It’s been more than two months since Casey Wasserman made the surprise move under pressure to put his namesake company up for auction after facing a mass exodus of artists when his decades-old emails with Ghislaine Maxwell turned up in the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein documents.
Since then, potential suitors have been asking questions: Is this a cheap sale? Is Wasserman willing to break his sprawling company apart? Is there a desire to buy the entire company, or just select customers in each department? And is Wasserman serious about selling, or is this the equivalent of a homeowner putting a beloved property on the market for a very high price in hopes of chasing off all but the highest bidders?
The first round of bids was submitted on Monday to investment bank Moelis & Co, which is handling the auction. (Ken Moelis, who runs the company, sits on the board of Wasserman’s LA28 Olympic Committee and advised on the Mongols’ major acquisition of Brillstein Entertainment Partners in 2023.)
Among the suitors: United Talent Agency, the Big Three Hollywood talent giant, has made a non-binding offer to move forward with the auction process. The agency, now run by David Kramer, has been in growth mode since the fund run by private equity firm EQT Partners became the largest outside investor in the Beverly Hills-based company in 2022. (One wrinkle with UTA’s bid, it likely couldn’t or wouldn’t acquire Brillstein from Wasserman because of a conflict of interest with the Writers Guild regarding the agency’s ownership of production entities.)
WME mogul Patrick Whitesell’s WIN company is likely to be the dark horse company he founded with former Endeavor CEO Jason Lublin last year. This acting company was launched with a football talent agency called WIN Sports Group which it acquired from WME’s NFL business. In its bid for Wasserman’s assets, Whitesell has not yet partnered with an additional financial backer but is in active talks about financing if his company chooses to move forward with its bid.
The private equity crowd also seems eager for opportunities to jump into this space. Goldman Sachs’s November 2025 major deal for Excel Sports Management sparked interest since the investment bank had not previously backed a representative company.
Among the agencies that did not submit bids: WME Group and Creative Artists Agency, two other big acting giants in Hollywood. Wasserman’s rep declined to comment on potential suitors. New York Times It was reported earlier that UTA and Whitesell were planning to bid.
In addition to its core sports representation division — which has amassed countless shingles since the company’s founding in 2002 — Wasserman includes a prominent music agency group created from its 2021 acquisition of Paradigm’s music division, Brillstein’s major production management and marketing services unit.
Another question might be how easy it would be to untangle his business if the company is sold in pieces. When Wasserman closed his blockbuster deal to acquire Brillstein in 2023, he said so Hollywood Reporter The company will not continue to operate as an independent silo. “It will still be in the public domain like Brillstein but we don’t run our business separately,” Wasserman said at the time. “We are one company, one culture, working together on behalf of and for our customers.”
While more than 20 artists parted ways with Wasserman during the February scandal — including Lovi, Chappelle Rowan, Best Coast, and Jon Summitt — only US soccer star Abby Wambach, of Unity Sports, publicly posted that she was parting ways with her costars. The company officially rebranded from Wasserman to distance itself from its founder, speaking as The Team in March.
Wasserman’s sports unit is likely to be the crown jewel since it is considered the second largest unit in the industry after market leader CAA. The division generated revenue of $266 million in 2024, 29 percent of the company’s total revenue, an S&P Global report from June last year detailed. The CAA’s athletic department generated $578 million that year.
At the table alongside Wasserman to navigate the sale decision is Providence Equity Partners, which took a notable stake in Wasserman in November 2022 to fuel growth in the company. Providence was founded by Jonathan Nelson, who is also a member of the Chernin Group’s board of directors. The private equity firm replaced two investors, RedBird Capital and Madrone Capital, which had taken ownership stakes in professional teams — soccer club AC Milan and the NFL’s Denver Broncos — and as such was unable to own a stake in a sports talent representation firm like Wasserman. In February, at the height of the social media artist exodus, a Providence representative said the company was “fully committed” to investing and expanding “the company’s capabilities across sports, music and entertainment.”
Wasserman issued an apology for his correspondence on January 31, shortly after the release of the latest tranche of Justice Department filings, saying “I am deeply sorry that there was any association” with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in conspiring to sex traffic minors with Epstein. In the files, Wasserman exchanged a large number of flirtatious letters with Maxwell in 2003. He also took a trip with Epstein, Bill Clinton and others to Africa in 2002.
The Pole, who chairs the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Committee and has led the city’s bid since 2014, has the support of LA 28’s board of directors, and has stated that he plans to continue oversight of the organization ahead of the Summer Games. LA 28 said it hired outside law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP to review Wasserman’s emails with Maxwell in 2003, three years before Epstein was first arrested in Florida on charges of soliciting prostitution. “We have found that Mr. Wasserman’s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell did not go beyond what has already been publicly documented,” the statement said on February 11.
After a social media hiatus and dismantling of the old website look, the team is continuing business as usual, publicly anyway, announcing hires, launching new initiatives like a leadership consulting and executive search practice led by former Bloomberg executive Amy Segal, and listing open positions, among them roles as “content creator,” “people coordinator,” and “AI architect” in Los Angeles.
