The Lakers Lean Towards Owner Change of Hands Again

Bob Iger and Josh Kushner are buying the NBA’s most storied franchise from Mark Walter, whose insurance empire is under federal investigation, in a deal that breaks the record Walter himself set a year ago.

Mark Walter has owned the Los Angeles Lakers for less than a year, and he is already selling. Multiple sources told ESPN this week that Walter has agreed to hand controlling interest in the franchise to a group led by Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for $12.5 billion, a figure that instant becomes the highest valuation ever placed on a pro sports team anywhere in the world. The transaction still needs sign off from the NBA’s Board of Governors, the same body that approved Walter’s own purchase of the team on October 30, 2025. That earlier deal, first reported by ESPN’s Shams Charania back in June 2025, valued the Lakers at approximately $10 billion and ended the Buss family’s 46 years of majority control. Jerry Buss bought the team, the Kings, and the Forum for $67.5 million in 1979. His daughter Jeanie Buss has continued to run day to day operations as governor ever since, and under the terms of Walter’s original agreement with the family, she is contractually guaranteed to remain in that role for at least five years, a commitment Iger has said the incoming ownership group intends to honor. The Buss family kept a roughly 15 percent stake in the franchise when Walter took over, and nothing reported so far suggests that piece of the ownership structure is changing.

What is changing, abruptly, is who sits at the top. Walter will net roughly $2.5 billion in profit for owning the Lakers for barely ten months, an extraordinary return by any standard, including his own. He described the year as one of the great honors of his life in a statement to ESPN, and thanked Jeanie Buss, the Buss family, the players, and the staff for welcoming him into the franchise. Report from Yahoo Sports indicate Kushner and Iger approached Walter with the offer only days before it was finalized, catching much of the league off guard given how recently the previous sale had closed.

The pace of appreciation is what makes this deal stand out even in a sports market that has grown accustomed to record breaking numbers. Sportico had valued the Lakers at roughly $8.07 billion in its most recent independent franchise rank, well below the $10 billion price Walter agreed to pay, and now well below the $12.5 billion figure attached to this sale barely a year later. For context, the previous high water mark before Walter’s purchase was the Boston Celtics’ sale at a $6.1 billion valuation, itself a record at the time, and before that the NFL’s Washington Commanders changed hands for $6.05 billion in 2023. Forbes has pointed out that Steve Ballmer paid $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers back in 2014, a sum Walter has now cleared several times over in profit alone from ten months of Lakers ownership. That kind of turnover, on that kind of timeline, has prompted some league observers to ask whether the NBA is comfortable with franchises being treated as short term financial instruments rather than long term civic institutions, even as the same owners continue to celebrate the rising valuations that make deals like this possible in the first place.

 

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Iger, 75, is best known as the man who ran Disney twice, first from 2005 to 2020, then again from 2022 until earlier this year, when he was succeeded by Josh D’Amaro. Disney has broadcast NBA games across ABC and ESPN for decades, which makes Iger’s move into ownership of one of the league’s marquee franchises a notable overlap of media and sport, even as he steps away from the corporate role that connected him to the league in the first place. He is not new to sports ownership either. Alongside his wife, Willow Bay, Iger became controlling owner of the NWSL’s Angel City FC in 2024. He has also been a partner at Kushner’s venture firm, Thrive Capital, since 2022, mentoring founders across health care, consumer technology, and financial services, a relationship that appears to have laid some of the groundwork for this deal.

Kushner, 41, founded Thrive Capital in 2009 and built it into one of the most influential venture firms in the country, with a portfolio that has included Instagram, Spotify, Stripe, and a large, recent bet on OpenAI. He is also co-founder and vice chairman of Oscar Health. Kushner already holds a minority stake in the Miami Heat, and CBS Sports reports he previously held one in the Memphis Grizzlies. To clear the way for the Lakers purchase, he will need to divest the Heat position, since NBA ownership rules generally bar cross ownership of competing franchises. Kushner is also the younger brother of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump and a longtime White House adviser, though the two brothers have kept largely separate public profiles: Josh has stayed out of politics and has been described by people who know him as a Democrat, while Jared went into government.

 

In a joint statement to ESPN, Kushner and Iger said they were deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world, adding that they have immense respect for the leadership and vision of Jerry and Jeanie Buss. Lakers legend and former part owner Magic Johnson offered his own public endorsement on X, congratulating both men shortly after the news broke. The Lakers, coming off a 53 win season and a fourth seed finish in the Western Conference, are entering a new era on the court as well as in the ownership suite. LeBron James, the league’s all time leading scorer, ended an eight season run with the team this July to join the Philadelphia 76ers, leaving 33.5 points per game scorer Luka Dončić as the face of the franchise heading into the new ownership group’s first season.

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Walter’s decision to sell so quickly is inseparable from what has been happening to the rest of his business empire over the past several weeks. The 66 year old built his fortune in insurance and co-founded Guggenheim Partners in 1999, where he still serves as chief executive of a money management arm that oversees roughly $362 billion in assets. Through his holding company TWG Global, he also controls two life insurers, Delaware Life Insurance Company and Clear Spring Life and Annuity Company, together holding tens of billions of dollars in assets. According to Bloomberg, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have spent the past year examining Guggenheim’s asset management arm, and more recently turned their attention to the two insurers, which received grand jury subpoenas in February. Regulatory filings disclosed on June 26 show prosecutors are looking into whether Delaware Life and Clear Spring failed to properly disclose that billions of dollars of their private credit holdings actually backed other parts of Walter’s own business ventures, an arrangement that would raise conflict of interest questions for an insurer’s policyholders. The Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a parallel civil inquiry. The investigation reportedly began after an internal whistleblower complaint about how Guggenheim represented its revenue to outside parties, and has since expanded to cover roughly $16 billion in transactions across the two insurers.

TWG Global has said it is aware of and cooperating with the investigation, and Group 1001, the parent company of Delaware Life and Clear Spring, has said its capital position and financial strength ratings remain unchanged while it works through a remediation plan. None of the companies have been charged with wrongdoing, and legal observers quoted in coverage of the probe have noted that this kind of investigation frequently ends without any formal action. Still, the timing is difficult to ignore. Walter is selling the Lakers for roughly two and a half billion dollars more than he paid for it less than a year ago, a windfall that would meaningfully help pay down the kind of loan obligations now under regulatory scrutiny, and Bloomberg has reported that raising cash is part of what is driving the sale. Walter is keeping the Dodgers, the Sparks, and his stake in Premier League club Chelsea, according to ESPN, along with his Formula 1 and motorsports interests. Only the Lakers are part of this transaction.

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The Lakers deal is the latest and by far the largest in a fast expanding pattern of sports investment for the younger Kushner brother. Earlier this year, Thrive Eternal, the Thrive Capital subsidiary Kushner set up to focus on long term, experience driven investments, bought a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Thrive Eternal was also on track to buy a minority stake in FIFA‘s World Cup operations for a reported $20 billion, a proposal FIFA president Gianni Infantino had framed as a democratization of football finance. That plan collapsed earlier this month after a wave of backlash from soccer’s governing bodies, with UEFA publicly stating that football’s soul and governance were not assets to trade. Kushner and Iger were also reportedly involved in the NBA’s ongoing effort to place an expansion franchise in Las Vegas before pivoting toward the Lakers opportunity instead, according to ESPN’s reporting, a pivot that speaks to how quickly this particular deal came together relative to the years long, more deliberate expansion process.

 

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Taken together, the Giants stake, the aborted FIFA proposal, and now the Lakers suggest Kushner is building a sports portfolio with the same high conviction approach that has defined his venture investing at Thrive, where he has backed companies like OpenAI, Stripe, and Ramp in sizable, concentrated bets rather than spreading capital thin. Iger’s involvement adds both institutional credibility with the league and, through his continuing role at Thrive Capital, a working relationship with Kushner that predates this deal by several years.

Kushner has kept a relatively low public profile for someone assembling this kind of portfolio, rarely giving interviews or making public appearances despite the scale of what Thrive has built. CNN Business has described him as making high conviction bets on high quality founders without much regard for what other investors think, a description that tracks with how quickly this deal reportedly came together once he and Iger decided to pursue it. That contrasts with the far more public profile of his older brother, and it is a distinction people close to both men have pointed to for years: two brothers from the same New Jersey family who have built entirely separate reputations, one in venture capital and now professional sports, the other in government.

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The sale is not final. It still requires approval from the NBA’s Board of Governors, the same body of fellow owners that signed off on Walter’s purchase last October, and Kushner will first need to unwind his minority stake in the Miami Heat before the league is likely to sign off on his taking control of another franchise. Assuming the deal clears that process, Jeanie Buss stays on as governor under the terms Walter originally negotiated with her family, and the on court product does not change hands at all: Dončić remains the roster’s centerpiece, JJ Redick remains head coach, and Rob Pelinka remains in charge of basketball operations as president and general manager. What does change is who is ultimately accountable for the franchise’s direction off the court, and how quickly that accountability can shift again. A team that spent 46 years under one family’s stewardship has now traded hands twice in fourteen months, at a combined valuation increase of $2.5 billion, a pace of turnover that has no real precedent among the NBA’s marquee franchises.