Tony Khan is one of those bidding to buy WWE as part of its 2023 sale, according to court documents in an ongoing shareholder lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
As first reported by POST Wrestling, Khan-backed company Base 10 is bidding alongside Formula 1 parent company Liberty Media and private equity firm KKR. Endeavor ultimately won the bid, spurring the formation of TKO, and the lawsuit stemmed from the belief that Vince McMahon had preempted the sale to secure his place in the company following the merger.
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The complaint has been recently unredacted and includes defendants’ responses to various paragraphs of the complaint. It was these responses that revealed the identities of the bidders and were relevant to the case, as the main bidders other than Endeavor were revealed.
“Base 10 is the owner of All Elite Wrestling, a professional wrestling promotion that will clearly have significant synergies with WWE,” the filing reads.
POST noted in its report that Base 10 is not legally registered as the owner of AEW, and legal documents unrelated to the lawsuit indicate that AEW’s parent company is Beatnik Investments; both Base 10 and AEW are owned by the Khan family, with Warner Bros. Discovery holding a minority stake in the latter.
Base 10 was incorporated in Florida in 2014, with Khan as its sole executive, and its corporate address is Jacksonville Jaguars Stadium.
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Base 10 is reportedly the smallest of four known offers. Base 10 offered stock deals worth $6.9 billion, KKR offered $8.5 to $8.7 billion, Liberty Media offered $8.5 to $8.9 billion, and Endeavor won the bidding war with an offer of $8.5 billion, POST estimated.
Plaintiffs in the shareholder lawsuit claim that the competing offers were not allowed to fully develop, thereby preventing a truly competitive process that could have resulted in higher bids. The defendant denies this claim.
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Read the original article about Wrestling Inc.