Ari Emanuel’s Bucket List Grows

After closing a $25 billion deal to take representation powerhouse Endeavor private and scale down that business to its WME Group core, Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro have been quietly building up a portfolio for their new holding company.

Their live events firm MARI (ie, Mark + Ari ) unveiled a deal on Feb. 4 to acquire a majority stake in the Andy Lederman-run Bucket Listers, a live events discovery platform. The synergies there may be obvious, but snapping up a platform that pledges to help users “make it easy to find & book the best things to do in your city” may pair nicely with a company comprised of those actual live events.

MARI houses such tennis tournaments as the Miami Open, the arts organization Frieze, Hyde Park Winter Wonderland and a majority stake in lifestyle brand and auction house Barrett-Jackson, among other events. Bucket Listers, founded in 2018, is the second deal for an events platform that the nascent Emanuel and Shapiro company has made after buying Broadway ticketing company TodayTix in October.

“Bucket Listers gives us deeper insight into how audiences discover and decide what to do,” said Emanuel. “As technology continues to reshape how time and attention are spent, Bucket Listers helps us engage audiences, understand demand more clearly, and build stronger relationships across the MARI portfolio.”

“Live experiences remain one of the few trillion-dollar categories without a destination that aggregates supply and makes discovery frictionless,” said Bucket Listers’ founder and CEO Lederman. “We are honored to join forces with Ari, Mark and team, along with TodayTix, on a collective mission to modernize and reshape the future of live experiences.” The company says it has produced live experiences with Mattel, Disney, and CBS/Paramount.

MARI was formally launched in early October, featuring name-brand investors like Apollo, RedBird Capital Partners, a16z Growth and Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong among its backers.

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