In a comment that took the wrestling world by storm, WWE Chairman Vince McMahon said on a call with investors last week that he doesn't consider All Elite Wrestling (AEW) to be competition.

When asked about whether or not AEW and WWE are likely WWF and WCW in the 1990s, McMahon said that the two situations are not remotely similar. 

Somewhat surprisingly, AEW star Chris Jericho has said that Vince McMahon was "smart" to say what he said on the media call.

While speaking with Inside The Ropes, Jericho seemed to suggest that he wasn't surprised with what McMahon had to say when posed the question about AEW being potential competition by investors:

“Well, what else is he going to say? You know, and to respond to that, we don’t see WWE as competition. And he was smart to say that."

Chris Jericho noted that AEW has not been concerned with what WWE has been doing, explaining that Tony Khan's promotion paid very little attention to what was happening in NXT when then two shows were going head-to-head:

“We’re not worried about what WWE is and we haven’t been since day one. We weren’t worried about what NXT did. The whole time with the NXT vs. AEW war, which ended in a total abysmal failure for NXT, we never once had a TV screen watching what they were doing when we were doing it. We didn’t know what segments they were in. We didn’t know any of that. Now, the WWE way is you’re watching what the competition is doing when they were on, we didn’t do that.

Chris Jericho clarified that he meant no disrespect with his comments towards WWE, just noting that AEW was too busy focusing on its own show to be worrying about what another company was doing:

“It was no disrespect. We just didn’t care. We were too busy worrying about our own company and about our own stories, and about our own show to care what anybody else is doing. And that’s one of the reasons why we did so well is that we were concentrating on AEW, not anything else.”