At the end of 1999, Steve Richards, Slipknot’s manager, and Sharon Osbourne, the wife of Ozzy Osbourne and producer of Ozzfest, had lunch in Los Angeles and agreed that Slipknot would headline the second stage on Ozzfest 2000. They shook on it. Sharon Osbourne had already become one of the biggest players in music by then and was known to be ruthless. She had resuscitated Ozzy’s career in the 1980s after he got fired from Black Sabbath, stealing him from her own father’s management company. Sharon’s father Don Arden was a legend in the music business in England (he managed Little Richard, Small Faces, and Black Sabbath) and was known to be a cutthroat character. But Sharon took him on, and Ozzy’s solo career and Ozzfest were proof of her skill in developing talent.