JBL is not mourning the end of the WWE shareholder lawsuit, and he hopes the plaintiffs walked away with nothing. The WWE Hall of Famer gave a blunt assessment of the case, which was settled before its scheduled trial date, on the latest Something to Wrestle with co-host Conrad Thompson.
The lawsuit, tied to the merger that created TKO, was set to go to trial before the Delaware court confirmed the trial was canceled, indicating a settlement between the sides. Terms have not been disclosed. JBL framed the resolution as the cost of doing business.
“Yeah, and I don’t know what the settlement was. You know, my dad used to always tell me a bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit any day of the week, you know,” JBL said. “And sometimes, you know, I’ve been around Vince a long time. Vince just gets out of things, you know, that sometimes it’s just not worth the trouble. These lawsuits are, you know, sometimes they’re just fishing, sometimes there’s some merit behind it. I don’t know the veracity of any of the claims, I don’t know the merit of the lawsuit itself, but getting out of this, that’s a really good thing for TKO.”
JBL went further, characterizing the suit as opportunistic. “This is damn stupid,” he said, recalling a story from his WCW days. “I remember I was sitting in the backstage area with Colonel Parker and Terry Funk one time, and they were going to go out and get their head blown off by the pyro and sue the company for $7 billion… That’s when the company was not worth even $1 billion. And they just, they had figured this whole thing out. They spent hours, they even figured out how, where they were gonna spend their money, the island they were going to buy, all the different things, the boats, and all the different stuff.”
He said the strategy is familiar. “Me and Ron used to talk about this all the time. We’re going to sue the company for a billion dollars, and we’re going to settle for $100,000 just so we get $100,000 and pay off our house. That’s what these lawyers are doing,” JBL said. “They’re saying, okay, this company is worth so much money, we’re going to step in here and we’re going to have some lawsuit, and we’re going to try to tie them up in court and see if we can’t get lucky and get a settlement, and that’s all these jackasses are doing… There, I just don’t see any merit to this whatsoever.”
Asked about the likely payout: “These guys didn’t get any money, you know, because this is such bull***. So many guys sue big companies… they sue these companies for something so egregious, they say, okay, we’re gonna give you all kinds of bad publicity, we’re gonna tie you up in lawsuit. And then they hope to settle for something very small, and I hope they didn’t get any money,” he said.
JBL described any payment as “a nuisance fee,” recalling how Vince McMahon historically approached such matters. “I’ve seen Vince over the years pay people off when he thought there was no cost whatsoever, but he paid him off to get rid of them… It’s a nuisance fee, is what it is. And Vince would always say, you know, like my father said, a bad judgment is better than a good lawsuit anytime, and Vince felt the same way, and so I don’t doubt they just didn’t give them a little money to go away, which I think is absolute bull***, because that’s what’s wrong with society. These guys need to have loser pays if they sue some company and it’s determined frivolous, they need to have a penalty in our judicial system today, so you don’t have all these stupid lawsuits.”
The settlement ends litigation that had drawn attention in part because of questions around Vince McMahon potentially taking the stand. A statement attributed to a source close to McMahon, relayed via Fightful Select, noted that such litigation follows every public-company transaction and that Endeavor’s bid was the highest and approved unanimously by WWE’s board, with shareholders making “an absolute fortune” in the merger that created what it called the premier combat sports company.
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