Saudis

I get that the President of the United States takes personal offense to my first name.

He doesn't mind as much when it's a shared name from the Saudis who are funding his son-in-law's private equity.

Doesn't seem to mind as much when it's the Qataris who are giving him a $400 million private jet.

I don't care how he pronounces my name.

And what they do is that the company accrues debt, and what ends up happening is they just shift debt from one area to the other area, and then everybody lines their pockets.

So when the Saudis buy out them, they line their pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars, and then they just push one debt from one area to the other.

That's what rich people do with their personal finances, right? They just move things around so they don't have to pay taxes on it.

And so what they do is that they buy...

Maybe some of them come back and help steer that thing and get it to the finish line where the game is going to be amazing.

You know, at this point, my hope is that EA or the Saudis, the Saudi private wealth fund, sit back and go, all right, we can't do much with this IP.

That said, I think it's the director or the producer for the Mass Effect TV show, the one that was announced a couple of years ago, who's come out and said, we're not dead.

Like, the show's not dead.

So maybe as a result, EA is just going, well, let's just leverage this IP.

Maybe one day their plan is to try and find a team that they can offload it to and go, all right, let's you, you develop mass effect for us.

But, um, I'd, I'd love for at this point, the Saudis, they're, they're after money.

They've, they've, they're in financial, like we don't need to get into crazy financial thing here, but they've just been spending and spending and spending and spending on everything, you know, whether it's live golf, whether it's, uh, EA, whatever it happens to be.

I still think the basic question of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, of Iran's nuclear program, those questions will still be out there after any new use of force by your design.

So assuming that the U.S. does attack either before or after the midterms, and I don't think there's any certainty that it won't be before the midterms, but Trump says no until after, it seems to me that the Saudi Arabians are as vulnerable as the Ukrainians are in terms of their aerial defense.

I mean, presumably, if we attack Iran, the Iranian response would be to go at Saudi Arabia.

And indeed, the U.S. recalled basically all of its personnel from Saudi Arabia.

They are in the sucking as much money out of the entities they own as they possibly can business.

If Sela stops funding Zufa, will Silverlake really want to burn cash in order to establish themselves in an industry with notoriously low profit margins for promoters? I think the money behind Zufa will dry up because the Saudis will pull back and the corporate overlords at Silverlake.

We'll tell the savvy operators at TKO to cut Zufa loose and focus on sucking every penny out of the UFC and WWE fans.

Please discourse.

Now, this is a thing we talked about last week on the Patreon page about whether or not the Saudis will step back from boxing and what that might mean for Zufa boxing.

Because, Ben, as you have talked about before, Mark Shapiro said, went on a shareholders call at one point for TKO and essentially said, hey, man, this is free money for us.

This is nothing but profit because other people are paying, we're playing with other people's money here, so don't worry about it.

I don't know, but it, you know, Zufa boxing recently does not appear to be in as powerful a position as maybe we had expected.

woman.

So imagine, a lot of people say, not all Saudis are like that, but most Saudis made this term for this small minority of Saudis that love white people way too much.

And by the way, this is a problem all over the world.

Like I've seen this in India as well.

I love all communities.

Yeah.

But the Desi community have a special place in all Saudis hearts and the Gulf and the Gulf in general.

Yeah.

It was never about it being a business model.

It was about being something else because the Saudis wanted it to be that and they wanted to use PIF as a blunt force instrument of disruption in golf.

And now when you get down to brass tacks, none of this makes sense.

Yeah, although I will say there's possibly a light at the end of the tunnel for all those unsecured creditors if LIV liquidates, that could lead to new avenues of recovery for the unsecured creditors by seeking to recover the money from the PIF.

So we probably wouldn't have seen this for quite a while.

But yeah, I mean, this is all to do with the the deal selling to the Saudis and Jared Kushner and all that sort of stuff.

And the fact that they it was a leveraged buyout.

So they owe a shitload of money on that company that they got to pay off and to do that they're making cuts.