On Monday, WWE was sold to the Endeavor Group, and the wrestling company will now be merged with the UFC to form a new publicly traded company that will trade under the symbol TKO with a valuation of $21 billion.
As we reported last night here on eWn, Vince McMahon was “heavily” involved in last night’s edition of WWE RAW after WrestleMania 39.
The show featured many last-minute rewrites that did not resonate with the kind of changes Triple H had been making since taking over creative.
Furthermore, McMahon reportedly kept making changes after RAW was already on the air. The Executive Chairman of the Board had his own office at the RAW venue.
Sources backstage described McMahon as being “firmly back in charge” despite the billionaire saying earlier in the day that he would not be in control of WWE creative.
Triple H ran RAW with the headsets on as the show began, but McMahon got increasingly involved as the show went on. McMahon was in the gorilla position for the majority of the show overseeing everything.
A report from Pwinsider suggests that there was a negative morale shift backstage among talent as they feared things were going back to how they were before McMahon retired and Triple H usurped the reigns of creative. According to one source, the “place felt nuked.”
The general feeling was that McMahon would likely be overseeing everything again and that the creative would be subject to his whims following WWE’s sale to Endeavor.
Triple H has been a very well-liked and trusted figure since taking over WWE creative last year, and the prospect of him no longer being in charge hurt many.
Some wrestlers shrugged off the changes as they believed McMahon would inevitably regain control of creative, while others adopted a wait-and-watch attitude as to whether McMahon would truly be running creative going forward or if last night was just a one-off scenario.
