Despite Earlier Statements, Dana White Says UFC Is Not for Sale

Promoted from the FanPosts by Kid Nate.

Bad news for all the MMA fans who were planning to spend millions to buy the UFC -- Dana White said that his statements about selling a small portion of the company were just taken out of context. He spoke to Kevin Iole about it:

"This is [expletive] bad; it’s not what I said. Here’s the bottom line: Basically, it was a longer story and he kept asking if we would sell this thing or not. I kept saying ‘No. No, we won’t sell it,’ and I’d go through this whole [expletive] thing about how we’re all 40 years old and we’re young and we’re the visionaries for this thing. We know where we’re taking this thing. We know where it’s going... We have no interest in selling it. And going public? We don’t need the [expletive] money. You go public when you want to raise cash. You raise capital to do something bigger. We don’t want to do that. We’re not looking to do that."

"He kept [expletive] pushing and pushing. He said, ‘OK, hypothetically speaking, would you ever sell a piece of it?’ I said, ‘I guess we’d sell a tiny little piece. We’d probably sell a tiny little piece.’ But, here’s the thing: I want it to be known that this guy kept pushing me and pushing me. I said ‘No, we wouldn’t go public. No, we wouldn’t sell it.’ At the end of the day, we’re the guys who are driving this thing. We have the vision. We know where we want to take this thing."

"We’re not interested in selling a piece of this to anybody. Me, Frank and Lorenzo are the three owners. We have an awesome relationship. Everything runs smoothly. It’s perfect. And for us to even offer somebody a piece, it would be the biggest compliment in [expletive] history because they’d have to be a serious strategic partner. It’s the only [expletive] way we’d do it."

"Why would we do that? We have this incredibly successful business. We know exactly where we want to go with it. And the only way we would do this, if we did sell a piece of it, it would be with some serious, serious player, a big-time strategic partner. That’s it. So the thing was really taken out of context because the guy was pushing me and pushing me and pushing me about, ‘What do you mean? You’d never sell it? You’d never go public? How about a piece? Would you sell a little piece?’ The guy kept pushing me, you know what I mean, and that was my [expletive] answer."