William Morris Endeavor. The #1 (#2, depending on who you ask) agency in the world.

TKO. UFC. WWE. IMG. On Location. PBR.

Superagent. Oprah Winfrey. Martin Scorsese. Mark Wahlberg. Dwayne Johnson. Larry David. Michael Bay. Seth MacFarlane. Tyler Perry. Donald Trump.

Entourage. Ari Gold.

Empire. Conquest. RAGE.

↓↓↓

In March of 2025, private equity giant Silver Lake closed its $25.0B take-private of Endeavor, marking the official closing of a chapter for a certain Hollywood kingpin.

The founder of Endeavor, Ari Emanuel, netted $174M personally. But that, I would argue, wouldn't even be his biggest win of the year.

With Endeavor safely in the hands of a PE titan, WME Sports being spun out to run independently, Patrick Whitesell launching WIN Sports Group and WTSL with Jason Lublin, and TKO ripping past a 20x EBITDA multiple on the public markets, Ari pulled a rabbit out of the hat, as if he didn't already have enough going on.

In October of 2025, Ari Emanuel raised $2.0B from an institutional Rolodex most companies (SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic excepted) could only dream of – Apollo, Ares, RedBird, QIA, a16z, and many others – cherry-picked the best live event assets out of the broader IMG-Endeavor portfolio, and launched a new live events HoldCo., MARI.

The initial cohort of assets included the Miami and Madrid Opens (tennis), the Barrett-Jackson classic car auction (lifestyle), and Art Frieze (culture).

But the cherry on top of a year that will surely go down in entertainment history came when Ari sat down with longtime interviewer Patrick O'Shaughnessy on the Invest Like the Best podcast and delivered what is, by all accounts, the most repeated thesis I've heard in the year since . . .

The “Anti-AI” bet.

Listen. To. This. Podcast.

If you work in sports, you have surely heard some iteration of this line of thinking. Gary Vee calls it "the rise of analog," and someone on every panel inevitably throws around phrases like "scarce assets."

And the argument goes something like this:

When I sat down and graded my three-year-old whitepaper on the evolution of sports as an asset class, it was clear that live events HoldCo. platforms were one of the major categories I completely missed, so much so that the subject deserved its own dedicated essay.

This is that essay.

“IRL” (In Real Life) used to be a dig or an insult at the guy who still lives in his parent’s basement, was chronically online, and wouldn’t stop playing video games.

But as most things do, the tide turns, and the phrase “IRL” has somehow now flipped to being premium.

There are more mega-trend intersections here than anywhere else I can think of across the sports, media, and entertainment economy.

And while I will walk through the practical argument, as well as the classic patterns 🧭 At the Center of it all, the real story is how this thesis and those patterns manifest in real-life companies.

I can think of no better way to demonstrate the power of live event HoldCos. than to walk through a few of my favorite examples.

Class is in session, let’s begin. 📝 📝 📝

#IYKYK

As you would hear if you clicked the link to the ILTB podcast, the anti-AI bet thesis rests on the intersection of a few mega-trends. We'll take them one at a time:

↓↓↓

Consumer spending has been moving from goods to experiences for most of the last quarter century.

Spending on live entertainment has grown 385% since 2000, more than double the 178% growth in total personal consumption over the same period and nearly 10x the growth of movie theaters.

The same shift shows up at the top of the market.

Bain's luxury data has experiences (hospitality, cruises, fine dining) compounding at 9% annually through the 2010s, faster than both luxury goods categories, and in 2024 it was the only luxury segment still growing while the other two contracted.

The consumer behind this is young, affluent, and premium-seeking (thank you, K-shaped economy), a generation that lives its life through experiences rather than possessions, which is why demand is going not just to more events but to destination-driven, VIP, and higher-priced ones.

↓↓↓

Every major structural reduction in working hours over the last 150 years has produced a new leisure economy.

The collapse of the six-day workweek freed up 17 hours per week for the average American worker between 1880 and 1920.

The paid holidays and two-week vacations that unions won in the 1940s and 1950s gave us Disneyland and the modern NFL and NBA, and the PC and internet era gave us low-cost airlines and the online travel boom.

The current version is hybrid work + AI gains.

Office visits fell 41% on Mondays and 53% on Fridays between 2019 and 2024, which is why Stanford economist Nick Bloom now says that "Thursday night is the new Friday night."

Across most ticketing platforms, midweek sales are growing faster than weekend sales, which have also kept growing.

That means demand is not simply moving from the weekend into the week but expanding the number of nights an event can sell out.

If Steve Cohen is right that the four-day workweek is "an eventuality," the time AI frees up will only extend that runway further.

↓↓↓

The more synthetic content floods the feed (see: LinkedIn AI cesspool slop), the less any single piece of it is worth, and the premium on what’s valuable moves to what AI cannot manufacture.

That is: a first-person POV, in-the-room human moment that happens once and cannot be reproduced.

Ian Charles calls it "the loneliness epidemic," and Brian Chesky describes it as "a void in people's lives, which is people living in the real world, making real connections with real people, having real experiences, real memories."

The dividend is asymmetric because the technology that commoditizes the digital version of an event (the highlight, the recap, the AI-generated song) also raises the scarcity value of the live version.

So experiences get a double AI uplift: first from the time AI frees up and then again from the premium AI creates.

↓↓↓

Private capital is pouring into AI at a pace with no modern precedent.

SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and dozens of other mega-AI companies are accomplishing something we've never seen before:

(1) The largest wealth creation event in history.

The SpaceX IPO minted ~4,400 millionaires and ~400 centi-millionaires. Anthropic's pending $2.0T IPO is going to be 4.8x the combined value of the 33 biggest IPOs in San Francisco history. Uber, Airbnb, Visa, DoorDash, Twitter, Figma, and 27 others add up to $413B.

Which leads to . . .

(2) Capital allocators are over-indexed on AI.

Top VC/PE firms and their partners now have billions locked up in just a few AI companies, concentrating their financial interests. And if personal finance 101 taught us anything, it is that diversification reduces idiosyncratic risk.

Which leads to . . .

(3) Tech money is flooding into sports.

Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger (Lakers), Marc Stad (Timberwolves), Vinod Khosla (Seahawks), Jeff Bezos (Liverpool FC), and the list goes on.

Concentrated exposure in data centers, frontier labs, and the Mag 7 begs for diversification into the other end of the barbell, which does not carry the same underlying risk.

Live events, sports, and entertainment sit at that other end, and notice how the logic runs in two directions simultaneously:

That is how you get AI-forward a16z writing checks into a live events HoldCo.

↓↓↓

The public markets have already started to price this in.

From January 2024 — August 2026, a basket of live entertainment public stocks (Live Nation, MSG Entertainment, Sphere, and CTS Eventim) returned +153%.

That beat the Mag 7 at +111% and was nearly 2.5x the S&P 500's +63%.

Broadcast returned +27%, and theme parks fell 38%.

Interestingly, theme parks are the most useful data point on the chart. They are an experience business that sits squarely inside the thesis, and they still got crushed.

That suggests the market is not rewarding "experiences" as a category so much as it is rewarding scarce, event-driven, culturally anchored moments over repeatable, commoditized ones.

This distinction lies at the heart of the pattern underneath the anti-AI bet.

To add nuance to Ari's thesis, I want to point back to what I wrote two weeks ago:

When you really think about it, "live" in and of itself is not actually the scarce thing.

A live event can be produced: collect enough capital, a competent operator, and a permit, and you can stand up a festival, a tournament, or a touring property in 12-18 months.

This world is full of people doing exactly that, so if the thesis were simply "live," we would be seeing a lot more successful live event platforms. But we aren’t.

For every Live Nation home run acquisition (Austin City Limits, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo) we see, there are a dozen Fyre Festivals.

So the asset isn't necessarily the live event itself. It can't be.

The asset, then, has to be the pattern underneath: the habit the event has accumulated in a population.

The Mutua Madrid Open is valuable because a generation of Spanish tennis fans has organized its Mays around it, and because the tournament sits at a fixed point in a calendar that people have internalized over time.

Hyde Park Winter Wonderland is scarce because London families have a 20-year habit of going each December, and because the people who went as children are now taking their own children.

So when Wimbledon reports that it welcomed 550,151 guests over the 2026 fortnight, I read that as the product of 149 years of accumulated participation and an event so steeped in heritage that it still measures itself in "fortnights."

Matthew Lloyd-Thomas of Milky Way Park framed the underlying human pattern as someone's "third thing."

Meaning, when people introduce themselves, they tend to name something about their family or where they are from, then what they do for work, and then a third thing.

The third thing is the pursuit, the obsession, the thing they would rather talk about than either of the first two.

That third thing is where identity gets deposited, and it is where accumulated participation is built.

But accumulated participation is just that. Accumulated.

The input is time. No amount of capital can buy more of it, and no amount of talent can accelerate it.

This asset won't show up on the balance sheet (maybe under "Goodwill"?), and it is one of the rarest things across the entire sports and live entertainment complex, which is precisely why it is the one worth owning.

So how do the anti-AI bet and the pattern of accumulated participation manifest in real assets?

If you were building one of these platforms today, what would you actually do?

The rest of this essay is how the people already doing it have answered that question.

Launched in October of 2025, MARI – Mark Shapiro and Ari Emanuel (clever, isn’t it?) – owns-and-operates (O&O) premium live event assets across four verticals:

Ari raised $2B, went out and acquired a basket of assets that are likely doing north of ~$150M of EBITDA cumulatively, and assembled one of the most premium, Tier 1 IP live event portfolios in the world.

And he did it all in under a year. Incredible.

Across the entire MARI portfolio there are 47 unique live events, some of which (like Frieze) run multiple editions in multiple cities (London, New York, Seoul), but most of which are completely independent from one another.

MARI surely owns 100% of some properties and a majority of others, and these businesses all have strong management teams who have run them for years (see: Craig Jackson, son of Russ Jackson, co-founder of the Barrett-Jackson classic car auction).

While they all run as separate businesses under the MARI TopCo. umbrella, you better believe that Ari, who according to this WSJ article detailing his takeover of William Morris in the early 2000s does not like to report to anyone, has taken over the reins as Commander in Chief and orchestrated a coordinated operating effort to juice the commercial output of each property, thereby adding more EBITDA to the MARI TopCo.

The playbook would be rather straightforward, drawn on Ari's years of acquiring 40+ properties and running marquee live event properties at Endeavor/TKO like the UFC, WWE, and PBR.

The centralized operations at MARI TopCo. would drive cross-platform synergies in the form of cross-selling inventory, bundling marketing, multi-event staging, and most importantly, data.

Not to mention that Ari is historically known to be a bit of a pitbull, and I would bet he rolls into town like the mafia, ready to juice these properties for what they are worth.

Case in point: Ari and Mark likely called their contacts in the Gulf and agreed to terms that will bring Frieze to Abu Dhabi on a long-term (likely 10+ years) basis.

That is millions of dollars of EBITDA Ari just picked up off the floor.

If we assume that MARI has executed ~5 of these types of deals and already integrated its ticketing and technology platforms, TodayTix and BucketListers, across the portfolio, then we can estimate that they have driven 10%? 20%? of value creation?

This is a multi-nine-figure bullet train.

But if that weren't already enough, last month MARI announced it had set its eyes on something even bigger.

Acquiring ATG Entertainment from Providence Equity will bring 70+ O&O musical theater venues across Broadway, the West End, and the rest of Europe into the portfolio.

ATG is being acquired for a reported $6.0B, and based on the mid-teens EBITDA multiples that other live event platforms trade at on the public markets, MARI is adding another ~$400M to its bottom line.

This acquisition will expand MARI geographically (Europe), categorically (theater), and by asset type (real estate), and the combined MARI-ATG NewCo. will be doing ~$550M of EBITDA at a mid-teens multiple.

Zero → $8-9B TEV in one year. Wow.

↓↓↓

The amazing part is that Ari has told the Endeavor story publicly many times over. Listen to a few of his interviews and you'll understand the full picture:

Silver Lake wanted Endeavor to be an agency, because agencies have predictable fee-based revenue streams.

Those fees are long-dated. If an agent puts The Rock in a movie, that movie will pay out over the next x many years, meaning they essentially function like an annuity and are easily underwritable.

When Silver Lake took Endeavor private, the live event assets were sold off to pay down the debt load.

Live was where Ari wanted to be, so he went and raised money for a new vehicle.

He had learned two main things from where the WME / TKO / Endeavor saga went wrong:

Well I would say he’s certainly learned his lesson.

But most importantly, look at the assets MARI acquired and think about the depth of those properties' accumulated participation. It is off the charts.

If you are Ari Emanuel, you can run this playbook, raise capital into a HoldCo., acquire live event assets, and then build an integrated operating platform powering it, with Tier 1 IP.

If you are anyone else, you can run the same playbook with Tier 2, niche IP.

What follows are the companies running this same playbook, sequenced by how much accumulated participation the underlying IP carries.

Milky Way Park, founded by ex-TCG investor Matt Lloyd-Thomas, is a HoldCo. for extraordinary sports and adventure experiences, built on the stated ambition of owning the leading experiential operators in a handful of niche outdoor sports that people have lifelong relationships with.

It currently holds Thomson Bike Tours, founded 25 years ago and now the largest tour operator to the Tour de France, and Alpenglow Expeditions in climbing and backcountry skiing.

Adjacent categories for future expansion would include fly fishing, trail running, sailing, scuba, and more.

Thomson Bike Tours, Alpenglow Expeditions, and any future acquisitions all operate independently, but central services (finance, back office, operations software, etc.) are consolidated cross-portfolio at the Milky Way Park HoldCo.

MLT describes Milky Way Park as the LVMH of outdoor experiences. Importantly, this means each business maintains its independent brand (Louis Vuitton, Dior, etc.), and thus its identity-driven relationship with its customer.

What comes through in my conversations with Matt, and in Brent's podcast with him, is that these customers are not tourists who happened to book a bike trip.

They are cyclists who booked a cycling trip.

The sport is the identity, and the operator is simply the vehicle through which that identity gets expressed for one week a year.

This is the “third thing” from before.

It is also, quite openly, a sale into the K-shaped economy. These customers are wealthy, and they are willing to spend real money on premium outdoor experiences that most people would not consider a vacation at all.

Which is what makes the cross-sell so obvious.

If your customer is the kind of person who organizes his year around backcountry skiing and climbing, it stands to reason that he would also want the scuba expedition, the fly fishing lodge, and the sailing week.

The customer relationship is not with the actual operator but with the way of living, and that relationship travels across categories.

So if Matt can acquire a handful of these targeted "forever" businesses, he is positioned to do two things at once:

And underneath both sits the pattern of accumulated participation.

No one at Thomson Bike Tours created a customer's relationship with cycling. No one at Alpenglow created a customer's relationship with the mountain.

Those relationships were deposited over the course of years across hundreds of quiet early mornings and cold climbs, long before a HoldCo. showed up to underwrite them.

That is precisely why the assets Matt is going after are some of the most durable intellectual property I can think of, and it is why the same pattern that makes the Madrid Open worth owning also makes a niche bike tour operator in the Pyrenees worth owning.

Teton Ridge occupies the western and rodeo niche, and it is sports, media, and entertainment in the fullest sense of that phrase:

Backed by TWG Global under Mark Walter and Thomas Tull, and chaired by Princeton football alum Shawn Colo '94, Teton is THE dominant player in the western niche, and it is not even close.

The American Rodeo draws over 40k attendees across the two-day event, PBR teams are fetching valuations upwards of $50M, and owning the Cowboy Channel gives Teton a distribution asset that no other operator in the category controls.

Although Mark Walter is in a bit of a situation currently, TWG practically functions as permanent capital, backed by a mix of sovereign wealth money (Mubadala, UAE) and insurance float, which is admittedly what got Walter into the situation he is in now.

Teton's platform capture within the western niche is actually incredible. 

At one point they literally owned a 618-acre horse breeding ranch (TR9) and equestrian facility in Weatherford, TX, which they sold for $45M, as well as a 100+ performance horse herd that brought $28M at auction in a single day, including a record $5.6M stallion.

But again, notice what is underneath: a live events HoldCo., backed by permanent capital, built on the pattern of accumulated participation.

Western culture was built over the course of centuries in America, and this Texan (me) knows it isn't going anywhere.

Unrivaled Sports is building this same model in its niche: youth sports.

I put them slightly beneath centuries of American western culture, but only slightly, because youth sports is accumulated participation that recycles with each generation.

Backed by David Blitzer and Josh Harris, The Chernin Group, DICK'S Sporting Goods, and others, Andy Campion (ex-Nike senior executive) saw that the best way to capture the $40B+ economy around youth sports was to own its premier assets.

Cooperstown All Star Village and Cal Ripken's properties anchor the platform in youth baseball.

But notice how Unrivaled has moved into O&O events leveraging its own brand: 

And that they are now building out premium destination experiences through assets like Rocker B Ranch.

The pattern: a HoldCo. unifies a portfolio of live events across multiple properties and formats, backed by long-dated capital (billionaires and corporations), selling into a category that is underpinned by accumulated participation, with the cherry on top being K-shaped economy offerings.

Natural Selection Tour (NST), founded by another Princeton football alum, Carter Westfall '96 and legendary snowboarder Travis Rice, is this same playbook in outdoor action sport: snow, bike, ski, and surf.

NST competes against other action sport leagues like the World Surf League, the Snow League, and the X Games League, but notice again that they are not the "NST League."

They are the Natural Selection Tour, and they are a live events platform, not a league.

The approach I love here is that NST is brand first rather than league first, with Mother Nature as the stated main character (i.e., "Natural Selection"). 

They have a portfolio of live events across four sports, but that brand ethos is just as easily extendable to other hard-to-do extreme sports (like backcountry horse racing).

NST has only ever raised capital hand-to-mouth in order to fund live events and production, and they think creatively.

For example, consider what it would look like to partner with a real estate fund that wants to roll up mountainside lodges or heli operations, and to be cut in on the economics of that fund in exchange for functioning as the marketing arm for its locations by staging events there.

This way of operating immediately counter-positions NST against the mainstream league-format and venture-funded models that have dominated outdoor action sports in recent years.

No league, no teams, just a brand that serves a grassroots community, structured into a live events HoldCo. that is building out an O&O experiential asset portfolio.

Intersport is the rarest, and maybe my favorite, version of the pattern in this essay, because it is a platform that financed its own accumulation.

Founded by sports legend Charlie Besser more than 40 years ago, Intersport is still 100% family owned, has never taken in a single outside investor at the HoldCo., and is run out of Chicago.

The business has two sides, and the relationship between them is the whole story.

(1) Brand marketing.

Intersport represents roughly 45 brands, including JPMorgan, Under Armour, 7-Eleven, Rocket Mortgage, and KPMG.

These brands want to activate in sports, and Intersport brokers and executes those activations, including the Pilot deal at the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium.

That side of the house throws off cash. It’s a very high-margin agency commissioning business. 

(2) Asset creation.

Two types: digital, and live.

Intersport runs a full production studio doing branded content, digital, and docuseries work, and they produce 4-5 NFL Films pieces a year. The NFL only uses two outside production shops: Intersport and Skydance.

That same production capability rolls directly into live events, which is where the company thrives.

Some of the events are O&O, others they run as an operator for hire, but the model is the same in either case: conceive an event around a sport or a market, build it from nothing, and then sell media, sponsorship, ticketing, and gameday revenue against it.

They are staging hundreds of events a year, including college basketball (the Players Era, the Crown tournament, the Fort Myers Tip-Off), the World Champions Cup in golf (PGA-sanctioned), and the APP Tour, their international pickleball tour, which is leaning hard into Asia and local festival-ization.

Some of those events lose money. Some break even. Some win big.

Net net, across hundreds of events over multiple decades, they are out on top in a big way. 

And guess what? 

The cash from the brand marketing side is what funded the losses long enough for the winners to mature.

Here is what it looks like running end to end in a single asset:

Intersport represents Under Armour as a brand client. One way to activate Under Armour is experiential. Because Intersport already has the live event competency, they created an All-American game for the top high school football players in the country and made it the Under Armour All-American Game, while also producing the broadcast, the social, the digital, and the media assets around it.

Client on one side, owned event on the other, and the same company capturing the margin on both sides. Amazing.

Not to mention the heritage here is absurd.

They created the College Slam Dunk and 3-Point Championship in 1987. They trademarked the phrase "March Madness" in 1989, which the NCAA eventually paid $17.2M for.

In 1992 they bought a plot of land caddy corner to Augusta National with a gas station on it, tore it down, and built the Double Eagle Club, the first corporate hospitality facility ever permitted at the Masters.

See the difference here?

MARI raised $2.0B (+$6.0B if you include ATG) and went out and bought accumulated participation that other people spent decades building.
Good strategy.

Intersport spent forty years manufacturing events from scratch and used its own services business to fund it, which meant it never had to price the asset or clear a preferred return. Great strategy.

They fly under the radar because they are in CHI, but what a beast of a business.

I won't spend long here, because you know who they are.

Formula One. MotoGP. Live Nation. The Atlanta Braves. SiriusXM.

John Malone is a brilliant man who was so successful that the Liberty complex had to be broken into multiple multi-billion dollar corporations in order to maximize shareholder value, splitting into Liberty Media (U.S.) and Liberty Global (international) in 2005.

These corporations function as permanent capital because they always have cash sitting on their (very large) balance sheets and can continually sell or spin off assets in order to roll those proceeds into other existing or new assets.

The brilliance came in the form of financial engineering: the tracking stock, which let one corporate parent hold wildly different businesses while giving the market a separate security to price each one.

Liberty has since been collapsing that structure, splitting off the Braves in 2023, SiriusXM in 2024, and Liberty Live thereafter, leaving Liberty Media as a focused Formula One and MotoGP company.

Which is to say: Liberty Media is THE live events HoldCo. of all live events HoldCos., backed by permanent capital, acquiring assets like Formula One and an MLB team that have been around for decades.

Accumulated participation.

The newest live event platform on the block is "the World Series of fitness racing," and it is currently running circles (pun intended) around CrossFit, Ironman, Spartan Race, UTMB, and the other fitness-niche live event companies.

Less than 10 years old, HYROX is now operating more than 100 events across 30+ countries, drawing roughly 1.4M participants and 1.5M spectators, doing $250M of revenue and ~$50M of EBITDA. Insane.

Two weeks ago, a consortium led by L Catterton, alongside WndrCo. and the co-founders, acquired Infront's majority stake in a management buyout at a reported ~$700M valuation.

Mass participation is the entire mechanism and underwrite, which inverts the usual sports business logic built on media rights.

Two days before the transaction, I wrote this quick breakdown on LinkedIn:

But here is where I want to focus.

HYROX has every ingredient required to build enduring intellectual property, but the jury is still genuinely out, because the only thing that ever confirms accumulated participation is time.

So how do they architect an enduring platform?

Here is what I would do:

Find a permanent capital source, one with no clock on it, and begin extending into experiences, production, and owned media.

Fight for inclusion in the 2030-whatever Olympics.

Resist the temptation to become the IOC or FIFA of fitness, lean into building a durable brand, and scaffold it with a multifaceted live events holding company focused on the niche of mass participation fitness.

Every company in this essay arrives at the same place: a HoldCo. sitting atop a portfolio of live event assets, with centralized services underneath and a brand over the top.

The HoldCo. is where these businesses find their fullness, because while a single event is a P&L, a portfolio is a platform.

One property carries asymmetric risk, but a dozen of them that share the same back office, sales infrastructure, production capability, technology stack, and customer data? That’s a winning structure.

How that HoldCo. gets capitalized, however, is a function of history.

If you have forty years of cash flow and no investors, you bootstrap it (Intersport).

If you have a thesis and a track record but no balance sheet, you raise pre- and post-money priced equity rounds into the HoldCo. and build the platform acquisition by acquisition (Milky Way Park).

If you are Ari Emanuel, you can skip all of that, raise and deploy billions in less than a year, and should probably structure that more like an investment company/fund than anything else.

Or you could just be Liberty Media – never on a clock, just waiting as long as the assets require to build accumulated participation.

If you enjoyed reading 🧭 At the Center, please consider subscribing:

And if you know someone who might enjoy learning the patterns shaping sports, culture, and capital, please forward it to them using the link below: