It has been an earth-shattering week of news in the world of pro wrestling. Just days after WWE announced a $5 billion broadcast partnership with Netflix and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was appointed to the TKO Board of Directors, a lawsuit was filed by a former WWE employee containing allegations of abuse and sex trafficking against Vince McMahon.
This has led to McMahon’s resignation from all responsibilities and roles within WWE and TKO - a hugely significant moment in the history of wrestling, as there are no blood members of the McMahon family involved with the company now for the first time.
The journey to this point really kicked off in June 2022, when the Wall Street Journal broke a story that Vince McMahon was being investigated for allegedly making non-disclosure payments to a number of female employees. At the time, this author posted an article drawing parallels between the real-life power struggle at the top of WWE and the fictional storylines from Succession, involving the Roy family.
And now the Succession/WWE parallels are so plentiful, we're even getting genius pro wrestling edits to the epic Succession theme music.
https://t.co/6TiZPofYMb pic.twitter.com/6Zld1mYGZT
— vince (@vincey1991) January 29, 2024
So as Vince McMahon’s downfall hits the global headlines and TKO leads WWE towards a new chapter, let’s look at how all the main players involved in this story have ended up.
Fair Warning: The next section of this article contains spoilers for the final season of Succession.
How Did We Get Here
The boardroom shake-up at WWE since June 2022 is a hard one to briefly summarise, but I’ll do my best. Soon after the original story from the Wall Street Journal, Vince McMahon announced he was retiring, while retaining a majority stake in the company. Just a few months after announcing her exit from the company, Stephanie McMahon returned as Chairwoman and Co-CEO while an investigation into her father’s conduct was to be carried out.
Stephanie was flanked by her husband, Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, as the head of WWE content, and the new Co-CEO Nick Khan, who had become the leading commercial executive at the company. This trio were all believed to have voted against a motion by Vince McMahon to have himself reinstated as chairman of the board just six months after he’d left. But the motion was successful and Vince McMahon was back by early 2023, on condition that his role would primarily focus on selling WWE to a new owner. His return coincided with Stephanie quitting the company entirely.
After months of speculation, that new owner was revealed to be the multimedia conglomerate Endeavour, who announced a merger between WWE and UFC, under a new parent-group TKO. The merger by TKO would retain Vince McMahon as Executive Chairman, with the board also including Levesque and Khan who remained in charge of WWE’s operations.
Meanwhile the issue of Vince McMahon’s alleged hush payments had never gone away, and many saw it as a ticking time bomb that threatened his long term status within the new ownership. That bomb exploded last week when Janel Grant, a former employee at WWE’s Connecticut headquarters, filed a lawsuit detailing a series of horrific allegations against McMahon and some of his associates. McMahon has publicly denied the allegations, but within 48 hours he had resigned. With a much weaker position than he had when he last stepped down in 2022, and given the severity of the allegations against him, it seems that now he is gone for good.
So at the time of writing, following a tumultuous couple of years, this is where the main players from this Succession saga are left.
Vince ‘Logan Roy’ McMahon
Although media mogul Rupert Murdoch is believed to be the main inspiration behind the Logan Roy character, there are some obvious parallels with Vince McMahon. The charisma, the lust for power, the vicious competitive edge and the relentless feuding with his children - it’s all there.
McMahon’s demise is not quite ‘suddenly dropping dead on a private jet’, and there is likely more of his own story yet to be told, as his legal issues rumble on. But both men seemed more willing to die on the throne, or even sell their life’s work purely to preserve their own position of influence, rather than gracefully bow out and hand over the keys to their kingdom. As Logan Roy once said, “Make your own fucking pile.”
Stephanie ‘Shiv’ McMahon
Perhaps the biggest surprise in all of this is that the first post-Vince leadership regime in WWE doesn’t include Stephanie. She has avoided the public eye since her exit and there has been some speculation on the status of her relationship with her father and her marriage.
Stephanie often looked like the front runner to take over WWE but her Succession dream was ultimately scuppered by clashes with her father. She may be out of the picture now, but at least there remains an obvious link to power in the form of her husband, much like Shiv Roy.
’Triple H’ Tom Wambsgans
Maybe it’s a bit unkind for Paul Levesque to be compared to the ultimate yes-man, corporate ass-kisser, Tom Wambsgans. But both men married into their dysfunctional royal families and when the game of succession played out, they were the last ones standing.
Triple H’s new position is strengthened by the credibility he has with the majority of wrestling fans following a legendary in-ring career and his impressive track record while booking NXT, and more recently Raw and Smackdown in Vince’s absence. His partnership with Nick Khan looks primed to lead WWE into the future.
‘Cousin’ Nick Khan
Okay, Nick Khan is in no way related to the McMahons, nor is he as comedically incompetent as Greg from Succession - so maybe this comparison is tenuous. But throughout his tenure he has navigated the various twists and turns in the McMahon family power struggle, starting as an outsider to finding himself as the main corporate player in WWE. There have been no reports thus far that Khan and Levesque secretly refer to themselves as ‘The Disgusting Brothers.’
Shane ‘The Eldest Boy’ McMahon
Long forgotten in the McMahon’s succession narrative is Shane, Vince’s eldest boy, who at various points in his WWE tenure has shown some similar traits to each of the Roy sons. Much like Kendall, he made his move by leaving WWE to ‘make it on his own’ but ultimately found that he could never stay away from his father’s orbit for too long.
Like Roman, his wild behaviour often came across like a cry for attention from his Dad - mainly in the form of his death-defying leaps from steel cages. But by the end he was playing the part of Connor Roy - an irrelevant player in the final Succession plan, burned by rejection and happy for the other schemers in the family business to get on with it.
The TKO Group joining the New York Stock Exchange pic.twitter.com/HfwMaNOtvt
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) September 12, 2023
Where Vince McMahon and WWE go from here will be very interesting. If HBO ever decide to create another drama about a boardroom struggle involving a publicly-traded family business, they could hardly go wrong with a serialised depiction of the McMahons in WWE.
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