Ari Emanuel, the executive chairman of WME and one of Hollywood's most connected power brokers, took to The New Yorker to lecture Americans about mixing business and politics — from an industry that has made corporate activism its entire business model.
Emanuel sat down with David Remnick to promote his new memoir, "Roll the Calls," and promptly demonstrated the establishment's defining trait: projecting its own conduct onto its enemies. He expressed disappointment with Donald Trump's self-enrichment during the presidency. Meanwhile, he openly discusses doing business with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in what he calls "shades of gray." Hollywood lectures the country about democracy while taking MBS's money. That's not gray. That's green.
The hypocrisy is the story. Emanuel's empire — WME, WWE, UFC, live theatres, ticketing operations — represents the merger of entertainment and political power. He has overseen the careers of Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift, Meghan Markle, Martin Scorsese, Dwayne Johnson, and Trump himself. When one man can claim the former president, the world's biggest pop star, and a Saudi dictator as clients and partners, that's not a talent agency. That's an influence operation.
Emanuel calls Elon Musk an "incredible human being." But the Trump-Musk alliance is precisely what threatens people like Emanuel. The Hollywood-Washington corridor has spent decades controlling which voices get amplified and which get buried. Musk buying X and aligning with Trump breaks that monopoly. No wonder the press can't stop running hit pieces. Gizmodo published an entire article this week mocking Musk over a fake AI-generated photo from a state dinner — a photo their own reporting confirmed was "fake as hell." Even Musk's own chatbot, Grok, couldn't identify the fabrication, while competitors ChatGPT and Gemini could. The story wasn't the dinner or the AI failure. The story was another excuse to paint Musk as a fool.
The Emanuel family has produced two of the most connected operators in American public life: Ari in entertainment, his brother Rahm Emanuel — former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayor — in politics. Both Jewish, both at the center of the Democratic establishment's power network. The revolving door between WME's client roster and left-wing political power isn't a coincidence. It's the business model.
When Emanuel says he's disappointed in Trump, read between the lines: Trump stopped playing by the rules that keep people like Emanuel at the top. The rules say you donate to the right causes, signal the right virtues, and do your Saudi deals quietly. Trump and Musk are building something outside that system. That's the threat — not mixing business and politics, but mixing them without permission from the people who've always controlled both.
The question isn't whether Trump and Musk mix business and politics. Of course they do. The question is who loses their grip when they do it without asking.
