AEW Star Speaks Glowingly About WWE Despite Being Released Twice

An AEW star had nothing but glowing things to say about WWE.

A part of All Elite Wrestling since 2022, Samoa Joe was a crucial member of the World Wrestling Entertainment roster from 2015 to 2022, before which he was one of the pillars of TNA Wrestling alongside AJ Styles and a few other crucial names. Despite his seven-year run at the Stamford-based promotion and a few title reigns, Joe was also released twice, once in 2021 and later in 2022.

Recently, appearing alongside MVP on Marking Out with MVP & Dwayne Swayze, the former AEW World Champion reflected on his relatively brief run at World Wrestling Entertainment, and had only positive things to say:

When I first got started, Jim Ross told me my face, you will never work in WWE. That wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t a a malicious thing. It was just saying, ‘Hey, listen, this is what we’re looking for. You are not it.’ It was the most liberating statements that was ever spoken to me. Because then it uncoupled me from sitting there and going, I gotta be at every WWE house show that comes through the West Coast and I gotta be there, and I gotta shake the hands. And instead I said listen obviously this is the head they told me I ain’t going to make it here.

So now all my focus shifts to everywhere else I can make money. I concentrated my efforts and everything on those spaces, and those spaces grew because of the effort that I put into them and those spaces got better, and they got more lucrative. And because of that when I now go to WWE and I finally started dealing with WWE, I did not do it from a position of weakness. I did it from a position of stability, power, and mutual respect.

Even though my time in WWE may have been cut short, it was a wonderful relationship because they respected me. They respected me financially. They respected me as a performer because I had become a proven commodity that had actual numbers behind them that they were not inflated or created by somebody else or by a greater entity.”