When Jon Moxley decided he was done being Dean Ambrose and leaving WWE, there was nothing the company could do to keep him.
In fact, the Ohio native says that when it actually came time to WWE giving him a new contract, he didn’t even bother looking at the offer made to him because he knew his time in the promotion was finished.
“I never looked at it. I didn’t look at it. I didn’t want to,” Moxley told Chris Jericho on his podcast when asked about the deal WWE offered him to stay. “I remember thinking at one point earlier on in thinking about the decision, what if they offer me $10 million? Like a Brock [Lesnar] contract. What if they just offer me $10 million?
“What am I going to do with $10 million? My truck is paid off. My house is paid off. My mother’s house is paid off. I got everything I need. What am I going to do with $10 million? Am I going to go buy a Maserati? I don’t live like that. There’s literally no number they could put on a piece of paper that would get me to stay.”
Moxley says he was itching to tell WWE about his decision to leave but he had to wait until after a weekend to finally sit down with Vince McMahon to break the news to him.
According to Moxley, McMahon acted shocked that he was unhappy with the direction of his character and couldn’t fathom not coming back to WWE on a new deal.
“He’s got the ‘Million Dollar Man’ complex,” Moxley said about McMahon. “He has to be able to buy [everything]. That’s why he pays Brock [Lesnar] billions of dollars to come in and ruin his company.
“Because he wants to own Brock. He wants to be like ‘Brock’s my attraction!’ and a guy he has no power over — me — he didn’t know how to handle it.”
Once his deal with WWE was finally up, Moxley says that it felt like a weight being lifted off his shoulders because his passion for professional wrestling had largely been drained away from him during his closing months with the company.
“It’s almost like over the years a physical depression sets in,” Moxley explained. “Cause they take away the thing that you love. Like I was saying about being obsessed with wrestling 24/7, they take it away from you.
“Don’t worry about coming up with promos because we’ve got a writer. Don’t worry about coming up with cool things for your matches because we’ve got producers who will tell you exactly what to do in your matches. Don’t bother thinking of storylines because we’ve already written them for you. It’s kind of like ‘we’ve taken care of everything, you just show up’.”
In the end, Moxley waited out his contract and then left WWE free and clear to sign with a new promotion, which is exactly what he did.
Moxley is now performing for All Elite Wrestling with dates already booked in New Japan Pro Wrestling as well as he looks to get his love of wrestling back now that he’s gone from WWE.
