Donald Trump’s genius marketing instincts forged a political movement. Now his pugnacious style has inspired a more tribal business model. And nobody embodies that better than UFC’s combative chairman.
By Matt Craig, Forbes Staff
Walking out of the tunnel at T-Mobile Arena for UFC 310 in Las Vegas, Dana White is greeted like a mixed martial arts champion, rather than the suit who pays them. Fans shout his name, initiate high fives and lean in for selfies. “You’re the greatest man in the world,” one tells him after snapping a photo.
The 55-year-old CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship takes it all in stride. “Thank you so much for helping our president,” says another. “Right?” White responds. “Thank God we won.”
Over the past two decades, White has turned mixed martial arts, or MMA, into a global phenomenon and, in turn, made his UFC into a behemoth, generating an estimated $1.3 billion in revenue last year—with staggering margins (Ebitda) of almost 60%. Along the way he’s become more famous than any of the fighters who step into his Octagon and amassed a net worth that Forbes estimates to be more than $600 million. “People ask me all the time, ‘Did you ever envision this? Did you ever think it would be this big?’ ” White tells Forbes. “And the answer is always yes.”
White leveraged that fame, fortuitously concentrated among a large swath of young, politically apathetic males, to support Donald Trump’s 2024 election triumph. First, he provided Trump with pop-culture cover when few others would. They were often seen side by side for UFC ring walks after he left office amid the stench of the January 6 insurrection, again after his federal indictment for election interference in 2023 and continuing through last year’s presidential campaign. He also coordinated Trump’s appearances on numerous bro-heavy podcasts—most notably with longtime UFC announcer Joe Rogan. That combination served as a backbone for turning out a demographic famously resistant to voter turnout efforts, swamping the impact of more traditional Hollywood celebrities who came out in support of Kamala Harris.
“If we took all of that out—the walkouts at the UFC, all the stuff he did with all the influencers,” White says, “and he’s only on Fox for the last however many years, there’s no way we win this election.”
There’s something even bigger at play here. Trump’s genius marketing instincts—his ability to dominate narratives and news cycles, to speak simply and consistently, pesky facts and nuances be damned—translated even better to politics than business. White has also proven how that works in reverse—that the Trump-era anti-establishment norms that reward pugnaciousness and tribalism, revel in taboos and ignore personal scandals, represent an ascendant business model. You can see it in Elon Musk’s much-aped transformation, the logic-defying meme stocks and digital tokens, the embrace of social media influencers, podcasters and other direct ways to speak to an enormous audience.
Call it populist capitalism. And no one embodies it better than White, a self-described moderate who professes to lean slightly left, whose clannishness proved ahead of this curve. “We are all viciously loyal to each other,” White says of his inner circle.
“If I was in a fight, I’d want that dude in a foxhole with me,” Ari Emanuel, executive chair and CEO of UFC parent company TKO Group Holdings, says of White. “And I know he’d be there.”
This us-against-the-world business formula has proven potent before, particularly in outlaw industries from porn to gambling to weed. White, however, has taken it mainstream. UFC is now bigger in America than golf or hockey, whether measured by television money or cultural resonance. In January, Mark Zuckerberg, in full MAGA pivot mode, added White to Meta’s board. Sure, for his media chops—and perhaps any grappling tips he might share with the Facebook cofounder and jiu-jitsu blue belt—but also because of his access to the pinnacles of power and the perceived loyalty those running the country have toward him. White was, after all, seated directly behind George W. Bush and Barack Obama—and in front of several heads of state—at Trump’s second inauguration.
Violent Nights: Dana White—in front of an Octagon canvas splattered with UFC fighters’ blood at company headquarters in Las Vegas—believes his newest combat sport, Power Slap, can be as big as the UFC.
Ethan Pines for ForbesWhite isn’t shy about flexing his connection. Settling into his front-row seat in Las Vegas for the night’s pay-per-view card, a de facto command center with three TV monitors, a phone with a direct line to the production truck, a printout of the night’s matchups he himself set and a seating chart of the VIP section that he personally curated, White looks at his vibrating phone and beams. He then reads the text aloud, withholding the name of the sender until the end for dramatic effect.
“I’m on a brand new Gulf Stream 650 flying at 9.2 over the Atlantic from France, where I got the UFC treatment at the reopening of the beautiful Notre-Dame cathedral,” the text reads. “That’s the good news. The bad news is this plane doesn’t have a television. So I won’t be able to watch your great fights tonight and I am not happy about it. I’ve become very spoiled and I assume that all planes come with high-grade televisions, but actually when you think about it there are many bigger problems in the world right now that need to be fixed. I’ll catch the next fight. Tell Joe Rogan I said hi. Donald J. Trump.”
To
get a clear view of White’s business style, look no further than the high-roller room at Las Vegas’ Fontainebleau hotel on the night before UFC 310. White takes a seat at a baccarat table and asks for $1 million in chips. A crowd packs in shoulder-to-shoulder and three separate camera crews jockey for position to watch White play, his chiseled frame and bald head unmistakable between the young YouTube creators who sit on either side of him.
White has long been a regular at the local casinos. After splitting time in his childhood between Massachusetts and Las Vegas, raised primarily by his mother, a nurse, due to his father’s alcoholism, he moved permanently to Sin City at age 25. But rather than chase the quick, ephemeral buck, he built his fortune the old-fashioned way: building and selling. His stake in the UFC turned into a nine-figure payday when the company sold in 2016, and he maintains ownership shares in current UFC parent company TKO Group Holdings while growing a pair of new ventures.
Still, he wagers seven figures at the tables nearly every night he’s in town. Formerly a voracious blackjack player, White now claims that he has learned how to spot patterns on a baccarat board. This is magical thinking, of course. Like roulette, baccarat is basically a game of luck—albeit with the lowest house advantage in the casino—with each hand providing its own independent outcome. Spotting patterns makes as much sense as believing a coin will come up heads just because it’s been tails five straight times.
But in a world of meme stocks and meme coins, conviction trumps logic. And so White places the maximum $300,000 they’ll allow on six straight bets—and wins five of them. “That’s $1.1 million for me,” he says, casually standing up. “I’m out.”
White is too smart to know this night is anything but luck—but he’s also smart enough to know such fearless risk-taking buttresses his no-holds-barred image. When it comes time to leave, White takes the haul in actual cash and puts it into a trash bag, a perfect everyman touch. “It becomes almost addicting,” he says of risk, though that could just as easily be true of the publicity, which—as Trump has demonstrated—offers much better odds.
That high-low showmanship explains why the UFC survived and thrives. Founded in 1993 by Art Davie, Rorion Gracie and Bob Meyrowitz, its early contests were bloodthirsty brawls with no judges, weight classes or time limits. At UFC 1, five of the eight competitors ended up in the hospital, with one leaving his teeth in the crowd. Senator John McCain famously called the sport “human cockfighting” in 1996, leading a campaign that saw dozens of states and multiple pay-per-view providers ban UFC, sending the company to the edge of bankruptcy.
Combat Man: “My philosophy has always been that fighting is in our DNA as human beings,” White says.
Ethan Pines for ForbesBut White, a college dropout who was operating boxing gyms around Las Vegas and managing a few UFC fighters, saw opportunity. He suggested an investment to two former high school classmates, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, billionaire heirs to the Station Casino fortune, with whom he practiced jiu-jitsu. In January 2001 the brothers closed a deal to acquire UFC for $2 million, giving White a 10% stake and installing him as president.
“At the time, I think it was a pretty controversial pick, because Dana had never run a business,” says Lorenzo Fertitta, who is worth $3.1 billion according to Forbes estimates. “But he had this incredible drive—like, he’s so competitive, he would literally run through a wall to make it work.”
“Looking back,” he adds, “if me and my brother had said, ‘We’re going to go out and hire a Harvard MBA,’ we would’ve been toast.”
With the Fertittas, White began to execute a playbook that feels familiar today: Take something popular but unsavory and use alternative channels to promote it and take it mainstream. His goal was to create something never done in combat sports: a brand, similar to the NBA or NFL, that fans could trust regardless of the individual fighters competing.
The reborn company found an early ally in Trump, who hosted the new team’s first two UFC events at his Taj Mahal hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (As for Trump’s failed attempt to launch a competing MMA venture in 2008, White laughs and replies, “I’ll never say anything bad about Donald Trump.”)
Yet broadcasters continued to be turned off by MMA’s brutal violence. “Porn was on pay-per-view,” White says incredulously, “but UFC was not allowed.” He began working with veteran TV producer Craig Piligian to develop a reality show that could serve as a “Trojan horse” to get MMA on the air. After numerous rejections, Spike TV agreed to air the program, but only if UFC paid its production costs, around $10 million for the season. The Fertittas, who had already sunk more than $30 million into the company with little return (at one point even asking White to explore a sale), agreed to make one final gamble.
The Ultimate Fighter debuted in 2005 and became an immediate ratings hit for Spike. And because UFC retained 100% ownership of its rights, when Spike renewed the show for additional seasons and eventually broadcast UFC’s live events, it cashed in.
The show was also a turning point for White, who gave what Piligian has called “the single greatest speech delivered on a reality television show,” a profanity-laced tirade asking the contestants, “Do you want to be a fighter?”
Like other reality TV stars of the era, including Trump on The Apprentice, White embraced the attention gained by saying outrageous things on camera. An early adopter of Twitter, he was also known to mix it up with fans online.
By 2010, UFC was valued at $2 billion when it sold a 10% stake to Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, son of one of the richest men in Abu Dhabi. The following year, UFC landed a lucrative new broadcast deal with Fox, and the Fertittas soon began receiving offers that were too big to ignore. In 2016, the brothers sold UFC to WME-IMG (now Endeavor) for more than $4 billion. White’s take: $360 million before taxes.
Emanuel, both Endeavor’s CEO and White’s former agent, wanted White to stay on after the sale and promised he would be able to continue operating the business as he saw fit. He was rewarded for that decision in 2020, when the pandemic shut down the sports world.
Comfortable with risk and skeptical of Covid restrictions, White saw no reason why he couldn’t stage fight nights just a few weeks after the start of the pandemic at a UFC-owned facility in Las Vegas, with no crowds and social distancing in place. Nevada’s Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, squashed the plan.
White never forgot. “If you cross him,” says former UFC champion Forrest Griffin, who now works for the company as VP of athlete development, “it’s scorched-earth. He’s going to burn you out.” During the next election cycle, he endorsed and gave money to Sisolak’s opponent, Republican Joe Lombardo, who won a narrow victory.
In the meantime, White found venues in Florida and Abu Dhabi that allowed him to put on UFC events beginning in May 2020. As the first sport to return to live events, the UFC increased its visibility and became a champion among conservatives. “I’m not a go-and-hide-in-my-house kind of guy,” White says. “We ran our business through Covid. Everybody got paid, we honored every contract. And our business grew something crazy, like 77%.”
By the time Endeavor merged World Wrestling Entertainment with the UFC to form the publicly traded TKO Group Holdings in 2023, UFC was valued at $12.1 billion. (White maintains ownership shares in the combined company.)
Now, TV networks and streamers will wage their own fight to broadcast the UFC. A deal with ESPN signed in 2019 pays the company $300 million a year for programming and another estimated $260 million in pay-per-view rights. Analysts predict its next deal, which has reportedly drawn competing interest from Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix, might fetch $900 million annually combined, more than the NHL and PGA Tour earn each year. Additionally, UFC makes more than $400 million a year from its sponsorships, live events and licensing. It’s also astonishingly profitable, with $755 million in Ebitda on $1.3 billion in sales in 2023.
Meanwhile, White continues to shape the UFC in his pugnacious image. Without him, it’s hard to imagine the company would have spent 10 times its normal event budget to host the first sporting event inside Las Vegas’ state-of-the-art Sphere, or publicly criticize a major sponsor that asked him to take down a social media post supporting Trump. White, like an Octagon veteran, knows no mode other than to attack. “I’m at a point in my life and my career where I want to be aligned with my sponsors,” he says. “And I found out through Covid who I was aligned with and who I wasn’t.”
With populist capitalism, it should be noted, ideology comes second to loyalty. In late 2023, White signed Bud Light to a sponsorship deal reportedly worth more than $100 million over six years. Despite boycotts from conservatives over a social media collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, White defended the beer publicly—and petitioned Trump to do the same. Before Super Bowl LVIII in February 2024, Trump suggested on Truth Social that Bud Light deserved a second chance, parroting many of White’s talking points.
White also maintains a chokehold over his athletes’ pay. Fighters are locked into long-term, incentive-heavy contracts that pay out only when they fight, which is to say when White, the head matchmaker, decides they will. The system is being challenged by a pair of antitrust class-action suits, the first of which was settled in October for $375 million.
“You’ve got a situation where the UFC essentially owns the sport,” says Eric Cramer, lead attorney for the fighters. “So if you want to fight for the championship, or the only championship that matters, you basically have to please Dana White.”
Four floors above the casino at the Fontainebleau, a ballroom hosts White’s newest combat spectacle. Hoping to execute the same blueprint that built UFC, White, the Fertittas and Piligian each invested around $1 million in late 2022 to found Power Slap, a league in which contestants take turns open-hand slapping each other into oblivion. White can explain the nuances of slap fighting technique in detail, but for those in attendance, the snapping sound of each blow draws feral outbursts.
Videos of the brutal knockouts have drawn millions of views on social media—and plenty of critics. The Brain Injury Association of America wrote an open letter to Nevada’s athletic commission calling the nascent sport “nothing short of watching traumatic brain injury happen to its participants in real time.”
White relishes the criticism—at this stage, all publicity, he seems to think, is good publicity. This too echoes Trump’s successes and his ability, unprecedented in American history, to shrug off scandals, from felony convictions to sexual assault judgments, that would sink anyone else ten times over.
White has experience here also. In a 2011 unauthorized biography of her son, White’s mother, June, accused him of having multiple affairs, including with UFC ring girls and his wife’s own sister. White has never addressed the accusations publicly, and when asked about his parents’ death in a 2023 interview, he said, “I had almost no feelings about it, to be honest with you.” Amid the Power Slap launch, a video surfaced of White slapping his wife, an incident for which he said there was “no excuse” and embarrassed their three college-age kids.
No matter. Populism embraces—and, it seems, endlessly forgives—outlaws. White claims that Power Slap can be even bigger than the UFC. “When everybody’s saying how horrible it is, you know you’ve got something good,” he says. “It’s actually been fun for me because it’s almost like if you built this incredible business, then you had the chance to go back and do it all again. And it’s almost identically the same.”
Just as he used reality TV to reach his core demographic in the 2000s, White has focused his efforts this time on building relationships with influential internet creators. He gambles with them, gives them front row seats to events and offers free rein to mingle and create whatever content they want. “This is what we do now, this is my whole philosophy,” White says. “Power Slap was built on the internet.”
Seat of Power: White was given a prime spot at President Trump’s inauguration—right behind former presidents and in front of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault.
Shawn Thew/AFP/Getty ImagesWith their help, Power Slap already has 35 sponsors and a media rights deal with conservative-leaning livestreaming platform Rumble. White says the league receives $2.5 million per event from the Fontainebleau and earned at least $4.5 million from a branded mobile game. Forbes estimates the company had $50 million in revenue in 2024, with less than $25,000 spent on marketing each event.
“If you want to take these kids and have them do something for you, you have to pay them a shitload of money. They do it for free for me, and they spend their own money to come,” White says. “I’m looked at as, like, the godfather of the influencers.”
Again, politics and business blended seamlessly for White in 2024, notably the overlap between his curated “manosphere”—with creators like the Nelk Boys, Theo Von and Barstool Sports—and young male Trump voters. Over the course of the presidential campaign, White coordinated Trump’s appearances on their podcasts, eventually securing the participation of Rogan, whom White says initially refused to do any political content. The Trump episode, which aired two weeks before the election, rang up more than 55 million views on YouTube.
The day before the election, White says he was aboard a plane headed for Mar-a-Lago texting Rogan. “I was like, ‘You have to endorse him,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘Who are you voting for, Joe? Who are you voting for?’ ” Rogan tweeted his official support at 9 p.m. on November 4, and the next night, White was called to the microphone during Trump’s victory speech and thanked the podcasters by name.
White says he received so many text messages after the election asking for his help that he had to change his phone number for the first time in 15 years. Nearly every day since, he says, entrepreneurs come to his Las Vegas office to ask for help raising money or marketing their products.
It’s there, surrounded by a suit of Samurai armor and a saber-toothed tiger fossil, next door to the infrared therapy bed and cold plunge he uses every morning, that White plans the future. His next target: boxing, which two generations ago was in the pantheon of American sports but now struggles to compete with his UFC. It’s hard not to think of Trump’s gut-level reaction to last summer’s assassination attempt—“fight!”—in pretty much everything White does.
“My philosophy has always been that fighting is in our DNA as human beings,” he says. “No matter what color you are, what country you come from, what language you speak, we like fighting.”
