I read TKO’s Q1 2026 earnings report this week and I genuinely need someone to explain to me how a company posts $1.597 billion in quarterly revenue — up 26 percent year-over-year — and then tells its wrestlers to take 50 percent pay cuts or get fired. I am asking this sincerely. I would like to understand the math.

WWE’s cut alone was $475.7 million for the quarter. That’s a $84.2 million increase from the same period last year. Live events and hospitality nearly doubled from $76.3 million to $123.5 million, thanks in part to the Saudi Royal Rumble payday. EBITDA margins went from 50 to 54 percent. TKO’s full-year guidance is $5.7 billion. They returned a billion dollars in capital to shareholders and authorized another billion in buybacks.

And the wrestlers, the people whose bodies generate all of this, got told to renegotiate downward.

Mark Shapiro went on the earnings call and bragged that the Netflix move tripled WWE’s audience. He’s right. Raw has been on Netflix’s Global Top 10 for 47 of the 52 weeks it’s aired. Three million viewers a week, every week. The $5 billion Netflix deal is the single largest media rights agreement in wrestling history, and TKO’s leadership spent the last month reminding everyone how transformative it’s been.

Then they fired 25 people on April 24. Then they asked the survivors to take less money. Then Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods, who signed five-year extensions barely a year ago, were given two days to accept restructured contracts. They walked instead.

https://twitter.com/SeanRossSapp/status/2051388156893630604

Kingston posted a statement that read like a man who’d spent 17 years pretending the arrangement was fair and finally ran out of patience: “Do not ever compromise or accept less than your due when it comes to your worth.” Woods said the same thing in different words. They left millions on the table because the principle mattered more than the check. Twenty-nine people have departed since WrestleMania 42.

Now look at what happened on the other side of the ledger. Nick Khan, the WWE president who oversees these cuts, saw his compensation jump 304 percent in a single year, from $6 million to $24 million. Ari Emanuel’s package went from $18 million to $67 million. Shapiro went from $32 million to $43 million. Khan just signed a new deal through 2030 that includes an $11 million signing equity award, annual stock grants up to $8.5 million, and bonus eligibility at 200 percent of his base salary. The man who tells wrestlers their contracts need restructuring got restructured upward by a factor of four.

This is the part where TKO’s apologists will tell you the reduced live schedule justifies the pay cuts — fewer house shows means fewer dates means the old contracts were based on outdated workloads. And I’d be more sympathetic to that argument if the company weren’t simultaneously posting record revenue, paying its executives nine-figure packages, and classifying wrestlers as independent contractors specifically so it doesn’t have to provide health insurance or benefits. You don’t get to claim the workload changed as justification for paying less when you’re making more money than you’ve ever made. That’s not an economic argument. That’s just greed with a spreadsheet attached.

The Netflix boom was supposed to be the rising tide. WWE has never been more popular, more valuable, more culturally embedded. Per Wrestling Inc, TKO tasked WWE with trimming “millions” from payroll while the quarterly report showed exactly where those millions already exist — in stock awards and executive bonuses. A 22-year-old taking bumps five nights a week for the league minimum gets no insurance and a contract that can be cut at any time. Nick Khan gets $11 million in restricted stock as a signing bonus.

That’s not a business strategy. That’s a protection racket in athleisure.