WWE News: Vince McMahon Incapable of Learning from Past Mistakes

Vince McMahon is without a doubt the best and most successful wrestling promoter of all time. He has taken what was a territorial sport and turned it into a global empire that brings in millions of dollars in profit every single year. Yet as he grows older, it's almost like he is succeeding despite himself.

No one is saying that his job is easy; I wouldn't want it—that's for sure. But the fact that he has been in charge of WWE for his entire adult life and still hasn't learned anything from his mistakes is baffling.

CM Punk said it best during his promo on the July 27 edition of Raw when he said, "Vince McMahon is a millionaire who should be a billionaire." But because he can't get out of his own way and put his own ego aside, he has cost himself a lot of money, and the wrestling business has suffered as a result.

Look at all the angles over the last 10 years alone that have had the potential to draw huge money but didn't because McMahon couldn't see the big picture.

The first and most obvious angle to single out is the invasion angle in 2001. WCW was dead and WWE purchased the company for the hefty sum of $4.3 million. Many WCW guys were brought in for an angle similar to The Outsiders angle when Kevin Nash and Scott Hall first when to WCW.

All that WWE had to do was make the WCW guys, who were now actually WWE employees, look strong and seem like a real threat to WWE and they would have made more money than ever before, even more than during the peak of the Attitude Era.

Fans wanted to see this angle, so much so that the Invasion pay-per-view in July 2001 did a buy rate of 750,000 domestic, by far the biggest non-WrestleMania buy rate in WWE history. There was a huge market for this angle, and all that McMahon had to do was make WCW look like a real threat.

But because McMahon likes to bury people who make their name in other organizations just to exert his power over them, the Invasion angle was dead even before it started. He made the actual WCW and ECW guys look like dorks and just had already established WWE guys like Steve Austin and Kurt Angle "switch sides."

Then there was the hiring of Eric Bischoff as Raw General Manager in 2002. You think about all the bad blood and the whole "Monday Night War" that went on between these two for years when Bischoff was leading WCW, this had all the potential to be a money making dynamic between owner and GM.

So what happened? Two minutes after Bischoff was announced to a WWE audience, he and McMahon were hugging on stage and all the money that was sitting on the table just two minutes earlier went away.

I won't even go into the ECW and Paul Heyman situation in the mid-2000s because the less said about that, the better.

And now there is the whole CM Punk angle. This angle started out fantastic. People were talking about wrestling again. Hardcore fans who had become so disillusioned with the WWE product over the years were excited because McMahon was giving Punk, who was the perfect choice to lead this angle, a voice and speak his mind.

Everything worked perfectly for three weeks through the Money In the Bank pay-per-view, and the buy rate for that show is expected to be very good when it comes in.

But here we are just two weeks removed from that perfect moment when Punk walked out of Chicago - and WWE—as champion and he is already back on television. All is not lost with this angle yet because Punk is going to cut a promo tonight on Raw to explain himself and what is going on with the WWE championship.

Yet Punk had to use his newfound backstage power just to keep his credibility going through this week. As Dave Meltzer from WrestlingObserver.com reported, last week's angle in which Punk and Cena had a staredown and held up the two championship belts was thought up after several rewrites.

The original ending for last week's show as going to have Triple H lay Punk out right in the middle of the ring setting up a match at SummerSlam. Basically, McMahon wanted to bury Punk and kill any momentum that he gained from the last two months of promos and in-ring work.

Plus, if you have been paying attention to the shows, the angle that the company is playing up is Triple H taking over and succeeding Vince McMahon as Chief Operating Officer of WWE. That's a big story, but it's not a money making angle, nor should it be the focus of the entire show.

McMahon's ego is huge, just like any successful businessman's ego is, but that ego has gotten in the way of his booking decisions for far too long now. He has never been good at booking "outsider" angles, which you can see just based on the examples that I used, and the fact that he was going to have Punk buried on his first show back continues to show that trend.

McMahon and WWE will continue to make a lot of money simply because WWE is the biggest wrestling company in the world and the company has more exposure than any other wrestling organization in the world.

But the money that WWE actually makes pales in comparison to the money that the company should have made in the past and should still be making to this day.

The reason that it isn't making the money that it can be is because of McMahon's inability or unwillingness to see the big picture and, instead, focus on making himself look bigger and better than the actual talent on television.