The Wheel of Greed

I have been a wrestling fan for most of my life. Not casually. Not ironically. I am the guy who can tell you which year Bret Hart left WWE (1997), who can recap the entire Attitude Era from memory, and who has spent more hours than I want to admit watching grown adults pretend to fight each other in their underwear. This is part of who I am. I bring it up in my blog. I bring it up with colleagues. I even bring it up in the classroom. So I was paying close attention when, earlier this month, the news broke that Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods of the New Day, and one of the longest running tag teams in WWE history, were leaving the company. The first story was that the departure was mutual. A few days later, the actual story came out. WWE had asked them, along with several other wrestlers on the roster, to restructure their existing contracts and accept significant pay cuts. They said no. So they walked.

If you are not a wrestling fan, none of those names mean anything to you, and that is fine. Because what happened to Kofi and Woods is not a wrestling story. It is a labor story. It is a class story. It is a story about the same dynamic that is grinding through working-class and middle-class people across this country every single day, just dressed up in spandex and pyrotechnics. We're going to walk through all of this together because there is a lot to unpack. This whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way and, combined with a video essay by Steve Shives that I have embedded at the bottom of this post, led me down a spiraling rabbit hole of inequality, consumerism, and greed. He said what I had been thinking, and most of the WWE numbers below come from his work.

The Numbers Are Obscene

WWE is currently owned by a parent company called TKO, which also owns the UFC. In 2025, WWE pulled in something like $1.7 billion in revenue. That number has been climbing every single year since 2009, and since TKO took over, it has been climbing faster. They have a $5 billion deal with Netflix for Monday Night Raw. They have a $1.6 billion deal with ESPN for their pay-per-views, or "Premium Live Events" as they call them now. They have a deal with the Saudi Arabian government that pays them $50 million per show, and over $200 million for next year's WrestleMania alone. The company is making more money than it has ever made in its history. Ticket prices are a piece of that pie. In the video that inspired this post, Steve Shives talked about the ridiculous pricing of tickets compared to when he last went over a decade ago compared to today. Out of curiosity, I decided to the same, and like him, I went to Ticketmaster and looked up an upcoming episode of Raw. The cheapest available seat, way up in the nosebleeds, are about $70 each. The most expensive seats on the floor facing the hard camera are going for over $1000 each! For one episode of a TV show. No matches announced. No specific advertised attractions. Just "come watch Raw."

The last time I went to a Monday Night Raw event in person was about ten years ago, and I paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 for some really good seats not too far from the floor. As a matter of face, here is a picture I took when I got there back in April of 2016. What a view!

Seats this close now are the $500 - $600 range! This is not a supply issue. You can always get tickets to these events. This is nothing more than "value extraction" for the sake of greed. Things got so bad that the company actually wrote it into a recent storyline. CM Punk, on the road to WrestleMania, looked into a camera and demanded that WWE lower the ticket prices, and the live crowd lost their minds in approval. When the highest paid creative team in pro wrestling has to write the fact that your ticket prices are too high into the main event of WrestleMania to manage fan resentment, that might be a sign that your ticket prices are too high!

The company is making money. The fans are paying for it. So the wrestlers must be doing pretty well too, right? They are the product. They are the entire reason any of this works. Surely they are getting their cut. Yes they are paid six and seven figure salaries, but what this represents is where things get ugly. You see, the whole reason Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods left, was because the WWE has been asking wrestlers to take pay cuts. Record profits, and the performers whom this business would not exist without, are being asked to take pay cuts. The same is not true of the executives running the show. Per the publicly available SEC filings:

• TKO CEO Ari Emanuel got a 272 percent raise. His 2025 compensation was around $67 million.
• TKO President Mark Shapiro got a 33 percent raise. He pulled in $43 million.
• TKO CFO Andrew Schleimer got a 198 percent raise. $23 million.
• WWE President Nick Khan got a 304 percent raise. $24 million.

While Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods were being told the company needed them to take less, four executives at the top of the food chain collectively took home about $157 million dollars, with raises ranging from a third more to nearly quadruple what they made the year before. No WWE wrestler, not even the biggest stars on the roster, makes that kind of money. The top of the wrestler pay scale tops out in the low single digit millions. The bottom of the executive pay scale starts in the low double digit millions.

 
As Steve Shives to eloquently pit in the video -- how many fans, in the entire history of WWE, have ever bought a ticket to see company president Nick Khan walk out to the ring and cut a promo? How many people have ever subscribed to a streaming service to catch TKO CEO Ari Emanuel? How many of the obscenely priced WrestleMania tickets this year were sold because the buyer thought, "Man, I just have to see what Andrew Schleimer is going to do in the main event"? If the answer is not zero, it is so close to zero that the distinction does not matter. The wrestlers are the product. Without them, the product does not exist. The labor creates the value. The executives extract it. That is the entire mechanism in plain language. And I am not being dramatic when I say this. I am being almost mechanically descriptive. The athletes do the work that creates the revenue, and the people in the corner offices take the lion's share of that revenue and call it their compensation for sitting in rooms that the athletes will never see.

This Is Not Just a Wrestling Story

If you are still with me even though you do not care about wrestling, this is the part where I tell you why I dragged you through all of that. What is happening to WWE wrestlers is happening to working-class and middle-class people in every industry in this country. The company brings in record revenue. The executives get massive raises. The people doing the actual work are told the company cannot afford to pay them what they were promised, and that they should be grateful to even have the gig. The labor creates the value. The capital extracts it. The receipts get shorter every year. It is happening to teachers. To nurses. To warehouse workers, baristas, adjuncts, retail employees, delivery drivers, ride share drivers, freelance creatives. Companies post record profits. Executive compensation balloons. Stock buybacks hit historic highs. And the workers who actually do the thing the company sells are told to do more with less, to absorb the rising cost of healthcare, to take on more responsibilities without titles or pay bumps, and to keep smiling through it because at least they have a job. Push back, and they are told they are entitled, or lazy, or out of touch with how the economy really works.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the MacBook Neo, and in it I introduced Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification, the term he coined to describe the way platforms and products get progressively worse over time as they prioritize engagement, advertising, growth metrics, and shareholder returns over the actual experience of the person using them. Facebook. Amazon. Google search. Every major streaming service. The pattern is the same. The product gets less good. The price goes up. The user gets squeezed for more attention, more data, more money. The company makes more, the customer gets less. WWE is doing the exact same thing to its product. The ticket prices keep climbing. The shows keep getting longer, but most of the run time is filler. House shows, the non-televised events that used to give fans an affordable, intimate way to see wrestling in their hometowns, have basically been eliminated. The pay-per-views moved behind a new paywall, this time at ESPN. The storytelling has gotten formulaic in a way that is genuinely depressing if you have been watching this stuff for thirty years. You can almost see the engagement metrics driving the booking. Wrestler X gets a viral moment, so the creative direction pivots around them for three weeks until the engagement plateaus, and then it is on to the next one. Faction storylines, which used to be the heart of pro wrestling, get cycled through and discarded so fast that nothing has time to actually mean anything. The presentations on TV look like every other sports broadcast on the dial now. Flat. Bland. Corporate. Sterile lighting, sterile staging, sterile commentary. The thing that used to feel weird and alive and slightly dangerous feels manufactured and brittle. You can see the hamster wheel. You can see the algorithm. You can see the boardroom. That is enshittification. Charge more, give less. Squeeze every drop of revenue out of the existing customer base, then squeeze a little harder. Reduce the cost of producing the product by cutting the labor share, the talent share, the parts of the show that actually require care and craft. Hand the savings to the executives. Tell the customer that this is what they wanted. 

When You Do Not Own Anything

We do not own things anymore. I think about this a lot. We used to buy a movie. Now we rent access to it from a service that can yank it from the library whenever the licensing deal expires. We used to buy a song. Now we pay a monthly fee to stream it on a platform that pays the artist a fraction of a cent per play. We used to buy a video game on a cartridge and play it forever. Now we buy a license to play it as long as the servers stay online, and the moment those servers shut down, the game is gone. We used to buy software. Now we rent it. Adobe, Microsoft Office, your accounting program, your text editor, the app that helps your kid do their homework. All of it, a monthly fee. Forever. And if you stop paying, you do not just lose access to new features. In a lot of cases, you lose access to your own files.

Cars are getting heated seats locked behind subscriptions. Refrigerators want a cloud account. Printers want you to subscribe to their ink program. Your TV wants to sell ads on the home screen of the device you already paid for. The deal is no longer "you buy a thing and the thing is yours." The deal is "you pay forever for the privilege of using the thing, and the company can change the terms at any time, and if you do not like it, your only recourse is to stop using it and lose everything you had on it." Ownership is being legally and culturally redefined right out from under us. This is connected to the WWE situation, even though it may not look like it at first glance. The mechanism is the same. Extract as much value as possible from the customer. Return as little as possible to the worker. Treat the people on both ends of the transaction as inputs in a spreadsheet rather than as human beings with lives. The wrestlers are independent contractors with no real ownership of their careers. The fans are subscribers with no real ownership of what they are paying for. Everyone is renting. Only the executives own anything.

The Math Stopped Working

I am a millennial. I am 40 years old. I have five college degrees, I am working on my sixth (doctorate), and I do not own a home. I rent. My peers, by and large, are in the same situation. Many of them are doing very well by every external measure of professional achievement, and they still cannot afford to buy a house in the cities or even the suburbs they live in. According to Redfin's analysis of Current Population Survey data, the millennial homeownership rate as of 2025 sits at about 55 percent. That sounds reasonable until you look at where the prior generations were by the same age, and realize an entire generation is sitting a decade or more behind the curve. The financial markers of adulthood that used to be standard, the house, the family, the retirement savings, the one stable career, have moved out of reach for an entire generation. And it is not because we did not work hard. It is because the math stopped working.

A bachelor's degree used to be the ticket. Now it is barely entry level in most professions. A master's degree, in a lot of fields, is required to even get a conversation with someone lest you have the AI algorithm that scanned your resume automatically reject you. The credentials inflate. The salaries do not. Housing costs accelerate. Wages flatten. Healthcare costs climb. Childcare costs climb. Groceries climb. The salary increase you got this year was three percent. Inflation was four. Congratulations, you got a raise and you are still poorer than you were last year. And on top of all of that, young people are now looking at the numbers and saying out loud, "we cannot afford to have children." The U.S. fertility rate has been declining for years and recently hit historic lows. The reasons are not mysterious. Surveys consistently show that younger generations are choosing not to have kids, or are delaying having kids, in significant part because they cannot afford it. Childcare alone, in many parts of the country, costs more than a mortgage. A hospital delivery can run tens of thousands of dollars even with insurance. The cost of raising one child to age 18 has been estimated at over $300,000.

You cannot have the family if you cannot afford the family. You cannot buy the house if you cannot afford the house. You cannot retire if you cannot save. The standard American life template, the one most of us were raised to expect, has become financially out of reach for a huge portion of the people who were promised it. This is not happening because young people are entitled, or lazy, or do not work hard. It is happening because the value created by their labor is being siphoned upward, year after year, into the hands of executives, shareholders, and the asset-owning class. The pie keeps getting bigger. The slice we get keeps getting smaller. And when we complain about it, we are told to budget better, or to stop ordering avocado toast, or to be grateful that we even have jobs, while the executives running our companies are taking 272 percent raises. It is all the same story. WWE wrestlers, baristas, teachers, nurses, adjuncts, warehouse workers, and millennials sitting in apartments wondering if they will ever own a home or start a family. The system is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is move value from the people who create it to the people who already have most of it.

 

It All Connects, and It Is All About Greed

I want to be careful here. I am not trying to argue that pro wrestling is the most important issue facing the working class. It obviously is not. What I am saying is that what happened to Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods is a clean, visible, easy to understand version of what is happening, at a much larger scale, to almost all of us. The numbers are public. The pay split is documented. The greed is on the record. The labor creates the value. The executives take it. When the workers ask for a fair share, they are told the company cannot afford it, even though the company has never made more money in its history. The reason this works, year after year, in industry after industry, is that the workers are isolated. They negotiate individually. They have no collective leverage. When you have a union at your workplace, your raises track with inflation and your healthcare gets covered. When you do not, you get a token cost-of-living adjustment that does not actually cover the cost of living, and you watch your CEO clear another $20 million bonus. Solidarity is not a feel-good word. It is a mechanism. It is the thing that keeps wages tracking with productivity. It is the thing that, when it goes away, allows the gap between the top and the bottom to balloon into the most extreme inequality this country has seen since the late 1800s.

Kofi and Woods walked. That is one form of resistance. But it is a costly one, and most workers cannot afford to take it. They had the platform, the credibility, and the financial cushion to leave a company that wanted to underpay them. Most people in most industries do not have any of that. They cannot afford to walk. So they stay, and they absorb the pay cuts or lack of raises, and they keep smiling through it, and the executives keep getting their raises, and the rest of us keep getting told that this is just how the economy works. It is not how the economy works. It is how this version of the economy works. The economy is a set of human choices and human institutions, not a force of nature. It will not be unchosen by the people benefiting from it. It will only change when the people on the losing end of it decide, collectively, that they are done losing.

 

What I Want You To Take From This

If you watched what happened with Kofi and Woods and felt nothing, that is fine. They are wealthy professional wrestlers. They are going to be okay. But the dynamic behind it, the way value gets extracted from the people who create it, the way executive pay balloons while worker pay stagnates, the way the company always cries poverty when it is time to pay the workers and always finds the money when it is time to pay itself, that is the dynamic eating the middle class. That is the dynamic making housing unaffordable. That is the dynamic making families financially impossible. That is the dynamic turning every product into a subscription and every job into a hustle. That is the dynamic running the country right now.

You can see it clearly in wrestling because wrestling is small enough that the whole picture fits in one frame. The labor is named and visible. The executives are named and visible. The revenue numbers are public. The pay split is documented in a lawsuit. The whole machine is exposed. The same machine is operating everywhere else. It just has better lighting and a louder PR department. The next time someone tells you that wages have to stay low because the company cannot afford to pay more, ask where the money is going instead. The next time someone tells you that the economy is too fragile to absorb a fair pay raise for working people, ask how it is robust enough to absorb a 272 percent raise for a CEO. The next time you hear someone say that millennials are entitled, or that Gen Z is lazy, or that nobody wants to work anymore, ask them when the last time was that the people at the top of their company took a pay cut so the people on the floor could get a raise.

The video that inspired by this post by YouTuber Steve Shives.