Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: capitalism, wrestling, wwe

WWE Declares Another $9.3 Million Stockholder Dividend

WWE announced another quarterly dividend for owners of Class A and Class B stock, paying out $.12 per share just as they did following the first quarter of 2020. Based on the known quantities of stock, that amounts to a total of about $9.3 million. The first quarter dividend could have paid all of the workers WWE laid off at the start of the pandemic into 2021, so this second round of shareholder payouts would have potentially allowed WWE to keep those people employed through 2022. Based on his stock ownership, WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon is personally entitled to one-third of that money.

STAMFORD, Conn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– WWE (NYSE: WWE) announced that its Board of Directors today declared the Company's regular quarterly dividend of $0.12 per share for all Class A and B shares of common stock. The record date for the dividend will be September 15, 2020 and the payment date will be September 25, 2020.

When WWE announced their first-quarter dividend, we did the following calculations to see just how much they were paying out to investors.

WWE's stock dividend paid to all shareholders of both Class A and Class B stock is $.12 per share, according to the press release, which says the company's "Board of Directors today declared the Company's regular quarterly dividend of $0.12 per share for all Class A and B shares of common stock." The record date for the dividend will be June 15, 2020 and the payment date will be June 25, 2020. Class B WWE stock is a special version of the stock reserved for the McMahon family only which includes ten times the voting power as Class A stock. Class B stock is automatically converted to Class A stock when sold by a McMahon. The last WWE filing available on their website that lists the total number of shares was made in 2019, and listed 43,739,412 shares of Class A common stock and 34,303,438 shares of Class B common stock outstanding. Vince McMahon himself, after selling 3.2 million shares of Class B stock to fund the XFL in 2019, retained 28.7 million shares of Class B stock and 80 thousand shares of Class A stock.

So what does that mean? It means that WWE paid out 12 cents per share in dividend to the owners of roughly 78 million shares. That's a grand total of about $9.4 million paid out to shareholders. Vince McMahon himself would be entitled to roughly $3.5 million of that based on his last known share total. The $3.5 million paid to Vince McMahon alone could have funded the laid off staff at Meltzer's rate for over five months. The total dividend amount could have paid them until April of 2021.

We ended up being slightly off, as the final total was $9.4 million instead of $9.3 million. WWE went on to declare massive profits and remain on track to make record profits by the end of the year. Unfortunately, the workers who were laid off in April during a pandemic which shows no signs of ending, and thus opening up the independent wrestling market so that those workers can make a living, until at least next year, won't get any of that money. But at least the rich are getting richer, and in America, that's pretty much all that really matters.

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