Dalip Singh Rana, the former WWE World Heavyweight Champion the world knows as The Great Khali, has been off American television since 2014. He is not off camera.
“I have almost 200 commercials. So I make more money now than I made in WWE. I do so many commercials. Every week I shoot a commercial,” he told Chris Van Vliet on the “Insight with Chris Van Vliet” podcast in July. The pitch list runs from KFC to the Indian cement brand Ambuja, with mainstream TV appearances on Bigg Boss and The Kapil Sharma Show woven around it.
The volume is what makes the math work. One shoot a week, year after year, in a country where a 7-foot-1 wrestling icon is a shortcut for scale, strength and spectacle, adds up to a career Western wrestling fans never see. Estimates of his net worth sit between £4.5m and £6m, built mainly from advertising rather than wrestling.
A school for giants in Punjab
The on-screen work is only half of it. In 2015, Khali founded Continental Wrestling Entertainment, a training academy and promotion based in Jalandhar, Punjab. CWE is where he puts aspiring Indian wrestlers through the kind of system he never had access to as a young man, and the pipeline has worked: Shanky and Kavita Devi both passed through the academy before signing with WWE.
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Khali runs the school, promotes its events and lends it his audience. On Instagram alone, he reaches around 11.8 million followers.
“I don’t want to come back to WWE”
The commercials and the academy explain why a WWE comeback keeps being politely waved away. Asked in March 2025 whether he would consider going back full-time, Khali was blunt.
“I don’t think so, going back to WWE. I’m doing so many things. CW, I have a restaurant business,” he said.
“I have lots of commercials. So many events in India. I’m busy all the time.”
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He has left a door open for a cameo. On the same podcast circuit he mentioned Royal Rumble as the kind of appearance he would still say yes to, as long as it stays short. His knees, worn down by two decades of carrying a 350-pound frame, no longer tolerate a full schedule.
They did tolerate one night. On 25 January 2026, Khali returned to a wrestling ring for the first time in nearly eight years, facing former WWE and AEW signee Parker Boudreaux at CWE’s Maithan Mania event in Dhanbad, India, with the promotion’s World Heavyweight Championship on the line, Yahoo Sports reported.
A strict life off camera
Away from the shoots, the life Khali describes is deliberately small. He is a devout Hindu, a strict vegetarian who avoids alcohol and tobacco, and a daily meditator who has attended major spiritual gatherings including the Maha Kumbh. He married Harminder Kaur in 2002, had a daughter in February 2014 and a son in November 2023.
The next CWE event is already being promoted in India.
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