Though the backstage drama has been ever so slightly overshadowing their in-ring product – need I say more than “Hangman” Adam Page vs. CM Punk? – the actual in-ring AEW product has been on fire as of late. The company is drawing good viewership numbers, drawing big gates for live shows, and, after literally years of anticipation, debuted a tournament to decide on the inaugural AEW World Trios Championship.

Kenny Omega is back, Dragon Lee arrived and was unmasked in the matter of a half an hour, and the eventual Tournament finale, which will take place at All Out, should be a marquee match by any stretch of the imagination, especially if it ends up being The Elite vs. Dark Order, who will have Page in their corner.

But, for that to happen, the Dark Order will actually have to make it out of the right side of the bracket, which features more than a few heavy-hitting teams like the House of Black, Best Friends, and the Trustbusters, a trio-turned-quartet that now features Ari Daivari, Parker Boudreaux, Slim J, and Sonny Kiss, who officially turned heel on the previous week's edition of Rampage.

And yet, the inclusion of Trustbusters has peeved more than a few fans who either don't like the group, don't “get” the group, or think they are being unnecessarily hot-shotted by Tony Khan for one reason or another.

Fortunately, TK punched back at these complaints in a very interesting way and peeled back the curtain ever so slightly to just how much he believes in the ‘busters.

In Bust AEW and Tony Khan Trust.

On August 12th, 2022, Josh Nason, a wrestling podcaster/editor who does some work at The Wrestling Observer, decided to air his frustration with AEW's decision to book a Rampage main event that featured a match between Daivari and “Freshly Squeezed” Orange Cassidy. He questioned why the promotion would push such a makeshift, relatively new faction as the main event of their nationally-televised TV show and lamented the 2021 iteration of the show, which he (presumably) considered a better in-ring product.

Enter Khan, who wanted none of it.

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Matt Hardy with a text bubble reading "My future?" with the AEW logo as the background and a few ???s around his head.

Matty Breisch ·

Adam Copeland with a text bubble reading, "AEW is where the best wrestle." next to CM Punk with the AEW logo as the background.

Matty Breisch ·

CM Punk with a text bubble reading "It’s not a sustainable business" next to Tony Khan with the AEW logo as the background.

Matty Breisch ·

“Coming less than 48 hours off of maybe the best AEW show we've ever done out of a few hundred + given it's an AEW Rampage Friday, I feel Emboldened to point out that in 2021, I got similar reactions for strapping the TV rocket to (Daniel) Garcia/2.0, and in 2020 to The Acclaimed” – whoa, proper punctuation in a tweet? You know Khan means business.

Is Khan's reaction valid? Sure, folks very much did complain about pushing Matt Menard, Angelo Parker, Max Caster, and Anthony Bowens back in the day, and they are all big-time fan favorites midway through 2022. What is very interesting, however, is Khan's decision to respond to a tweet that was more than a week old from an account with a little over 2,000 followers.

Did Khan have that tweet in his back pocket for an entire week ready to fire off a response if Dynamite went well? Or was he name searching “Ari Daivari,” “Parker Boudreaux,” “Sonny Kiss,” or even just “AEW” looking for a fight? Either way, while Nason tried his best to clap back at Khan, suggesting that he should have bigger issues to deal with, “given the last few days,” it ultimately proved a fruitless retort, as Khan again bested his online adversary in a promotional effort to “ratio people to promote Rampage.”