There’s an important fact that gets lost in all the talk about Conor McGregor these days. He was recently found guilty of sexual assault by a jury in Dublin and told to pay about €248,000 in damages. After that, the whiskey company he started fired him. Partnerships in video games ended. It was quietly taken out of advertising materials in a number of markets that used his name. But from a money point of view, none of it made a difference because McGregor had already cashed out years before. That’s the part you should learn.
Proper No. Twelve Irish Whiskey came out in early 2018, and McGregor owned most of the company. His business manager, Audie Attar, and an American spirits operator named Ken Austin were his partners. Austin had helped Dwayne Johnson’s Teremana tequila become a popular brand. The timing was planned, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time. Irish whiskey sales in the U.S. were really going up—they grew 31% between 2018 and 2022, according to data from the Distilled Spirits Council—and McGregor’s face on a bottle made the brand stand out right away in stores that didn’t even know the category existed.
The next thing that happened had less to do with whiskey and more to do with power. In 2021, Becle, the Mexican company that owns Cuervo tequila, Kraken rum, and Bushmills, bought the company. The deal was said to have a maximum value of $600 million, but Becle admitted putting up $244 million in cash. Even if the number is lower, McGregor probably got more than $125 million, and that’s a conservative estimate. After all of his UFC earnings, including the huge $100 million he made from the Floyd Mayweather fight, he was already one of the richest combat athletes in the world. For McGregor, the whiskey sale did not make him rich. He wasn’t built like other rich athletes because of it.
Take a moment to think about what he did here. He didn’t give his name to a spirits company that already existed. He bought shares, brought in partners with operational knowledge, rode a real market wave, and sold before the excitement died down. Most famous fighters don’t do that order—build, scale, and exit. A lot of people take the endorsement check. McGregor bought stock and waited.
While the whiskey was first released, McGregor did things that led to the current crisis with the brand. This is a real irony. The jury found him guilty of assault in late 2018, when Proper No. Twelve was still a new label getting its feet under it. Years later, the legal and public relations problems showed up. But he didn’t own the thing anymore by that time. Becle took over the problem. And McGregor’s bank account was mostly left alone.
That’s not a moral point of view. The point is that the way the deal was set up protected him financially from outcomes that, in a different model of celebrity-brand partnerships, would have cost him everything. If his name had been on a license instead of a sold share of the company, the termination clauses would have kicked in and the money would have stopped coming in. The money had already been moved.
Part of this seems to be slowly becoming clear to the rest of the sports business world. A fighter wins a title, signs a deal with a shoe company, retires, and the shoe deal ends. This is being replaced by a more planned approach. McGregor wasn’t the first athlete to start a consumer brand, but the size and timing of his exit made it a case that should be looked at. In 2026, his net worth was thought to be around $200 million, and a big chunk of that didn’t come from punching people. That’s because they knew when to sell.
It is really hard to say if that makes him a business visionary or just someone who got lucky with timing and surrounded himself with the right partners. Most likely a mix of the two. It’s true that the whiskey paid out. The blueprint is there, even though it is messy and not perfect.
