Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs said he is uncertain about his future after serving two full four-year terms in office and leaving office in 2026.
Jacobs was first elected in the 2018 Knox County mayoral election and won reelection in 2022.
Prior to being elected mayor, Jacobs spent more than 20 years as a professional wrestler as the WWE legend “Kane” before moving on in the private sector to own a small business.
Set to exit office in September 2026, Jacobs, who was once seen as a potential contender for Tennessee governor before he endorsed Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) for the job, said he is “unsure” what the future will bring for him.
“At this point, I seriously don’t know. Opportunities do come up. Opportunities have come up. It’s a matter of what my skill set would be best at, how I could best serve the people of Tennessee or wherever. As well as, what I want to do, because you’re not going to be very good at something if you’re miserable doing it. So you do have to take that into account,” Jacobs explained on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Jacobs did not rule out work as an elected official in his future endeavors.
“It may not be in elected office. My passion is supporting and defending the Constitution. It’s about free people and about free markets and encouraging, advocating, and promoting those ideas. So it might be an elected office, it might be somewhere else, but ultimately that’s what I want to do,” Jacobs said.
Discussing his relationship with President Donald Trump, Jacobs said if the opportunity were to arise for him to somehow serve Trump in his administration, the mayor said it would be “hard to say no.”
“It would be hard to say no to the president, but we’ll see. I haven’t got that phone call yet. Don’t know if I will,” Jacobs said.
During his two terms as mayor, Jacobs said he has learned “a lot about leadership.”
“I’ve learned a lot about leadership. Leadership is not like dictatorial, making people do stuff. It’s really about persuasion influence. It’s about empowering the people around you. I’ve learned that an organization is only as strong as its weakest link. The most important thing that I do is actually have a great team around me, empower them to do their job, and obviously have a vision of where we want to go,” Jacobs said.
“The executive is important, but the most important thing about an executive is the team they have around them that actually does the work,” Jacobs added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Glenn Jacobs” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
