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UFC CEO Dana White is most definitely a gambling man. He has shown many times over the years that he is willing to put his money where his mouth is, but unfortunately for him, it doesn’t always work out.
“I would call this the biggest loss for many different reasons,” Dana White revealed on Lex Fridman’s podcast this week. “You live and you learn in life, you figure things out as you go along. One night I’m over at the Rio and they’ve got big suites over there, so I go over there with some buddies and we got one of the suites, and we have some dinner and we start drinking. So we’re having some drinks, dinner, and blah, blah, blah. It starts to ramp up, I’m having a good time and I make my way down to the high-limit room, and we start gambling. I continue to drink, having a blast, I end up leaving to go home that night and I lost, like, $80 grand.
“So I wake up the next morning, I’m like, ‘F—. Those mother f—— got me for $80,000 last night.’ So I’m at work the next day and the host over there calls me and he says, ‘Hey Dana, are you coming back? Do you still need the room that you guys had where you ate and all that s—?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t need the room, but don’t get too comfortable with my f—— $80 grand, I’m coming back for it.’ Dead f—— silence on the other end of the phone.
“And he’s like, ‘Dana. You lost $3 million last night.’”
Naturally, that’s quite a jump from thinking you lost $80,000 to losing $3 million, so at first, Dana White didn’t believe the Rio host.
“‘What the f— are you talking about? I only have a million-and-a-half dollar credit line,'” White continued.
“He goes, ‘Yeah, you made us call the GM of the hotel and you started calling him ‘a f—— p—-,’ and I went, ‘Yeah, no, that sounds like something I would do.’”
Dana White didn’t say exactly when this happened, but as of 2019 he was worth approximately $500 million.
Still, no one wants to just give away $3 million to a casino.
“You know, there’s been a lot of cases where people are in Vegas and they’re like, ‘I lost all this money. They were giving me free drinks and I drank too much and I was taken advantage of.’ No, you stupid mother f——. Man up, You got f—— drunk. Alcohol is free, but you don’t have to f—— drink it,” White explained, copping to his own stupidity.
“This was a huge learning lesson for me, so I never drank again when I was playing cards after that night.”