last year at a market cap of $10.3 billion. Next week he’s off to Abu Dhabi to oversee a major fight put on by Ultimate Fighting Championship, which Endeavor owns. Then he heads back to New York for more calls with bankers, then back on the road.
“I wanted the company Endeavor to be a cultural ambassador—if you’re going to be an ambassador for culture, the center of that is art,” he says on the phone when I ask about this particular point of pride. “I think the concentric circles of art in all the different areas of where we touch is getting more and more accentuated. Which is why you can’t just measure it by a P and L.”
But he also can’t help but flash a little bit of the old Ari Emanuel muscle, the ultracompetitive mentality that, back when he was simply the most powerful agent in Hollywood, fueled the legend that may or may not have inspired the character of Ari Gold onThat is to say, even as he plays the global contemporary art-fair game, he’s got his eyes set firmly on the competition: Art Basel.