Is Ari Emanuel on the verge of monopolizing boxing?

Dude's looking to change the Ali Act to take over boxing and he might be powerful enough to do it.

Ari Emanuel’s Friday appearance on The Pat McAfee Show is the ultimate TL;DR that explains how his “Endeavor flywheel” works and why he’s got a real chance to attain monopoly control over combat sports by adding boxing to his palette of mixed martial arts and professional wrestling.

The whole appearance is a flex for Emanuel in which he shows off his subtle but immense cultural control — which underlies the political power that might enable him to overthrow the Ali Act and monopolize boxing.

That’s usually Ari’s secret sauce, but McAfee is so busy fluffing Emanuel and talking up his power and influence in the entertainment and sports business that Ari relaxes and revels in his power.

While it appears from the conversation that Emanuel and Endeavor don’t directly represent McAfee, the former NFL punter turned YouTube mega-star does do commenting work for TKO’s WWE and he and Emanuel discuss a McAfee role in an upcoming Peter Berg movie.

So let’s just say Ari Emanuel is someone who can directly impact McAfee’s career in a big way. Plus there’s Ari’s relationship with Silver Lake investor Egon Durban who is seeking to buy part of the Las Vegas Raiders and McAfree and Ari discuss Emanuel’s potential interest in an ownership stake in the NFL’s Chicago Bears.

Note how McAfee opens the conversation by talking up Emanuel’s power and influence — Ari’s the man McAfee calls when he needs a hook-up to get last-minute dinner reservations for 20 in New Orleans during Super Bowl weekend.

McAfee also talks up Emanuel’s role as the inspiration for Entourage, the hit HBO series from the naughts featuring Jeremy Priven as “Ari Gold” — a thinly veiled portrait of Emanuel.

Emanuel also reveals the bottom-line reason he basically pawned his best-in-class Hollywood talent agency to buy his way into sports and sports entertainment. He realized early that only live content would truly generate mass cash in the streaming era.

Ari’s Super Power

Here’s a key part of the conversation in which Ari presents an incredibly revealing pocket biography:

Pat McAfee: How would you describe who you are to somebody?

Ari Emanuel: I was an agent for four years before I started the company Endeavor (in 1995). I had an idea what I wanted to do. We're now in 2025 (and it) worked out. yeah okay

Pat McAfee: So Endeavor is an agency?

Ari Emanuel: Endeavor is an agency. It's a marketing company. It's a licensing company. It's a lot of things.

What they’ll get into later is just how powerful controlling Endeavor makes Ari Emanuel. As the business representative of many of the talking heads you see on traditional media and the influencers you see online, Emanuel has a unique ability to control what topics are and are not discussed in front of the American public.