WWE Held An "All Hands On Deck" Meeting For Employees on Wednesday

WWE held an internal "all hands on deck" employee meeting at company headquarters on Wednesday, May 17, 2023.

CEO Nick Khan led the meeting, according to Mike Johnson of PWInsider. It's been described as a "rah-rah" meeting to praise everybody's hard work and express management's appreciation.

WWE is in the midst of merging with the UFC, the world's premiere mixed martial arts promotion. The combined entity will be known as TKO Group Holdings, as first reported by CNBC.

Mergers often bring the "elimination of redundancies." More simply put, a lot of people could lose their jobs. There's not a lot of overlap between WWE Superstars and UFC fighters, but each company has its own departments for finance, legal, accounting, marketing, public relations and human resources.

Last month, Nick Khan spoke on Lightshed Live about Endeavor's expectation to dramatically cut costs when the WWE and UFC merger is complete. They have integration teams who will help them cut at least $50 million from their overhead and the office is the first place they'll look. Khan said:

"We think 50 (million) is a really conservative number. We have integration teams now, we’re going to get those in shape, I think we’ll have a better sense of it in a month or two. We’re going to be pretty aggressive with them to make sure that, for our shareholders and for our company, our organization is as lean and mean as possible, and we’re going to rely on the Endeavor flywheel to make up the rest.”

These pending cuts have led to uncertainty and fear amongst WWE employees, who may be replaced by someone who currently works for UFC/Endeavor.

The PWInsider report notes, "There was no indication, warning or comment about potential impending cuts." This doesn't mean everybody is safe, but this has not been formally addressed as of this writing.