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Just 14 months ago, Jeanie Buss and family sold their majority stake in the Lakers to Mark Walter at a $10 billion valuation. This week came the sudden news that Walter has now sold the team to Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion.
The word “whiplash” comes to mind. The speed of the sale has raised eyebrows across the sports world—and questions.
It will take some getting used to for Lakers fans. It’s been 46 years of the Buss family and then 10 months of Mark Walter, who was already familiar as a Lakers minority owner and a Dodgers co-owner. Now Kushner, just 41 and the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Iger, 75, the longtime Disney CEO who only just finally stepped down in February, will be the faces of Lakers ownership—although Iger claimed he intends to honor Walter’s promise to Jeanie Buss to let her continue as the team’s governor for five years.
As rapid reactions from Wednesday have crystallized, the question overshadowing everything is why Walter sold so suddenly, and what it means for the rest of his extensive sports portfolio—and for pro sports team prices from here.
1. Why did Walter sell? Pro teams don’t get flipped this fast.
The sports economist and professor Andrew Zimbalist told Front Office Sports’s Ben Horney on Thursday this is “the fastest flip I know of” in pro sports ownership.
The whole thing sure looks like a fire sale: ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, who broke the news, reported it came together in just 72 hours after Kushner and Iger called Walter. (Subsequent New York Times reporting added a few days to that timeline.) But obviously, they didn’t cold-call him without knowing he was willing to sell. Iger confirmed as much to the California Post: “We were involved in pursuing the new franchise in Vegas, and while that happened, it was suggested to us that maybe Mark Walter would be interested in selling his stake in the Lakers.”
So someone tipped them that they could pivot to the Lakers for a few billion dollars more than they needed to buy the Vegas team. If that person wasn’t Mark Walter, it could have been NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who sat with Iger and Kushner at the US Open in Queens last year, then again at Game 1 of the NBA Finals two months ago.
The process looks frantic, which is the opposite of how sales of pro teams usually go.
Walter has been under federal investigation since last year over how billions of dollars in loans inside his business empire were classified and accounted for. The investigation, reportedly sparked by an internal whistleblower, has included seizures of phones and searches of a private plane. This is the key line from The Wall Street Journal’s reporting: “The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission are now examining how around $16 billion in loans extended to companies tied to Walter or his conglomerate, TWG Global, wound up on the books of insurance companies he owns after passing through a third entity.”
It certainly looks like this is why Walter sold; Bloomberg subsequently suggested Walter is still looking to sell assets to raise cash to pay off the loans the feds are investigating. (It bears mentioning he also had a stroke in 2024 that went unreported until July.) Did the NBA push the sale, or did Walter feel urgency due to an investigation-related liquidity crunch, or some combination of the two?
2. Which sports assets will Walter sell next?
In addition to the Lakers and MLB’s Dodgers, Walter also owns the WNBA’s Sparks, a stake in Premier League team Chelsea, a stake in the Cadillac Formula One team, and the entire PWHL (its championship trophy is even named for him). If he sold the Lakers due to a squeeze related to the investigation, and still has to sell more, there’s lots to sell.
Walter’s Dodgers co-owner Stan Kasten told reporters Thursday, “This is a Laker story. It’s not really a Dodger story. It really has nothing to do with the Dodgers.” But if Walter is selling his whole sports empire, it certainly does affect the Dodgers and Sparks.
The Sparks could be easier to part ways with than the Dodgers. They play in the same arena as the Lakers, and everyone wants into the WNBA right now, which offers red-hot investments at a much lower cost than the big four men’s pro leagues. (Of course, a Sparks sale would provide less liquidity.)
Two weeks ago at FOS’s Huddle in the Hamptons event, Jason Wright, the former NFL player now running Ariel Investments’s Project Level women’s sports fund, used WNBA prices to make a point about how women’s sports valuations are rising at a faster clip than men’s. “We just watched WNBA valuations go from about $250 million average to $414 million average in a year’s time,” he said, “and that will continue to happen over the next five to seven years.”
3. Is there any sign of a pro team price ceiling? I don’t see one.
Now, let’s zoom out beyond Walter’s specific situation.
The record for the sale of a U.S. pro sports team gets reset every few months now, not years. The Seahawks sold for $9.6 billion last month, and only just missed a record, mostly because of Seattle’s media market.
Pro sports teams used to be reputation-defining crown jewels that would remain with the same ownership for decades, passed down to family members. Now they’re seen as luxury status symbols with guaranteed return, and the prices are too high for one rich individual to afford (hence: private equity).
Six NBA teams have sold in just the past three years (in MLB, three; in the NFL, just one). When the Celtics sold for $6.1 billion in June 2025, it set a new NBA price-tag record. That record lasted all of three months until the Lakers sold for $10 billion. Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon bought the Trail Blazers this year at a $4.25 billion valuation, and Portland is in the bottom third of NBA media markets.
NFL prices are even more eye-popping. The Commanders sold in 2023 for about $6 billion to Josh Harris. Just three years later came the $9.6 billion Seahawks sale—a nearly 60% price increase for a team in the No. 13 media market by population (compared to D.C., which is No. 8). Industry insiders recently told FOS they expect the next NFL team sales to hit the $15 billion ballpark. A recent private equity investment in the Yankees valued the team around $10 billion, which actually sounds low.
So the floor has risen dramatically, and now, with the Lakers, the ceiling has risen again. When the priciest sales happen, you see some people wondering about whether we’ve reached the “peak.”
We’re obviously nowhere near that point yet.
