Eddie Hearn has seen a year of Dana White promoting boxing, and he isn’t impressed.
MMA Junkie posted on X Tuesday that the Matchroom promoter had trashed Zuffa Boxing’s first year in about the crudest terms available, linking to its story on Hearn’s latest shot at the UFC boss. Yahoo carried the same headline.
Hearn also had a pop-culture insult ready. A day earlier, Lindy’s Sports ran a headline saying Hearn believes White’s boxing venture suffers from a “Drake curse.” The headlines don’t explain how Hearn built that comparison, and I’m not going to fill in the blanks for him. The message lands either way. Nobody calls a rival’s company cursed as a compliment.
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Some context on the target. White co-founded Zuffa Boxing in 2025 and serves as its promoter. That makes November 2026 a natural point to judge its first year. Boxing is far from his only job. He’s been president of the UFC since 2001, when the Fertitta brothers bought the promotion for $2 million. He became CEO in 2023 after the ownership was reorganized into TKO Group Holdings. He started the slap fighting league Power Slap in 2022, and Meta put him on its board in 2025.
Boxing is also where White started. He began boxing at 17, opened a boxing gym in Boston with former Golden Gloves champion Peter Welch, and once wanted to fight professionally. He dropped that idea after seeing a punch-drunk boxer up close.
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White also had a strange week before Hearn piled on. Pop Base and The Spectator Index reported on Nov. 7 that President Trump had offered him the job of White House press secretary. Two days later, conservative commentator Eric Daugherty posted that White walked into the briefing room with Trump and took questions. According to a post from Aaron Rupar, the briefing ended with White turning the job down. So he’s still a promoter, with a boxing company that the most visible promoter in British boxing just described in gutter terms.
As of this writing, the sources show no public reply from White to Hearn’s comments. White doesn’t usually ignore this kind of thing for long, and Hearn knows it. A promoter calling a competitor’s product garbage is also a pitch for his own, and Hearn has never needed help getting attention.
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