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 strong grasp of live sports.
If you’d like to know why live sports are a sound investment, all you have to do is reach into your pocket.
“At one point, Tiger talked about how the first time he won, people were clapping; [but the] second time he won, phones were up and people were screaming,” Emanuel said, illustrating his broader point by pointing to the cell phone near his left hand.
“That’s because of that thing,” he said. “You want to show how great your life is. And also because that thing detaches you, 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 topics, why the sports world presents one of the world’s few “AI-proof” investments.
Among those who know him, Emanuel is perhaps best understood as a human lightning rod. In one life, he was a hugely successful Hollywood agent who served as the inspiration for Entourage‘s Ari Gold. In another, he was the prolific investor and entertainment executive behind the Hollywood superagency Endeavor. Then, in 2016, he began a third life as a sports owner, purchasing a majority ownership stake in the UFC for $4.2 billion — a perceived overpay for which he was roundly mocked.
It wasn’t long before Emanuel was the one laughing. Under his leadership, the UFC compounded its revenue from $15 million in 2003 to more than $1.3 billion in 2023.
While Emanuel’s cutthroat style and his dealings with the Saudi Public Investment Fund haven’t endeared him to everybody, his institutional understanding of events and media at the helm of the UFC has proved fairly bulletproof. Emanuel oversaw the UFC’s ingenious streaming-and-cable deal with ESPN, correctly timing the decline of the cable TV model and providing a blueprint for sports leagues in the streaming age. Later, he spearheaded a frenzied push into the U.A.E.-based Covid “bubble” that made the UFC the lone pro sports league active during the early oughts of the pandemic, turbocharging an already explosive period of growth.
Now Emanuel’s attention is turned toward the looming specter of artificial intelligence, and by its potentially revolutionary effects upon the business he knows best.
In the revolution promised by AI evangelists like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the world is hurtling towards “artificial general intelligence,” or “AGI” — a phenomenon in which AI becomes smart enough to replace most human work. If researchers manage to create AGI in Altman and Amodei’s image, it will prove powerful enough to alter the economy as we know it: lowering the cost of goods and services, trimming the time and difficulty of white-collar work and dramatically expanding access to leisure.
“AI is going to be … big. Which I think is a proper conclusion,” Emanuel said. “There are a lot of smart people spending a lot of money at it, and they’re smarter than me. The Netherlands just moved to a four-day work week. Drive times are now 11-4 across America. Hotel bookings on Thursdays are way up — and there’s a lot more data points to this. The weekend starts on Thursday now, and we’re in 2025. Maybe in 2027 it starts on Wednesday.”
If the AI evangelists are right, media is primed to witness an enormous transformation. In a world where AGI can produce infinite content for almost nothing, and where people have more time than ever to consume it, media companies will have to reimagine their efforts to win attention. Either the gap will be filled by those who can create enormous amounts of unique content from existing intellectual property, attracting attention away from the infinite vastness of AI-generated content on future social media platforms, as executives like Paramount/CBS chair David Ellison have suggested. Or, as executives like Emanuel have suggested, the gap will be filled by those who create things that AI can’t replicate — things so ontologically different from our digital world that even the smartest computers cannot threaten them.
Enter: Live sports. Emanuel has always had an intuition for the special power of a crowd. Some of it stems from his memory of Tiger Woods. The community that comes from watching Woods compete, and the social capital that comes from capturing and sharing that experience with others? In Emanuel’s telling, that’s the kind of experience that AI can’t replicate.
“That just bodes well for music, live sports, live events,” he said. “This is status.”
And, as Emanuel knows all too well, where status exists, so does profit.
“We’re social animals,” Emanuel said. “You’re coming to a UFC fight, you’re a social guy. What are you gonna do? You’re gonna watch a lot of content — David Ellison’s conclusion — there’s gonna be more content than ever, and it costs zero. You’re going to be going to concerts, going to stand-up, 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 bet.”
Of course, Emanuel’s thinking is just that — a bet. There’s no telling if we’ll reach the world of AGI promised by the AI evangelists (who themselves have a financial incentive to believe in such optimistic arguments), just as there’s no telling that live events will be a value add in a world with more free time. Emanuel’s hypothesis rests upon the success of a series of other hypotheses.
In many ways, this is a microcosm of the moment for the largest economic bet of the post-Internet world. The range of outcomes still possible for AI is far broader than either its evangelists or its critics would like to admit, while the scale of the progress already achieved remains opaque. Are our current chatbots already forging a more efficient world, or are they merely helping a legion of white-collar workers achieve 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 gives to even simple questions? Your answers to these questions — and your beliefs about what those answers mean — depend largely upon 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 untangle, which is part of what makes AI so divisive. To the skeptics, it’s outrageous to live as if AI will become as revolutionary as its creators envision; to the optimists, it’s outrageous not to.
It’s this chasm that creates an opportunity for executives like Ari Emanuel. And right now, his money is on live events.
“I don’t know how to write an algorithm, I don’t know how to build a datacenter, I’m not in the chips business,” Emanuel said. “I just know how to create great live events, and live is the opposite bet of AI.”
You can watch Emanuel’s full Invest Like The Best interview at the link below.
