2022 has proven rather tumultuous for All Elite Wrestling. Between the issues caused by dwindling ticket sales and plummeting ratings, CM Punk’s actions during the All Out media scrum led to scandalous developments that the company is still rocking from.
The result of that incident has seen a number of top AEW stars absent from programming for the past two months, plans scrapped for the AEW World and World Trios Championships, and what appears to have been a change of the guard backstage. Specifically, Jon Moxley, Chris Jericho, and Bryan Danielson have been credited with having led AEW through these trying times.
Jim Cornette Believes The Elite Never Wanted CM Punk In AEW
Speaking on the latest Jim Cornette Experience podcast, Jim Cornette discussed the ongoing saga, making the bold claim that The Elite trio of Kenny Omega and The Young Bucks never wanted CM Punk in the company to begin with. Specifically, he noted Punk as having “exposed them” as his logic behind this:
“They didn’t want Punk there from the start. I’m talking about the hardly boys [The Young Bucks] and old twinkle toes [Kenny Omega] because he exposed them. These guys he exposed for their limited audience.”
Continuing, Jim Cornette claimed that Tony Khan realised how AEW couldn’t solely be carried on The Elite’s backs, which is why he had to start bringing in huge names such as CM Punk:
“He [Tony Khan] thought that he could f*cking put together a national wrestling promotion on their [The Elite] backs. When he found out those backs weren’t wide enough to carry it, he had to start bringing in stars. They got somebody [who] was doing numbers.
And they were jealous of it because not only was he [Punk] doing bigger numbers than they were, but he was doing it with wrestling instead of their brand of convoluted western swing dancing. So those three guys they needed Punk out of there because he was exposing the whole myth of The Elite as this massive powerful force around wrestling.”
As of this writing, The Elite are expected back in AEW “imminently”, while CM Punk isn’t expected back in the Tony Khan-helmed organisation at all.