When David Ellison sat in the front row at a pair of UFC events in April and June, just a few seats away from Donald Trump, media analysts wondered whether the 42-year-old CEO of Skydance Media—and son of the world’s second richest man, Larry Ellison—was using the opportunity to smooth over any political concerns about his $8 billion acquisition of Paramount. The deal, which was held up by Trump’s FCC for months, officially closed last week, but it appears the merger wasn’t the only multibillion-dollar deal Ellison was working on in those ringside seats.
On Monday, the Las Vegas-based UFC announced a seven-year, $7.7 billion media rights deal with Paramount to stream all of its fights on Paramount+ in the United States, with select events to be simulcast on CBS.
UFC CEO Dana White tells Forbes he had a preexisting relationship with Larry Ellison and spoke with David at each of those events, one of many network executives looking to land the MMA behemoth. But it was Ellison who swooped in and knocked out the competition just days after the merger between his Skydance and Paramount was approved.
“These guys came in aggressive with an all-or-nothing approach and said, We want the whole thing,” White says. “The Ellisons are brilliant businessmen and have a whole game plan behind this thing. I can’t wait to be in business with them.”
At $1.1 billion per year in average annual value, the UFC will now earn nearly as much in media rights fees as MLB ($1.8 billion), the Olympics ($1.3 billion), March Madness ($1.1 billion) and Nascar ($1.1 billion), dwarfing the likes of the NHL ($635 million) and the PGA Tour ($700 million). And that figure only covers the United States. The UFC will continue to sell its international rights territory by territory through IMG, a category worth an estimated $250 million per year.
Unlike other sports leagues, however, the UFC funds its own broadcast productions to maintain control over the look and feel of its events. Any talk of offloading those costs to a partner, and thus ceding control, was a non-starter. “It’s going to be like that until I leave,” says the 56-year-old White.
Paramount’s annual payouts nearly double the UFC’s current media rights revenue from ESPN, the promotion’s partner since 2019. The existing deal will continue through the end of 2025, and pays the UFC an estimated $350 million per year to distribute 30 UFC Fight Nights per year on ESPN+. Additionally, under the most recent extension signed in 2023, ESPN pays an estimated $250 million per year up front for the UFC’s 13 “numbered” events, which the network then offers to ESPN+ subscribers for an additional pay-per-view fee, keeping all of the PPV sales revenue.
The major change in this new deal is the elimination of the pay-per-view model that has been a bedrock of UFC programming since its inception in 1993.
Mark Shapiro, president and chief operating officer of UFC-parent company TKO Holdings, says UFC has wanted to ditch the PPV model since the beginning of negotiations with potential partners in February. At nearly $100 per month for fans to access both tiers of UFC events, he says the model had gotten too expensive for many fans, leading to a massive spike in pirated streams during the biggest events.
“That's when we really knew the price point or the double paywall had gotten out of control,” says Shapiro, who was previously head of programming and production at ESPN. “We were seeing piracy number up tenfold, which is what you see for big boxing pay-per-views.”
As negotiations continued this summer, White and Shapiro assumed the UFC would need to divide its media rights package among several partners. At one point, they considered using as many as five different distributors, with Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly included among the suitors.
Over time, Paramount emerged as the likely partner for Fight Nights, but conversations with multiple networks and streamers continued for the premium event rights until last Thursday when Ellison’s Skydance officially took over Paramount and hammered out a deal for the entire package within 48 hours.
“Every time we do a media rights deal it’s monumental—one, because obviously the money goes up,” White says. “And two, because you start looking at all the different things we can do with leveraging the assets they have and what their plan is for their business over the next five years.”
Paramount stock was down slightly on Monday following news of the new streaming deal while TKO’s stock was up more than 10 percent.
White and Shapiro are confident that UFC fans will move en masse to the Paramount+ platform next year, showing the same loyalty to the brand as they did in 2012 when the UFC moved from Spike to Fox, and then again in 2019 with the move to ESPN.
The incoming Paramount leadership is no doubt counting on the bump. As of July 31, the company reported 77.7 million subscribers for its Paramount+ streaming service, trailing major competitors including Netflix (300 million), Amazon Prive Video (200 million), Disney+ (150 million) and HBO Max (125 million). According to Nielsen, Paramount+ accounts for just two percent of all TV viewing on a monthly basis.
In an effort to boost those figures, Ellison has already signed a $1.5 billion agreement to bring South Park to Paramount+, a deal that made the show’s creators, Matt Parker and Trey Stone, billionaires. But the UFC deal is a far bigger bet that a year-round global sport can drive new viewers to the platform, slow subscriber churn, and increase engagement.
Now as the exclusive home of the UFC, Ellison has made the MMA promotion a pillar of the new Paramount. The political implications of such an association—given Trump’s affinity for combat sports and personal friendship with White—cannot be ignored.
White confirms plans to host a UFC event at the White House around July 4, 2026, a “one of one” experience similar to the UFC’s event at the Sphere in Las Vegas last fall, which he says would almost certainly be broadcast on CBS. White, who has long had the president on speed dial, says he had yet to hear from Trump regarding the new deal.
“Not yet,” White says with a laugh. “But I’m sure he will. He always does.”
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