Stu Snyder gives more insight on WWE purchasing WCW.
In 2001, WCW was officially sold to WWE for a total of just over $4 million. The deal included assets, the tape library and trademarks. Eric Bischoff, working with Fusient Media Ventures, attempted to acquire the company in January 2001, but WCW would not be continuing on Turner networks.
Before WCW was officially sold to WWE, and Bischoff got involved, WWE had an original agreement in place to purchase the company.
After my phone call where I said, 'Hey, how are you doing? If you want to do something, ever, we might be interested. We're an obvious buyer, if you're interested," Former WWE President Stu Snyder recalled on 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff when discussing the original details of WWE making inquires about WCW.
"Somewhere after that period is when Turner and WWF started having a conversation about acquiring WCW. I can't tell you a date or time period, was it a month or two months, I don't recall that. We actually had a deal done, closed, we agreed on a price. Brad (Siegel) was only one player of the Turner team involved in that negotiation. We were paying....I'll put it this way, we were paying a lot of money. Our offer was for a lot of money for WCW the first go round. We had our exclusive deal with Viacom. The deal with us was, we were taking the shows off of Turner. We were going to go with Viacom because we couldn't have the shows on Turner. Vince's perspective -- one of the things we chatted about was, 'Vince, we had to get Viacom on board with airing more wrestling. They're not just going to go here is two more hours.' We already had two hours. Vince, in his magnanimous way, said, 'Don't worry, we'll make it happen.' Okay, got it. Vince had a very good relationship at Viacom. We negotiated a deal. I flew down to Turnr broadcasting, on the jet, we had a deal. We then go to Viacom and say, 'We have a deal to buy WCW. We need two more hours on the Viacom networks.' Viacom said no. All I remember about Yom Kippur 2000 is that I worked all day on the deal. We had done this deal, brought it Viacom, they said no, we then had to pick up the phone and call Turner, the lawyers, and go, 'We can't move forward,'"
Snyder said because that deal fell through, it opened the door for Bischoff and Fusient, which ultimately didn't happen either.
The final deal between WWE and WCW happened in March 2001.
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