Vince McMahon Secretly Controlled WWE Creative Into 2023

Turns out Vince McMahon didn’t let go of WWE creative nearly as early as fans were led to believe.

A report from The Wrestling Observer Newsletter reveals that McMahon was still calling the shots “until well into 2023” following his corporate return. While Triple H (Paul Levesque) and the writing team may have handled the first draft of WWE scripts, McMahon had the power to overrule them and was the “final decision maker” for most of the year.

That dynamic only shifted once TKO CEO Ari Emanuel intervened. According to Dave Meltzer, Emanuel “decreed that Levesque in fact was actually going to be in charge of creative,” responding to consistent “complaints about McMahon’s changes to the shows at the last minute most weeks.”

And if you think Cody Rhodes’ recent main event runs represent the post-Vince era, think again. Meltzer pointed out the irony, noting that even though Rhodes is considered a “Levesque guy” today, “it was actually McMahon who cut the deal to bring Rhodes back and created the storyline in 2022 that drove WrestleMania 39 and WrestleMania 40.”

This reporting lines up with some revelations from the ongoing WWE shareholder lawsuit. As covered by Wrestlenomics and Post Wrestling, legal documents and text messages show Endeavor president and current TKO executive Mark Shapiro knew exactly what was coming—months before it happened.

In a text sent on July 22, 2022—the same day McMahon announced his “retirement”—Shapiro messaged Endeavor CFOs Andrew Schleimer and Jason Lublin with an eerily accurate prediction:

“Nick and Stephanie are going to take over the WWE for the next nine months. Vince [will] be back with a new board, or he will take the company private, or he will sell it/coming to us. The race is on. The courtship is on.”

He wasn’t wrong. McMahon forced his way back onto WWE’s board in January 2023 to push through the sale to Endeavor.

Despite public assurances from WWE CEO Nick Khan that McMahon had zero creative input, internal documents confirm he was actively involved in the lead-up to WrestleMania 39. That directly contradicts Khan’s appearance on CNBC, where he claimed McMahon was uninvolved because he “was no longer in an executive role.”

This all paints a very different picture than what WWE fans—and shareholders—were led to believe.