Just days after Vince McMahon returned to WWE Stephanie McMahon stepped down from her position as co-CEO with immediate effect and left the company.
Her exit came shortly after she, Triple H and Nick Khan said that nothing would be changing in how WWE was operating. While Vince McMahon has stated that he is back on the Board of Directors to help facilitate a sale, some have used Stephanie’s departure as evidence that there may be more to it.
WWE Management Knew Vince McMahon Would Be Back
Speaking during a new interview on the Bill Simmons podcast, Nick Khan who had been co-CEO alongside Stephanie, revealed that it was always believed Vince would come back. Khan said that there is “only one boss at WWE and it ain’t me.”
“From the inside, it’s not that insane to me…my thought has always been ‘there’s only one boss at WWE and it ain’t me.’ It was always my point of view, always Stephanie’s point of view that he would, at some point, come back. I think the way that he played it, to me, was smart.”
When asked whether he was surprised McMahon had come back, Khan reiterated that the retirement was never going to be permanent.
“No. No. That’s Vince. Anyone who knows him…anyone who believed that [his retirement] was permanent, doesn’t know him. That was never gonna happen, but I’m appreciative of the fact he gave it five, six months to let the dust settle a bit and then coming back in the way that he’s come back.
“I think the succession plan in his mind is the one he put in place when he stepped down. Which was Paul (Triple H) runs creative and then Stephanie and I co-run, or help to run the company, if you will, with Steph as Chairwoman. So, to me, I never got a sense of any sort of bitterness or anything like that. He seemed, for the first month of his hiatus, thrilled […] I think by month five, he was getting ready to return.”
Vince McMahon announced his retirement from WWE in July 2022 after being surrounded by allegations of serious sexual misconduct and claims that he paid hush money to the women involved to cover up the incidents.
This also brought to back into the spotlight a previous allegation of sexual assault, while he was later revealed to have been accused of sexually assaulting a spa owner in 2011.
H/t to Cultaholic