Vince McMahon’s latest stock transaction was reported in a filing Thursday. He disposed of 3,484,000 TKO shares, related to his margin loan with Morgan Stanley, which was initiated in March 2020, shortly after the XFL folded. Vince got $85 million in cash at the time from the loan.
March 2024 was the scheduled month for the agreement to be settled, in which many shares would be transferred to Morgan Stanley in 15 installments throughout the month, from March 5 to March 25. How many shares Morgan Stanley got was contingent on complex math involving what the stock price would be this month.
I believe Vince would’ve ended up transferring about 2.25 million of the 3.484 million shares to Morgan Stanley, but instead the parties amended the agreement at the beginning of the month for Morgan Stanely to just get all 3.484 million shares in exchange for an additional payment to Vince of $100 million, which is close to market value for the incremental shares being transacted.
In other words, this wasn’t an entirely spontaneous stock sale, but Vince did decide to sell off more than the original agreement required.
To review, earlier this month, in a more straightforward transaction, on March 4, Vince did sell 5,350,000 shares, liquidating about $412 million. And in November he sold 8,400,000 shares for about $642 million.
After his stock transactions, Vince now has 11,518,099 shares, which is about 6.7% of all TKO shares. He has the same percentage of voting power.
Plus, due to TKO’s special one-time dividend that paid out upon the closing of the WWE-UFC merger in September, Vince received about $111 million.
The transactions above total more than $1.2 billion in cash that Vince has received since September.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.