There’s no doubt Saumil Mehta entered the Ticketmaster ecosystem during a threatening time. He took over as the company’s global president in October, as Ticketmaster moved toward a federal antitrust trial against its parent company, Live Nation.
That uncertainty persists today, following a federal jury’s decision last month that Live Nation-Ticketmaster acted as an illegal monopoly. The remedies phase of that process — which could still ultimately result in a breakup of live event promoter (Live Nation) and ticketing provider (Ticketmaster) — will likely trickle into 2027.
On the SBJ Tech Week stage Tuesday afternoon, Mehta, the company’s global president, shared that he felt a clear understanding of all outcomes. And regardless, he’s encouraged his employees to focus on improving the quality and efficiency of the TM product.
“My message to our team is we’ve got to put our heads down, we’ve got to keep working for clients, we’ve got to keep working for fans,” Mehta told listeners at the Times Center in Manhattan. “Everyday matters. We have no time to waste.”
Mehta’s dropped into a competitive ticketing space, and his early learning phase has produced some parallels that he’s experienced in his career, most notably during his approximate decade at Square. Fintech, he said, has figured out fraud fighting at a heightened scale, something that would benefit a ticketing industry that is riddled with bots (he said that Ticketmaster deals with billions of bots) and speculative ticketing transactions.
Square also regularly helps the transfer of $200B annually worldwide between buyers and sellers. For comparison’s sake, Ticketmaster produced $765M in revenue during Q1 of 2026, part of Live Nation’s $3.8B revenue total. “The expectations are on-demand, instant, excellent experience and transcends utility into delight,” Mehta said of the ticketing industry. “All of those things need to be brought to life.”
A question from the crowd probed how Ticketmaster can differentiate in a quickly evolving space. For Mehta, he sees the brand’s longtime connections to fans and rightsholders as a position that can be bolstered with technological advances of their own.
“We have significant opportunities at our scale, given our size and our history with fans and with clients, to actually create more personalization, better commerce, and to build stuff quickly for clients and fans, especially with AI, which makes building things better, faster, cheaper, easier. And so we should be able to do that.”
