Saumil Mehta claims he doesn’t see the Ticketmaster everyone else sees; the distressed, deeply unpopular, legally embattled, near-50-year-old monopoly that in theory should be difficult to staff with the right Silicon Valley executive. Where most people would see a major career liability, Mehta sees a product problem – one that can be resolved with the right tech stack and a willingness to engage critics on X.

Appointed to Ticketmaster’s Global President role last October, Mehta came to the role from Square, where he spent nine years as chief product officer helping Jack Dorsey scale Cash App, Afterpay, and TIDAL. While he had no ticketing background, he had, however, spent years building commerce infrastructure that moves money across disparate markets and currencies — which is precisely what Ticketmaster says it needs.

The context matters. Mehta stepped into a company facing existential lawsuits from both the DOJ and the FTC. A federal judge is currently weighing an antitrust remedy — backed by 33 state attorneys general — that could force Live Nation and Ticketmaster to separate entirely. A federal court has also authorized a national class action, Popp v. Live Nation, alleging inflated fees across major U.S. venues since 2010, with a trial date set for July 2027.

So…who would actually want this job?

"Lots of people want this job," Mehta told me when we spoke recently. "It's actually a phenomenal time to join."

Why He Took It

When Mehta left Square last spring, he expected to take time off. He was deep in the San Francisco startup ecosystem, talking to AI founders, thinking about what to do next. Then Live Nation called.

His reasoning was two-pronged and distinctly of-the-moment. The first was a counterintuitive AI bet; a sort of hedge against AI.

"If you believe in AI as much as I do," he said, "you also have to believe that digital content could get overrun with AI slop, which is going to make the in-person thing — community, connection, the greatest artists — that much more valuable." His phrase for it: "the anti-AI bet." There's only one Foo Fighters. That makes time with touring acts like the Foo Fighters – who Metha just watched headline BottleRock festival in Napa, that much more valuable

The second reason was the inverse: not live entertainment as an alternative to AI, but Ticketmaster as a vehicle for it. "If you believe AI is going to transform organizations and commerce and buying behaviors — wouldn't it be great to have a platform like Ticketmaster to implement it?" Six hundred million tickets a year across 39 countries is a fairly compelling laboratory.

The Stack Problem

The most underappreciated challenge at Ticketmaster isn't political — it's the engineering one, and it's enormous.