WWE CEO Nick Khan Leads 'Morale Boosting Meeting' For All Employees

Speculation continues to run rampant about how exactly the merger of WWE and UFC into TKO Corp, a company controlled by UFC parent company Endeavor, will affect WWE, particularly when it comes to layoffs. That's only natural, since Endeavor quickly laid off approximately 15% of UFC's staff when they bought the MMA promotion in 2016, and Mark Shapiro, Endeavor's President and COO, has already said that similar layoffs due to "redundancies" are to be expected. On Wednesday, though, according to PWInsider, WWE CEO Nick Khan attempted to assuage those fears via a very "rah rah" meeting with all employees.

The report states that there wasn't much of substance in the meeting, calling it "basically a morale boosting meeting," one that was about little more than talking about how great everything and everyone was doing. There were no announcements, and nothing said about any potential cuts of current staff that could happen once the merger is finalized.

The 2016 UFC layoffs were particularly headline-grabbing at the time in large part because of the name value of some of the employees who were let go. UFC Hall of Famers and former champions Chuck Liddell and Matt Hughes were relieved of their nebulous office jobs, with UFC President Dana White saying that it wasn't his money being spent anymore, so the call was not his. Soon after this, former UFC fighter Chael Sonnen claimed on his podcast that the one former fighter with an office job to not get laid off, Forrest Griffin, was kept on because he was the only one to treat it as a "real job" and actually show up to work at the UFC offices.