Read this article on Variety’s sister website Sportico.
The record-breaking Los Angeles Lakers sale, announced Wednesday to a largely unsuspecting audience, is packed with intrigue.
The seller, Mark Walter, is facing federal investigations across his business empire. The buyer, Joshua Kushner, is Trump family-adjacent, recently tried to invest in FIFA in what became a true international scandal and could soon become the youngest control owner in the NBA. The deal, which is still a long way from closing, has implications for the NBA’s potential multibillion-dollar sale of an expansion franchise 300 miles east of LA, the ownership future of baseball’s richest team and much more.
To unpack the biggest topics, Sportico complied six things to know about the agreement and its fallout:
Yes, $12.5 billion is the highest valuation ever for control of a sports team in a transaction, but Kushner’s group is not forking over $12.5 billion to make it happen. Nor did Walter actually pay $10 billion when he consolidated control less than a year ago. It’s important context, particularly as sports team values soar to numbers unfathomable for all but the world’s absolutely richest people.
Walter and Todd Boehly already owned 27% of the Lakers before they agreed to that “$10 billion takeover,” a slice they purchased in 2021 at a $5.5 billion valuation. What’s more, the team’s long-time control owners, the Buss family, retained an approximately 15% stake in the club. In rough math, that $10 billion transaction was really less than $6 billion, and that’s before you get into the debt and the financing specifics.
For this deal, Kushner has already clarified that the Buss family will remain involved. So right off the bat, that lowers the transaction to $10.6 billion. The team’s exact cap table is not public and it is unclear who is exiting, so that number is an absolute max. The NBA’s debt limit is $475 million, and the league allows teams to have up to 30% of their equity held by institutional funds (no one fund can have more than 20%), which means more than $3.5 billion of this total could come via private equity funds like Kushner’s Thrive.
That back-of-napkin math helps explain how Kushner and Bob Iger—who have a combined net worth of about $6 billion—can buy an NBA team in a $12.5 billion deal.
As team prices have skyrocketed, there’s been lots of chatter about who is rich enough to actually own these franchises. Tech has seemingly come to the rescue.
Venture investor Vinod Khosla is leading the $9.6 billion takeover of the Seattle Seahawks. Jeff Bezos is reportedly a notable part of a consortium looking to buy a significant minority stake in Liverpool, along with Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
Earlier generations of Silicon Valley leaders largely turned their noses up at sports. But no longer. The development of AI in particular appears to have increased tech billionaires’ interest in the artificially scarce entertainment assets that will continue to draw attention (and dollars), even if other segments of the economy are turned upside down by sudden surplus. Khosla has predicted a world in which today’s 5-year-olds won’t ever need jobs. That would give them more time for football.
AI can produce information and entertainment for basically free. But it can’t match the local team when it comes to generating passion.
Kushner, 41, has overseen Thrive’s investments in tech companies including Instagram, Spotify and OpenAI. He explained his philosophy for a new Thrive Eternal fund this spring alongside an investment in the San Francisco Giants.
“These are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology,” he said at the time. “In a world shaped by abundant intelligence where creation scales and distribution fragments, we believe they will matter even more.”
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Kushner isn’t just known as a tech investor these days. He’s also recognized as the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law who remains active in global relations after serving as a top advisor during Trump’s first term in office. Jared divested from Thrive Capital after Trump’s election in 2016. Their father serves as the U.S. ambassador to France.
Those political connections were a key driver in the backlash to the proposed FIFA investment deal.
Joshua Kushner reportedly donated $250,000 to the Growth Democrats political action committee during the 2024 election cycle. Iger was briefly considered a potential 2020 presidential candidate after switching his party affiliation from Democrat to no party preference in 2016. He largely avoided direct confrontation with the President during his recent stint as Disney CEO, which ended in March, even as the company and administration collided over allegations of defamation and concerns over press freedom at ABC.
Iger has long been a power player within the sports world and is known to be close with NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
There’s been very little disclosed about how this deal is being financed. Sportico’s assumption is that it’s being backstopped by Thrive, which has more than $60 billion under management, and that Kushner and Iger will now begin the process of building a group of investors—almost certainly a mix of wealthy individuals and institutional funds, likely with notable celebrities mixed in too.
Fifteen years ago, this timeline would have felt backwards, but this is largely how modern sports transactions unfold today. It’s what happened with the sales of the Boston Celtics and Portland Trail Blazers, and it’s currently underway for the pending acquisitions of the San Diego Padres and Seattle Seahawks. The sale agreement comes first, then the financing comes together.
That helps explain at least part of what is perhaps the most shocking piece of this very shocking story. Iger said Wednesday that the deal came together in just three days. But that’s really just an agreement on a price. Now the much harder work begins to syndicate a group that has the money and can pass the NBA’s background checks.
That will all have to be wrapped up before the deal is officially approved by the NBA, in a process that could take a few months. The exact close date has big ramifications on the level of taxes Walter will owe for the deal.
Walter flipping the Lakers in less than a year, for a tidy 25% profit, came as a shock to the sports business industry. If he sells another team from his portfolio, it will be less of a surprise.
Walter is “in talks with investors to raise money to help pay down loans on the books of its insurers that had drawn scrutiny from the Justice Department,” according to recent reporting from Bloomberg. The DOJ is reportedly investigating loans Walter-owned insurance firms made to holdings of his within the TWG Global holding company, which also includes his sports portfolio.
“Mark Walter and TWG have always acted in good faith, and those who have done business with Mark know him as honest and straightforward,” TWG Global said in a statement in July. “We are cooperating with authorities, and we are confident these matters will be resolved favorably.”
Those investigations have put an extra spotlight on Walter’s relationship to The White House. Walter visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in July with the Los Angeles Dodgers, delivering a personalized World Series ring to Trump on behalf of the team.
Walter is the Dodgers’ controlling owner. He also owns part of the Chelsea Football Club, Cadillac Formula 1 Team and the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks. He is the primary backer of the Professional Women’s Hockey League.
The NBA formally launched its expansion process in May with only two cities under consideration: Las Vegas and Seattle. Adam Silver has been clear that expansion is not guaranteed, and the league might choose only one market.
The Vegas opportunity has attracted more interest, with four known groups interested and more unknown parties certainly kicking the tires. Kushner and Iger hired an investment bank and spent months exploring a Vegas bid. Their group and one fronted by Nancy Walton Laurie and Bill Laurie were considered the frontrunners, according to multiple sources.
Kushner and Iger pivoting to Los Angeles reshapes the bidding and potentially clears the path for Walton Laurie, a Walmart heiress who brings deep pockets and a local flavor to the Vegas process. She and her husband live just outside Sin City in Henderson, Nev., and are worth $18.4 billion, according to Forbes.
Other known contenders in Las Vegas include a bid fronted by Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley. A group dubbed the Las Vegas Jacks revealed plans to bid with a cap table that includes former Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, former Turner Sports executive David Levy, American Century Investments CEO Jonathan Thomas and Prime Capital Financial chairman Scott Colangelo.