Dana White’s Past Business Mistake Which Cost Him $200K Resurfaces on the Internet
Dana White has earned a reputation as one of combat sports’ sharpest businessmen, turning the UFC from a struggling promotion into a global juggernaut. Even he admits that reputation came with some expensive lessons along the way, and one of them just went viral again.
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An old clip from White’s appearance on The Pivot Podcast has resurfaced on social media, showing him recount how refusing to buy the UFC.com domain early on ended up costing him roughly ten times more than if he had just paid up front. At the time, a small outfit called User-Friendly Computers owned the address. White called the owner to make an offer and didn’t like what he heard back.
“So this guy owned user-friendly computers,” he said. “And this, this was my big first business mistake. So I called him up, and we want to buy the ‘.com’ from him. And I don’t remember the number, but he wanted something like, like $20,000. And I motherf—— him up and down, you piece of s—, $20,000.
“He’s like, ‘ F—- you,’ he hangs up the phone. So we battle for years, but the UFC just starts to go (up) like this. So we end up paying a crazy number, $150,000 or $200,000, for the thing eventually, when I should have taken it for $20,000 in the beginning.”
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The fallout from that fight explains something longtime fans have wondered about for years: why the UFC used UFC.tv instead of UFC.com through its rapid rise in the early 2000s. White finally acquired the domain in 2006. UFC.tv went on to become the platform where fans bought unaired preliminary fights before it eventually redirected to UFC Fight Pass.
White has told this story before as one of his defining business lessons, that paying a price that feels steep today can be far cheaper than waiting for demand to catch up. That kind of regret is something money can eventually fix. A different relationship from his career hasn’t been so easy to repair, as he claims one of his former UFC champions still ‘hates’ him for one reason.
Dana White claims Anderson Silva still ‘hates’ him years after UFC exit
In a recent interview on the same podcast, Dana White revealed that former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva still refuses to speak with him due to how their relationship ended.
Silva’s remarkable UFC run came to an end in 2020, when he lost seven of his last eight Octagon fights. Despite the obvious slump, the UFC CEO claims the promotion didn’t reduce the Brazilian’s pay and instead pushed him to retire out of concern for his long-term health.
“I don’t know if there’s anybody we treated better than Anderson Silva,” he said. “I respected him so much for his talent and everything else, and the guy is, to his core, a fighter and a martial artist.
“He went on a losing streak, seven of his last eight or something like that; we never cut his money or ever pulled his money back; he made s— loads of money.”
According to Dana White, it was his insistence that ‘The Spider’ retire that permanently damaged their relationship.
“I said, ‘Time to retire,’ and he won’t talk to me to this day,” he confessed. “He hates me because he says, ‘Who the f— are you to tell me I can’t do what I love to do?’.
“It’s business, but sometimes it gets personal.”
However, just last month, Anderson Silva already openly disputed White’s version of events. Taking to his social media, ‘The Spider’ claimed that he helped save the UFC on multiple occasions and condemned the longtime head honcho for his sharing false narratives about the end of his career in the promotion.
“The bald guy saying (s—),” Silva wrote in Portuguese. “I’ve been out of the organization for many years already, but apparently neither the current fighters nor the bald guy himself can forget my accomplishments.
“Deep down, the bald guy knows that with me there was no whining, everybody got beat up, and I saved the promotion more than once. And just so we’re clear, it seems like the bald guy doesn’t know how to count.”
That leaves fans with two competing versions of how the relationship really ended, and no sign either man plans to budge. What’s certain is that Silva isn’t looking to patch things up any time soon. He’s kept himself busy since leaving the UFC by building a second career in boxing, and this past March he confirmed he’s done with MMA entirely, turning down an approach from Most Valuable Promotions to focus instead on training for a new career as a police officer.
