[Casino moguls Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought a violent fight club called Ultimate Fighting Championship--and built it into a billion-dollar sports empire.
UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta, 39, wandered tunnels around the arena. He dropped in on a broadcast booth to pepper producers with questions about which countries would be receiving the night's pay-per-view event, and then checked in with the commentator, Joe Rogan of NBC's Fear Factor, to learn more about the matchups. He made small talk with some of the 18 fighters on the bill before joining the crowd to watch the fights taking place inside an eight-sided ring surrounded by a chain-link fence.
Americans will never understand cricket. The British can't grasp American football. But you can't get much more universal than this. "What makes UFC so great," says Fertitta, "is that every single man on the planet gets it immediately. It's just two guys beating each other up."
It's the Ultimate Money Machine. That night before the Super Bowl 10,700 fans packed the arena, paying an average of $340 for a ticket to witness nine mixed martial arts fights. Another 500,000 fans paid $45 ($55 for high definition) to watch five of the nine fights at home. The total haul from the event: $25 million.
This year UFC is likely to generate $250 million, capturing perhaps 90% of mixed martial arts revenue. The majority of UFC revenues come from the monthly pay-per-view events. Additional cash is made from ticket sales to live fights and licensing fees from its Spike cable shows The Ultimate Fighter and UFC Fight Night . These shows in turn act as promotional tools to drive fans to pay-per-view events. More scratch comes from sales of DVDs and T shirts, as well as downloads from UFC's library of past bouts.
The brothers each own 45% of UFC (White owns the rest), which is operated through their holding company Zuffa (Italian for "fight"), LLC. Add in personal assets and their stake in Station Casinos (nyse: STN - news - people ), which they took private with buyout maven Thomas Barrack for $9 billion in cash and assumed debt last year, and each Fertitta has a net worth of $1.3 billion, ranking each 380th on The Forbes 400.]-Forbes
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Its a superb article. . . to say thee least. Anytime someone is willing to write a story on how Billionaires made their Billions im alllll about it!!
