Dana White Says Mother’s Money Emails Ended Their Relationship
Dana White says the break with his mother started in an inbox he did not open for two weeks. On The Diary of a CEO, he told Steven Bartlett the rupture came after a London trip with Lorenzo Fertitta, when he came home to a string of emails demanding money.
Bartlett had asked where the relationship fell apart. The question followed a reference to an unauthorized biography White’s mother published about him, a book Bartlett said was critical of her son. White said he had never seen the physical copy before the interview and had only flipped through the pictures. “I don’t go on shows to speak negatively about my mother,” he said earlier in the conversation, before describing what he found when he got back.
“I was on a trip one time,” White said. “You know, this, this was before, you know, I didn’t have emails and all that sh*t on the road. And I was with Lorenzo Fertitta, my partner, and we were in London for like two weeks.” Fertitta was his partner in the UFC during the years the promotion was still being built. White did not date the trip.
The emails were waiting when he landed. “And when I got back, I checked my emails, and I have like a bunch of emails from her, like, threatening me,” he said. He summarized the demand without naming a figure. “You’re gonna send me this much money. By, you have two options. You can give me this all up front, or you can pay me payments over the next f*cking whatever.”
He tied the request to a purchase. “I’m, I’m looking to buy a, a bar or whatever it was,” White said. He did not name the bar or say whether any money was sent. The detail he kept was the silence on his end. “And then she wasn’t getting responses because I was in London.”
That gap, in his telling, changed the tone. “And then the emails started getting nastier and nastier and nastier by the end, and I was like, I f*cking just blew up,” he said. “And that was the beginning of the end with me and her.” He did not read the messages on the podcast or describe what the later emails said beyond that they grew nastier.
The account is his. Bartlett had framed the book as unauthorized and critical. White answered with a trip, a partner, two weeks without email, and a demand he says arrived while he was gone. He did not put a year on it, and he did not say the relationship was repaired. The line he used was the beginning of the end.
White has run the UFC since he, Fertitta and Frank Fertitta bought the company in 2001. The London story sits outside the cage, in the period he described as before email followed him on the road. The promotion he built with Fertitta is now the center of his public life. The family break, as he told it on the podcast, started with unanswered messages and a request for money toward a bar.
He has not, in this interview, walked back the break. Bartlett asked where it happened. White answered with the inbox. The emails got worse while he was away, he said he blew up when he read them, and he marked that moment as the end of the relationship with his mother.
