The LA Lakers' Shocking Hedge Fund Deal
For $12.5 billion, the Los Angeles Lakers are set to be sold to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner.
The sale is still under negotiation and will need to be approved by the NBA's board of governors. The Buss siblings, who own a minority 17.8% stake in the franchise, are also bickering over whether to sell their shares to Iger and Kushner.
The sale would make the Lakers the most valuable franchise in basketball, and signal an acceleration in private equity's scramble to get its claws into the world of sport. The disappearance of the patient old world of sporting capital that Jerry Buss once embodied can have no better advertisement than the fact that Iger and Kushner's bid for the Lakers comes a little over a year after the franchise was sold to an entirely different set of private equity investors.
Mark Walter and Todd Boehly announced their purchase of a majority stake in the Lakers at a valuation of $10 billion in June 2025, with the Busses retaining a minority share in their family inheritance. Walter's disposal of the team, for a tidy $2.5 billion bump in the franchise valuation, just 14 months after he took control of it symbolizes the arrival of a brash new era in US sporting investment.
The old ideas of heritage, tradition, family, and community that once bound the pro leagues' owner dynasties to their teams are now mostly useful as a rhetorical device, rather than a set of values to respect in practice. There are still teams in the NBA holding out against the tide of private money, such as the Indiana Pacers, who have been in the same hands since 1983.
The NBA opened up to institutional money in 2022, the first big pro league in US sports to embrace the worldwide emergence of sport as an investible asset class like technology or construction. Iger and Kushner's deal to buy the team will have to be structured in various tricky and byzantine ways to get around their own comparative poverty and the restrictions the NBA places on institutional investment.
Iger and Kushner's wealth is significant, but it won't even buy you a stadium half-court in the modern NBA. Iger was last estimated by Forbes as having a net worth of $690 million in 2019. The deal will have to be structured as a consortium involving a number of individuals and firms, with finance coming via a mix of debt and cash.
The families are out; the sharks are in. What exactly does private equity want from sport? "Good returns" may seem like the simplest answer. If all that's required these days to book a fat profit is to sit back, do nothing to arrest a team's slide into mediocrity, then exit the scene, perhaps owning a professional sports team really is the perfect modern investment.
The sale is still under negotiation, and it remains to be seen whether Iger and Kushner will be able to secure the necessary approval from the NBA's board of governors. If the deal goes through, it will be a significant moment in the history of the NBA, and a major development in the world of sports investment.
Source: Yahoo Sports