How Tony Khan's WWE Bid Compared To Rival Buyers

There were rumors in 2023, around the time of WWE's sale to Endeavor, that the Khan family might be interested in acquiring their pro wrestling rivals. Those rumors were confirmed to be true this week via court documents shared by Post Wrestling. The documents revealed four entities placed bids for WWE in 2023, and the Khan family was one of them.

The court documents have also revealed how much the Khans were willing to part with to acquire AEW's biggest rival, and that alone explains why we don't currently live in a world where WWE and AEW are owned by the same people. The Khans' per share offer reportedly totaled roughly $6.9 billion, which is considerably less than what Endeavor wound up paying to win the WWE bidding war three years ago.

It's actually a small enough amount that the Khans were the lowest bidders in the four-horse race to buy WWE. Both Liberty Media and KKR offered more than $6.9 billion, but neither of them could compete with the winning bid. That winning bid was $9.3 billion. Significantly more than what the Khans were willing to pay, which means even though they made a bid, they were likely never really considered as potential new owners of WWE.

Would Vince McMahon Have Sold WWE To The Khans Had They Offered More?

There's every chance fans are right in thinking McMahon would never have sold his baby to the competition, of course. We will never know if that's true or not, and since the Khans offered more than $2 billion less than Endeavor, it was never a potential eventuality that McMahon even had to consider.

What we don't know is the order in which the bids were placed. There's a chance McMahon told Endeavor about the Khans' bid, urging them to up their game so he wouldn't be forced to sell WWE to the owners of AEW. The sizable gap between their bids makes that seem unlikely, though. That hasn't stopped fans from wondering what might have been, with some imagining what that iconic promo during which McMahon announced he had "bought his competition" after acquiring WCW might have looked like had it been Khan recreating it on Raw.