Jinder Mahal was inadvertently dropped into the middle of a social media war of words last night when AEW President Tony Khan responded to a jab made by the USA Network’s X account. After it was announced on this week’s Raw that Mahal would be World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins’ next challenger, one X user pointed out the history between the two in that Rollins defeated Mahal back in 2012 to become the inaugural NXT Champion.
In response, USA Network wrote, “what was the cagematch rating?”, a shot at AEW President Tony Khan who has pointed out the high Cagematch ratings that several AEW shows and matches have received in the past. The post drew the ire of Khan himself who pointed out Mahal is getting a world title shot despite not winning a single WWE match in the past year.
The AEW President went on to call out a “double standard” in the online criticism AEW received over HOOK laying down a challenge to AEW World Champion Samoa Joe versus the response WWE got over Mahal receiving a World Heavyweight Championship match. Some time later, Mahal himself entered the fray with a rare post to his own X account.
“Who tf is Hook?”, Mahal posted last night. “WATCH MONDAY NIGHT RAW ON USA NETWORK MONDAY 8PM EST!”
The latter part of the former WWE Champion’s post is a sly jab back at Khan who signs off nearly all his AEW-related tweets with a similarly-formated sentence promoting the next upcoming AEW show. A few hours later, however, Mahal deleted his response.
Khan’s fervent social media activity garnered a response from another WWE talent, NXT’s Edris Enofe. In a post quoting Khan directly, Enofe simply told the AEW President to “stfu”. Interestingly, Enofe’s post is still live on X and has not been deleted at the time of writing.