Impact Wrestling star and former WWE backstage producer Jimmy Jacobs recently spoke to Sportskeeda.com and talked about Austin Aries's run in WWE, as well as Jimmy's relationship with WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon:

Austin Aries's time in WWE:

“I’ve worked with Austin Aries from the independents to Ring of Honor to WWE and now to Impact. He and I have had careers that have intertwined a lot over the years. I’ve always been a big Austin Aries fan. I thought part of the problem in WWE is that he was miscast. You know, we’d just turned Neville into a heel and we brought Aries in as a babyface. Anybody who knows Aries knows that he’s (chuckles) kind of an unlikeable guy naturally, in a lot of ways. And he’ll tell you that himself. So, I was upset that in WWE he never got that heel run, that he needed to get over that hump.”

Jimmy's relationship with Vince McMahon:

“So look, you have the freedom to come up with whatever ideas you want. It’s just that he’s the one who says no. And at a certain point, Vince says he likes people to challenge him but only to a certain point. And that’s kind of the balance you have to run there. That you get to disagree with Vince like once, and that’s it. (Laughs) I wasn’t like in the super inner circle but outside the inner circle. We didn’t have a bad relationship. I don’t think he actively disliked me, but we never clicked. I was kind of like a crazy, eccentric, flamboyant gender-bending artist and he’s like an eccentric megalomaniac billionaire. So, it’s cool now to be around people in a creative aspect who I don’t have to filter my ideas thinking, ‘Ugh, is this going to make him mad? Is this too off the wall?’ (Puts on a Vince McMahon voice): Goddamn, what the hell is that?”