personality; cunning, quick-thinking, charming, and heroically profane. There are three Emanuel brothers: Zeke, the doctor and intellectual; Rahm, the former congressman, White House chief of staff, and mayor of Chicago; and Ari, the businessman. All are consummate schmoozers, though Ari and Rahm balance their ingratiating manners with ferocious tempers.

Emanuel founded Endeavor in 1995, and went on to establish himself as one of the country’s most prominent agents, representing Oprah Winfrey, Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Mark Wahlberg, and Dwayne Johnson.

He craves the stature of a visionary, not of a mere corporate executive. “In ten years, is anybody gonna remember Bob Iger?”

For the past decade, Emanuel has worked to transform Endeavor into a global sports and entertainment conglomerate

In September, 2019, he launched an I.P.O., expected to raise roughly six hundred million dollars

The afternoon before the trading was to start, Emanuel pulled the I.P.O.

It was the biggest failure of Emanuel’s career, and some of his peers suggested that he had made a mistake in trying to reinvent himself as a mogul

Then the pandemic struck. Productions were cancelled. Hollywood all but shut down. Endeavor inspired particular speculation, with many people wondering whether it would go bankrupt.

the company’s revenues sank, and its credit rating was downgraded to junk-bond status. In a conference call on March 20th last year, Emanuel told a large group of agents that their salaries would be cut, and that there would be no bonuses

The prospectus for the I.P.O. had disclosed that he had sold more than a hundred and sixty million dollars of equity in the company in 2017.

For his company to survive, Emanuel had to find a way to hold sports and entertainment events, even as much of the world was shutting down. In late March, around his fifty-ninth birthday, he got a call from Khaldoon Al Mubarak, a partner in Abu Dhabi

For someone who was not a member of the royal family, Al Mubarak was extraordinarily influential in the United Arab Emirates

In 2016, Emanuel’s company led an acquisition of the UFC, with help from Mubadala

During the pandemic, though, the UFC had struggled to hold fights. The contract with ESPN required forty-two events that year; thus far, there had been seven. At Endeavor, managers worried that the contract could be at risk, just when the company could least afford it. Emanuel told me that Al Mubarak proposed a solution: “Khaldoon said, ‘Why don’t you have the UFC come here? We’ll create a bubble for you.’ And then everything got started.”

The fights couldn’t admit spectators, but they could be broadcast to fans all over the world

On July 11th, the UFC held its first fight on Yas Island

According to people familiar with the company’s finances, the league was Endeavor’s most successful business in 2020

On the morning of October 28th, Emanuel delivered the opening remarks at an Endeavor “retreat,” conducted virtually

Endeavor had secured a high-interest loan of a quarter of a billion dollars, and it worked through the summer to cut costs aggressively.

Mark Shapiro calls Endeavor “a cult of personality.” In public appearances, Emanuel likes to extemporize, cajole, and find a connection

He explained that he had dyslexia, and felt a “dread of having to read in public.” But he wanted young people with dyslexia to understand that it could be a gift, which could provide them with “the insight to find inventive solutions to life—and in business—that others when they’re in those situations probably never find.”

In the third grade, still unable to read, he was diagnosed as having dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

The instinct for combat did not run in the family. His father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, was born in Jerusalem and served in the nascent Israeli Army during the Arab-Israeli War, in 1948. An avowed pacifist, he fought for eighteen months with an unloaded gun.

Their household emphasized service to the community. Zeke wrote in his memoir, “Brothers Emanuel,” that there were many times when people who were struggling asked if their children could stay with the Emanuels.

As a boy, Ari felt overshadowed by his siblings. “Zeke was always the brainy one,” he has said. “Rahm was the shrewd one.

After graduating from Macalester College, in 1983, Emanuel briefly played professional racquetball, and then got a job working for Robert Lantz, a New York talent agent.

“I read this article about Mike Ovitz,” who was then the head of Creative Artists Agency and the dominant agent in Hollywood. “And I said, Fuck, I wanna fucking go to work for that dude.” In 1987, he left for Hollywood and became a trainee at C.A.A.

several former C.A.A. colleagues asked him to join a firm they’d started, called InterTalent

In 1993, Emanuel and his best friend, Tom Strickler, began talking about starting their own agency. They’d worked together in the mail room at C.A.A. and then at InterTalent, before moving to International Creative Management (ICM).

Emanuel liked the idea of creating a firm, but he had other options. The management company Brillstein-Grey Entertainment wanted him to be the head of television, at triple the salary he was making at I.C.M.

On March 29, 1995—Emanuel’s thirty-fourth birthday—he and Strickler started Endeavor, along with two colleagues from I.C.M.

A prominent Hollywood agent who was an Endeavor assistant in those years said that the company’s ambition emanated from Emanuel and its culture from Strickler.

To strengthen Endeavor’s position in the movie business, Emanuel tried to hire Patrick Whitesell, a talented agent at C.A.A.

“At Endeavor, we didn’t really advocate for titles,” Whitesell told me, “but it kind of evolved over time that Ari and I were the two running the firm.”

Emanuel’s ferocity appealed to clients. One of them was the producer Brian Grazer, who had started out developing television projects in the eighties, before founding Imagine Entertainment, with Ron Howard.

he also has a very good sense of how that town works. The favor bank there—it’s complicated to see the ledger, but if you know the ledger in your head it has a lot of benefits. And I think Ari knows it six ways to Sunday.

Emanuel had a successful talent agency, but he was already meeting with prospective investors, including Casey Wasserman, a sports and entertainment executive, and Ron Burkle, a grocery-store magnate, who might help him create a larger venture.

By 2007, Emanuel had held merger talks with United Talent Agency and with I.C.M. But the William Morris Agency was the most appealing prospect.

William Morris had also been weakened by a series of internal power struggles. Most recently, in the summer of 2008, Jim Wiatt, the firm’s chairman, had tried to force out John Fogelman, the head of the movie department. A compromise was reached, but it was unstable

Emanuel and Whitesell pitched Wiatt a vision of a hugely powerful alliance, with Wiatt presiding as chairman.

Members of the two firms were scheduled to vote on the merger on April 27, 2009. The sides had agreed to harsh layoffs. Endeavor fired about fifteen per cent of its staff, and William Morris nearly a third. “It was so emotional,” Strickler told me. “This was watching something burn to the ground—we had this enormous success based on a culture that was going to be destroyed.” Early that morning, Tom Strickler sent a company-wide e-mail, saying that he was leaving the firm.

Strickler is a godfather to the children of seven people who worked for him. One agent told me, “Tom was the heart and soul of the company.” Emanuel and Strickler have not spoken at length since. “When Ari needs somebody, he’s their best friend,” Strickler said. “When that is no longer the case, he disappears. It shocks a lot of people.”

As the deal closed, Jim Wiatt’s position seemed well defended.
But Fogelman and Walsh had promised Emanuel that they would take his side. Wiatt, realizing that his support had collapsed, resigned before the first meeting. Emanuel and Whitesell took control of W.M.E.

The merger of Endeavor and William Morris was still in process, but Emanuel had already started laying the foundation for an expanded company. His ally was Joe Ravitch, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, who had covertly helped him navigate the deal. Ravitch and Jeff Sine, an executive at the multinational investment bank UBS, planned to leave their firms and start a boutique merchant bank, called Raine, with a focus on digital media, gaming, entertainment, and sports.

Emanuel called a New York real-estate lawyer named Martin Edelman, whom he had met through representing the UFC.

he was close to the royal family of the Emirates and deeply involved in business there, serving as a senior adviser to Mubadala

Emanuel told me that Edelman was receptive, saying, “Whenever I call you to come to Abu Dhabi, come to Abu Dhabi.”

It was on this trip that Emanuel met Al Mubarak, introduced by Edelman

Some people who had known Emanuel since Endeavor’s early days found his new relationships somewhat confusing. They remembered that he had always identified deeply with Israel.

Emanuel responded, imitating his father’s accent. “Having nothing to do with their being Arabs. He just doesn’t understand the map that I’m looking at, and how the world is changing, and how important that region’s gonna be.”

Emanuel secured other important investments from the Emiratis. He described a conversation with Al Mubarak, in 2010, about the prospect of putting money into Raine.

he turned to me and he said, I trust you. I said, I trust you. He said, I’m going to give you one hundred million dollars.” Mubadala’s investment launched Raine’s private-equity fund.

In March, 2010, Abu Dhabi held its first Media Summit

At the second Media Summit, a year later

It was a tumultuous time in the Middle East. The Arab Spring protests had started four months earlier

few weeks later, Khaldoon Al Mubarak resigned, under pressure; he was subsequently imprisoned.

The Media Summit took place barely a month after Mubarak stepped down.

M.B.Z. (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan) saw the fast-moving revolt as a threat to his monarchy. Obama wrote in “A Promised Land” that, after he called for Mubarak to step down, M.B.Z. got in touch to say that “the United States is not a partner we can rely on in the long term.” To tighten security, M.B.Z. turned to Asia Global Technologies, a company based in Switzerland. Its founder was Matanya Kochavi, an Israeli with a background in intelligence; its international chairman was Martin Edelman.

In February, 2011, Abu Dhabi awarded A.G.T. a six-hundred-million-dollar contract to install a statewide surveillance system, a project named Falcon Eye

Kochavi decided that some of the technology might also lend itself to news-gathering. In 2013, with Edelman’s help, he launched Vocativ, a New York-based company that would bring together Israeli analysts and American journalists to mine the deep Web for investigative stories. Vocativ ultimately did not thrive

Emanuel had been obsessively interested in technological change since the nineties, when he read “Life After Television,” a book by George Gilder, which predicted the revolution in digital media

One night in 2004, he knocked on the door of a house in Sherman Oaks, looking for Jules Urbach, a thirty-year-old who was developing software that might transform online gaming

two years later Urbach was ready. At Emanuel’s request, Gilder met with him, and reported back that he was impressed

Zeke Emanuel told me, “Ari is incredibly curious about lots and lots of things.” He traces this trait to their father, who was so eager to engage people that, when their family went to a restaurant, “literally in five minutes he’d be talking to the next table.” After the pandemic started, Emanuel began reading articles about potential COVID medications and calling scientists to quiz them about their findings. Health is an area of persistent inquiry for Emanuel, whose interest in digestion is intense even by Hollywood standards.

Emanuel says that he has a habit when he gets interested in a subject. “I’ll read an article, and I’ll tag it, and I’ll say, I want to talk to the person in that article, or I want to talk to that author—and I’ll just start going down rabbit holes of things that make me curious,” he said. “I call it creating serendipity. And it’s created a large web.”

Emanuel’s search for profitable connections doesn’t always yield good results, Shapiro noted, but on balance it is productive: “Can I tell you how much business we have, just from his cold calls?”

When Emanuel was raising money for Raine’s first private-equity fund, he read an article about Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture-capital executive. “I call Marc out of the blue,” Emanuel told me. “He picks up the phone, we meet, we talk, he comes down, I go to see him, da da da, we become friends. And then, after we have a relationship, I say to him, We’re raising a bunch of money. I would like you as an investor—just put in a couple million dollars.” Andreessen invested in the fund.

“We’d been talking about stuff, and meeting,” Emanuel said. “And then Teddy died.” This was Ted Forstmann, the prominent New York investor; Emanuel had been playing golf with him for years, trying to persuade him to sell IMG, the giant marketing group, which owned sports and fashion events—assets that W.M.E. lacked

Emanuel and Durban reached a deal, in which Silver Lake would provide cash to buy IMG, in exchange for a controlling stake in the combined companies

But Emanuel kept buying companies, especially those centered on live events. He wanted to change the balance of his firm’s income, so that half came from representing talent and half from owning rights, events, and production.

In 2017, he launched Endeavor Content, to produce TV and film projects—breaking the long-standing convention against talent agencies producing or owning entertainment entities

the Writers Guild of America protested by asking members to fire their agents

This February, after two years of litigation, W.M.E. became the last of the major agencies to yield; among other things, Endeavor Content agreed to reduce its stake in productions with Guild members to twenty per cent.

In March, 2017, Kacy Grine, a young investment banker, went to the Endeavor offices in Beverly Hills, to meet with Emanuel

Shortly after Salman bin Abdulaziz became king of Saudi Arabia, in January, 2015, he appointed his son Mohammed bin Salman deputy crown prince. With the King in decline, bin Salman, a twenty-nine-year-old known as M.B.S., quickly became the most powerful figure in the kingdom.

He needs someone to structure how to bring in movies, music, sports—none of which exist.” Grine suggested that he meet with M.B.S. “

“For Ari, it was great,” Grine said. “A new country, a new market, and a new source of capital.”

Emanuel said. “He’s telling me everything he’s gonna do, which was incredible, at the time. Like how he’s gonna change the culture, wants to spend thirty billion dollars on entertainment, bring people into the region instead of people leaving.

M.B.S. said that he had an international-investment conference planned for the fall, and he wanted Emanuel to be one of the speakers

In late October, 2017, the Future Investment Initiative conference drew several thousand international businesspeople and political leaders to the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. M.B.S., who by then had been recognized as the new crown prince, gave an address. He disclosed his plans for a five-hundred-billion-dollar high-tech city

Emanuel told me that, in the months between his June meeting with M.B.S. and the conference, there had been “a very difficult negotiation” with M.B.S.’s representatives over the investment in Endeavor

Emanuel decided that he should deal with the crown prince directly. At the conference, he met with M.B.S. and closed the deal.

Nine days later, M.B.S. launched a vicious purge of his rivals

The most prominent prisoner was Prince Alwaleed (Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud), a major shareholder in Citibank, News Corporation, Apple, and the Four Seasons—and Grine’s client and close friend.

Alwaleed was released two weeks later, after eighty-three days under armed guard at the Ritz.

Until Alwaleed’s imprisonment, Kacy Grine had been meeting with Emanuel’s Hollywood contacts who were interested in M.B.S.’s initiative, and had accompanied several to Saudi Arabia. Now he told Emanuel that he could no longer be part of the project.

In late March, M.B.S. embarked on a U.S. tour, intended to cultivate American politicians, business leaders, and the media. Shortly before he arrived in Los Angeles, the deal with Endeavor was announced: the Saudis’ investment of four hundred million dollars would buy what was said to be a five-to-ten-per-cent stake in the company

On October 2nd, six months after that dinner, Saudi agents brutally murdered the expatriate Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul

Some of Emanuel’s friends advised him to return the money that the Saudis had invested with him. But the Saudis warned that if he gave their money back he would never be able to do business in the kingdom again. “They were threatening me,” Emanuel told his friend. To extricate Endeavor from the relationship, he eventually agreed to pay the Saudis substantially more than they had invested; Silver Lake raised the money from its limited partners

As the 2016 Presidential campaign began, Emanuel stopped representing Donald Trump, and he did not advertise their relationship in Hollywood

A few weeks before the election, according to the Daily Beast, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, heard that there were recordings from the Miss Universe Organization that could be damaging to Trump. As it happened, Emanuel had control of the tapes

Cuban and other Clinton allies urged Emanuel to release the recordings, but he refused. Responding to critics, he said, “My brother is in politics, I’m not.”

Twelve days after the election, Trump met with potential Cabinet members at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Emanuel went to see him. Photographs from the day show them shaking hands and grinning

Emanuel’s foreign partners moved quickly to align themselves with the new Administration

Emanuel already had a relationship with Jared Kushner; he had befriended Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, when Mnuchin dabbled in producing films years before.

For Emanuel, politics were sometimes inseparable from business. Since acquiring the UFC, he had begun to expand the organization abroad, in China, the Middle East, and Latin America. Russia was a particular target.

Now he and his colleagues are preparing for a new I.P.O., meeting with investors on a virtual road show.

Endeavor’s prospectus focusses less on agenting and on the storytelling business; instead, it emphasizes sports and events, especially the UFC. Endeavor says that, concurrent with the I.P.O., it will buy an additional 49.9 per cent of the UFC, giving it complete ownership.

Emanuel plans to expand his company’s involvement in sports betting (gambling), and the UFC attracts wagering from all over the world.