What Is Erika Nardini's Net Worth and Salary?
Erika Nardini is an American businesswoman, producer, and podcaster who has a net worth of $12 million. Erika Nardini, also known as Erika Ayers Badan, is best known for being the Chief Executive Officer of Barstool Sports. She announced her departure from Barstool in January 2024.
Named the Most Controversial Woman in Sports by the "New York Post," Nardini became the first CEO of Barstool Sports when she joined the site in 2016. She grew the company from a regional blog with a dozen employees to a national multimedia conglomerate with valuation of more than $500 million. Over the course of several transactions, Barstool was acquired by Penn Gaming for more than $500 million. Through those transactions Erika reportedly earned $20-25 million in pre-tax equity sales.
Barstool Sports was named a top 50 publisher in the US by Nielsen and has a wider reach than ESPN Digital, Turner, "The New York Times," and "The Washington Post." Erika previously held executive marketing positions at both Microsoft and Yahoo!, and she served as AOL's Chief Marketing Officer from 2013 to 2015. Nardini has also executive produced the television series "The Barstool Rundown: Live from Houston" (2017–2021), "Barstool Sports Advisors" (2018), and "Barstool Yak" (2021) and the Barstool Sports podcasts "Pardon My Take" (2018–2021) and "The Dave Portnoy Show with Eddie & Co" (2021). Erika hosts the podcast "Token CEO," which is described as "an explicit business pod for people without a business degree."
Early Life
Erika Nardini was born Erika Kathryn Ayers on November 6, 1975, in Colorado. She is the daughter of Mina and Richard Ayers. In a 2021 interview, Nardini said of Mina and Richard, "My parents instilled a very strong work ethic in me. They worked in education as teachers and professors so we didn't have a lot. They let me know that anything that I wanted, I had to work for. If I liked certain brands and clothes, if I wanted to have new clothes to go back to school, then I had to go bus tables at a restaurant." Erika spent much of her youth in Vermont and New Hampshire, and she earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Maine's Colby College.
Career
Nardini's career began at Fidelity Investments, where she worked as a media manager, then she served as the senior vice president of sales and marketing for Demand Media. She previously worked at Microsoft and Yahoo! in executive marketing positions, and from 2013 to 2015, she was AOL's Chief Marketing Officer.
In 2016, Erika became the CEO of the digital media company Barstool Sports. She was responsible for overseeing the company's expansion into streaming, multimedia, pay-per-view programming, and merchandising. As part of Barstool Sports' expansion into pay-per-view, the company acquired the Rough N Rowdy Brawl, a West Virginia amateur boxing competition, in 2017.
During Nardini's first year as CEO, the company's valuation doubled to $30 million, and in 2018 it grew to $100 million. That year Erika was featured on "Fast Company's" list of the "Most Creative People in Business," and she was ranked #25 on "Forbes" magazine's "Most Powerful Women In U.S. Sports" list. In 2019, "The Big Lead" ranked her #19 on its list of "The 75 Most Powerful People in the Sports Media Business," and she was featured on "Crain's New York's" list of the "Notable Women in the Business of Sports" and "Business Insider's" list of "22 power players leading the explosion of the US sports betting space." "Adweek" named Nardini one of the "Most Powerful Women in Sports" in both 2017 and 2020.
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Erika was elected to the WWE board of directors in 2020, and she was also a member of the Torchy's Tacos board of directors. She resigned from the WWE board in September 2022. In a 2020 interview with "Digiday," Nardini spoke about the growth of Barstool Sports since she became CEO, stating:
"Barstool Sports is a brand that's been around since 2003. Dave Portnoy originally started Barstool as a newspaper because he wanted to get into the casino business and they wouldn't let him. But what it's really become in the last three and a half years is the fastest-growing lifestyle brand on the fastest-growing platforms on the planet. We're now starting to inch toward 100 million consumers."
In September 2021, Erika told "Front Office Sports" that she expected the company's revenue to exceed $200 million by the end of the year, doubling the prior year's revenue. In 2022, Barstool Sports launched TwoYay, an NIL marketplace platform that connects advertisers and college athletes. In March of that year, Nardini joined the Premier Lacrosse League board of directors. Erika has given talks at the CAA World Congress, SALT Conference, Milken Institute, G2E Las Vegas, and MIT Sloan Sports Conference.
In a 2021 interview Nardini said of her role as Barstool Sports' CEO:
"I feel like what I was able to bring to Barstool was a willingness to try anything, an appetite to grow, a desire to be very hands-on, an appreciation for fans and creators, and a desire to put businesses around the fans and creators in a way that helped them both and made them both feel rewarded and big."
At the time of the interview's publication, Barstool had the #1 sports podcast in the world as well as the top golf podcast, hockey podcast, and female podcast, and the company was referred to as "the fastest growing sports brand on every social platform."
Personal Life
Erika married Brett Nardini on October 11, 2003, and they have two children, Turin Jean Nardini and Cannon Gleason Nardini. In April 2021, the "Daily Mail" reported that Erika "left her banker husband for her married squash coach." At some point she reportedly married that squash coach, Yvain Badan, and from that point began going by Erika Ayers Badan.
