Dana White

Dana Frederick White Jr. (born July 28, 1969) is an American businessman who is the CEO and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), a global mixed martial arts organization. In August 2019, White's net worth was estimated at $500 million. Outside of the UFC, he is the owner of Power Slap, a slap fighting promotion he founded in 2022. Meta Platforms elected White to its board of directors in 2025.

White was born in Manchester, Connecticut, to June and Dana White Sr. on July 28, 1969. He is an Irish American. White spent many of his early years residing in Ware, Massachusetts.

White and his sister, Kelly, were raised by their mother and her family for the majority of their childhoods. White's mother was a nurse, and the family moved to Las Vegas when White was in third grade, as Vegas offered higher wages for nurses. White attended Bishop Gorman High School, where he first met Lorenzo Fertitta, although they did not become close friends until years later. White said he disliked school and "got kicked out of Gorman twice". Despite living in Nevada, the Whites returned to the East Coast in the summers, to spend time with White's grandparents in Levant, Maine, a small town near Bangor. White spent his senior year of high school in Maine.

After graduating from Hermon High School in 1987, White started college twice, once at Quincy College and once at UMass Boston, but dropped out during his first semester each time. During this time, he had various jobs, such as laying asphalt, working as a bouncer at an Irish bar, and being a bellhop at the Boston Harbor Hotel. White had begun boxing at age 17, and befriended former Golden Gloves champion Peter Welch. Through this relationship, White decided he wanted to enter the fight business, and he started a boxing gym in Boston with Welch. White initially intended to become a professional boxer himself, but was put off the idea after seeing a punch drunk boxer and worrying that he would suffer the same neurodegeneration. White then worked as a boxercise coach.

White has stated he left Boston to return to Las Vegas in the early 1990s after being threatened by mobster Whitey Bulger and his associate Kevin Weeks. "He basically said, 'You owe us money.' It was like $2,500, which was like $25,000 to me back then, and I didn't pay him. This went on for a while and one day I was at my place and I got a call and they said, 'You owe us the money tomorrow by 1 o'clock.' I literally hung up the phone, picked up the phone and called Delta and bought a ticket to Vegas."

In Las Vegas, White continued running boxercise gyms and also began training jiu-jitsu under the tutelage of John Lewis (a competitor in UFC 22 and UFC 28), alongside Lorenzo Fertitta and his older brother Frank Fertitta III. White had reconnected with the Fertitta brothers after meeting Lorenzo at a mutual friend's wedding; they had not spoken to each other in 10 years prior to this encounter. It was in Lewis' practices where White met mixed martial artists Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell and ultimately became their manager.

While working as a manager for Ortiz and Liddell, White met Bob Meyrowitz, the owner of Semaphore Entertainment Group, the then-parent company of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). When White learned that Meyrowitz was looking to sell the UFC, he contacted his friend Lorenzo Fertitta (an executive and co-founder of Station Casinos, and former commissioner of the Nevada State Athletic Commission), to ask if he would be interested in acquiring the company. In January 2001, Lorenzo and his older brother Frank acquired the UFC for $2 million; it subsequently became a subsidiary of Zuffa. White was installed as the company's president. He was also granted a stake in the company as a finder's fee and as sweat equity.

White said that when he and the Fertittas acquired the UFC, all they received was the brand name "UFC" and an old octagon. The previous owners had stripped the company's assets to avoid bankruptcy, so much so that the UFC.com website had been sold to a company named "User Friendly Computers". The first UFC cards under White's leadership, UFC 30 and UFC 31, were held in the Trump Taj Mahal, which led to the development of White's long-term friendship with Donald Trump. The UFC did not immediately have success after the Zuffa takeover, and by 2004 the Fertittas had invested over $40 million into the company without attaining significant growth or reaching profitability. He re-hired previous commentator Joe Rogan as a color commentator. White, alongside the Fertittas and television producer Craig Piligian, developed the idea of an MMA-based reality series, The Ultimate Fighter, as an attempt to create interest in the sport. The company self-funded the show as television networks refused to pay for the cost of production. The Ultimate Fighter, particularly the finale fight between Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin, is credited for having "saved the UFC". Under White's leadership the UFC subsequently developed into a highly successful business; in 2006, UFC 66 headlined by Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz generated over 1,000,000 pay-per-view buys, and by 2008 the company was valued by Forbes at $1.1 billion.