Multiple corporate departments have been affected by the second round of WWE employee layoffs since its merger with UFC, with more rounds likely to take place in the future.
On December 1st, long-time NXT backstage personality McKenzie Mitchell announced the surprising news that she had been released by WWE. Mitchell had been with the company since 2019 and appeared on NXT just days before she was suddenly let go.
Her release appears to be part of a second round of corporate layoffs within the company, as first reported by Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics. The initial round back in September saw over 100 employees released shortly after WWE finalised its deal with Endeavor and subsequently merged with UFC to form TKO Group Holdings.
In a follow-up report, Thurston noted that multiple departments across the company had been affected by the layoffs yesterday including the finance, sales & partnerships, human relations, and production teams.
Additionally, he reported five specific Senior Vice President-level employees who had been laid off. These include Michael Weitz, SVP of Financial Planning; Craig Stimmel, Head of Global Sales and Partnerships; Karen Mullane, Controller and Chief Accounting Officer; Stewart Frey, SVP of Streaming Technology; and Matt Geyer, SVP of Gaming.
WWE lays off second round of corporate employees following TKO mergerhttps://t.co/643bG7NRJ8
— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) December 2, 2023
In a follow-up on December 4th, Dave Meltzer spoke about the releases on Wrestling Observer Radio. Meltzer noted that much like back in September a lot of executives have lost their jobs in the December cuts. Sadly, this looks set to take place again in the near future as cost-cutting measures continue in an effort to raise the share price:
I mean, they cut a lot of people who built that company from an organisational standpoint [in September]. And, you know, you didn’t know who was gonna get cut and who wasn’t going to get cut. And a lot of major people got cut. And same thing here. And when they did the last round of cuts, and they said, there’s gonna be no more cuts. There’ll be more cuts. Once they examined things and everything like that, yeah. I haven’t seen the stock price since they did the cuts, but I guess we’ll see that in a couple of days.
As WWE and UFC have now merged, many departments have also merged in the process. With TKO Holdings needing fewer employees than they have on payroll to carry out the day-to-day procedures, redundancies were inevitable.
Several Notable WWE Stars Were Released In September
Just one week on from the first round of corporate layoffs, WWE also released over 20 talents from across the main roster and NXT on September 21st.
Most notable among them were former World Heavyweight Champion Dolph Ziggler, Mustafa Ali, Emma, Shelton Benjamin, and Aliyah. All of those released are subject to the usual non-compete clause and will be able to wrestle outside of WWE from December 21st onwards.