The Los Angeles Lakers are changing hands.

The Buss family, which has owned the team since 1979, will sell its majority stake to Mark Walter, ESPN reported Wednesday. Walter is an owner of the Dodgers, Sparks, and Cadillac’s Formula One team, and he is the primary financial backer of the PWHL.

Jeanie Buss will stay on as the team’s primary governor after Walter takes over, and ESPN reports she will continue to run the team for “at least a number of years.” The deal values the team at $10 billion, according to ESPN.

The Lakers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Walter, 65, is the CEO of Guggenheim Partners and TGW Holdings. He also, through a holding company, owns stakes in Chelsea and Ligue 1’s RC Strasbourg. He already owned a sizable minority stake in the Lakers before Wednesday’s report.

The Buss family is one of the NBA’s longest-running controlling owners. Jerry Buss bought the Lakers, Kings, and Los Angeles Forum for $67.5 million in 1979. Jeanie Buss, 63, has been governor since her father died in 2013.

According to ESPN, Walter has had first pick at the Buss family’s 66% majority stake ever since 2021, when he took over Philip Anschutz’s 26% stake in the team. The Athletic reported Wednesday that the deal “could reach $12 billion in value,” while ESPN reported that the Buss family will keep 15% of the team.

The $10 billion valuation would launch the NBA—and sports franchise sales generally—into another stratosphere. The recently-announced Celtics sale is set for $6.1 billion, a then-record price tag for U.S. sports that required a complex, multi-stage agreement and a consortium of investors to fund the deal. Estimates generally had the Lakers valued between $7 billion and $8 billion, with the Knicks and Warriors ahead.

It’s a dramatic increase in the NBA, where Mark Cuban sold his majority stake in the Mavericks in a deal that valued the team at $3.5 billion less than two years ago.

It may even reshape team prices in other sports. The previous record valuation was for the 49ers, set just a few weeks ago, when the NFL team sold a small stake in a deal that valued the team at $8.6 billion.

The deal comes as the NBA’s new 11-year, $77 billion media rights deal—roughly triple the old deal—is about to kick in. ESPN retains the “A” package, with NBC making its return as an NBA broadcaster, and newcomer Amazon Prime Video joining on. Starting next year, teams will earn about $140 million each from the new rights agreement, but that figure could rise to about $290 million annually by the end of the deal, according to The Athletic.

The 17-time NBA champions are one of the league’s most iconic franchises, and currently roster two of its biggest superstars in LeBron James and Luka Dončić.

But the team was eliminated by Minnesota 4–1 in the first round of the playoffs this year. James, 40, has one year remaining on a two-year, $101.3 million deal. Dončić will be eligible to sign a maximum four-year extension with the Lakers in August and has said he intends to stay with the team.

In 2013, the family’s stake originally passed from their father to all Buss siblings, with Jeanie as the governor. But infighting followed in 2017. Jeanie fired her brother Jim as vice president of basketball operations for not consulting her on trades. Jim and brother Johnny took the battle to court with the goal of ousting Jeanie from the team’s board of governors, but she emerged victorious with control over the club.

Walter and Guggenheim bought the Dodgers in 2012 and has overseen two World Series titles. In 2014, he bought the Sparks with a Dodgers ownership group that includes Magic Johnson. The team had previously been owned by Jerry Buss and led by president Johnny Buss until 2006.

His financing of the PWHL has brought him even wider name recognition—the league’s equivalent of the Stanley Cup is called the Walter Cup after him and his wife, Kimbra. Walter’s TWG also owns the parent company of Gainbridge, whose name is on the Pacers’ and Fever’s home in Indianapolis and sponsors a number of high-profile athletes, including Caitlin Clark.

The sale is the second major non-Finals news out of the NBA amid the Finals. On Sunday, the Grizzlies traded Desmond Bane to the Magic for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Cole Anthony, four first-round draft picks, and a pick swap. The big exchange dominated NBA talk shows ahead of a decisive Game 5 Monday.

Once again, the league has found itself with a headline-making transaction on the day before a Finals game.

The news that the Buss family will sell majority control of the Lakers to current minority owner Mark Walter is a market-reset shockwave for NBA franchise valuations and possibly for the other big men’s pro leagues as well. 

$10 billion is a massive number that will hog all the attention, but viewed from another angle, it’s exactly the leg higher everyone could have seen coming for a marquee franchise as price tags have accelerated dramatically. 

Here are my first three thoughts as I ponder it all on Wednesday night.

1. What peak?

Right here in this newsletter on June 7, I wrote about the then-record $6.1 billion price tag on the Celtics sale and asked how long that record would last before another sale topped it. The answer was 11 days. Onlookers had rightfully asked whether NBA valuations could keep going up, up, up, and my biggest takeaway from this $10 billion figure for the Lakers is that there’s no ceiling in sight. 

Bruin Capital CEO and former Nascar and IMG exec George Pyne recently told me pro sports franchises have “been durable over thirty years… appreciated in value in double-digit CAGRs” and have been “pretty recession-proof.” So why would this be the peak? If the Lakers can go for $10 billion, imagine what the Cowboys, Giants, or Patriots could sell for.

2. It’s hard to walk away

Reports that Jeanie Buss plans to stay on as the team’s governor for a few years even after she’s given up majority control make this the third NBA sale plan in recent memory to involve a lingering majority owner. What was unusual is becoming usual. 

Mark Cuban sold the Mavericks to the Adelson family in 2023 and has stuck around (initially saying he’d remain the decision-maker, but that has not been the case); Wyc Grousbeck is selling the Celtics to Bill Chisholm but plans to hang around as governor through 2028. All of this after Adam Silver has been saying since April of last year that he doesn’t like “staged transactions” in which the governor of the team sticks around even once they are not the majority owner. Yet the league continues to allow them.

3. Welcome to the era of team ownership portfolios

Mark Walter may not be an instantly recognizable face to the average sports fan a la Cuban, Jerry Jones, or Bob Kraft, but Dodgers fans certainly know him, and now everyone will. He’s the CEO of Guggenheim Partners and thus primary owner of the Dodgers; already a minority owner in the Lakers; has ownership stakes in the LA Sparks, Chelsea FC in the Premier League, RC Strasbourg in Ligue 1, and Cadillac’s F1 team; ​​personally financed the launch of the PWHL; and owns Gainbridge, the annuities company whose name adorns the arena that is home to Caitlin Clark and the Fever and Tyrese Halliburton and the Pacers. 

Ted Leonsis, in the latest episode of our Portfolio Players series, was just making this exact argument: that the future of ownership lies in bundling multiple teams and assets. Leonsis’s Monumental Sports & Entertainment owns an NBA team (Wizards), WNBA team (Mystics), NHL team (Capitals), arena (Capital One), and local TV network (Monumental Sports Network).

Leonsis told me his whole portfolio is probably worth $7 billion, and acknowledged that’s what NFL teams are going for nowadays. (Wait five minutes and that’ll go up.) But he said he wouldn’t trade his assets for an NFL team: “It’s a team versus all these assets… Don’t sell short these conglomerates that own an NBA, WNBA [team]… We’re few and far between.” As examples, he referenced Rogers Communications (Blue Jays, SkyDome, and 75% of Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment) and Liberty Media (F1 and the Atlanta Braves until a 2023 spinoff), but those are publicly traded companies. 

There are obvious synergies to owning a team, the arena it plays in, and the network that airs the games. And multiple teams. And indoor venues where you can host non-sports events. I expect privately held sports ownership conglomerates like Leonsis’s and Walter’s to multiply.

The sports world got sticker shock Wednesday when ESPN reported that the Buss family sold its majority stake in the Lakers to Dodgers owner Mark Walter at a valuation of $10 billion. The Athletic later reported that the valuation could reach $12 billion.

Several factors contributed to the astronomical figure, as the Celtics just recently sold for $6.1 billion, and Walter and his partners had purchased 27% of the Lakers from AEG in a deal that valued the team at $5 billion in 2021.

How did the value of the Lakers double in just under four years? There’s a pie chart of reasons, led by the NBA’s lavish new TV deal.

$77 Billion Windfall

The NBA is starting an 11-year, $77 billion TV deal later in 2025. In a game of musical chairs where there were more bidders than spots, longtime partner TNT is out and Amazon and NBC are in. Disney’s ESPN/ABC remains a partner, as the league is poised to triple its annual national TV revenue. 

“The new media deal super-charged the new $$,” Ringer founder Bill Simmons tweeted in the immediate aftermath of the Lakers deal.

Prime Luka

The Lakers are in the advantageous position of having a superstar in his prime. Luka Doncic, acquired from the Mavericks in a stunning trade this season, is just 26 years old. Photos of him appearing to have gotten in substantially better shape have already started to circulate on social media this season. Doncic is eligible for a four-year, $229 million extension later this offseason, according to ESPN’s Bobby Marks. 

Magic number

According to the Los Angeles Times, each of Dr. Jerry Buss’s six sons and daughters owned an 11% stake in the Lakers. The significance of the $10 billion sale price is that each of their stakes is worth over $1 billion.

Business synergies

There are strategic benefits to owning multiple sports franchises in the same region. With Walter and his partners owning the Lakers and the Dodgers, they can find efficiencies in departments like sales and marketing. For example, they can carve out bundles for sponsorships that reach both teams, and are relevant for a vast majority of the calendar year. Local TV rights can also be bundled down the road. 

Inflation

As the federal government printed trillions of dollars in an attempt to stave off the economic effects of COVID-19, $1 in 2025 is not quite worth the same as it was in 2021. The U.S. government’s CPI calculator claims that $5 billion in 2021 would be $5.92 billion today. That would be an 18% increase, but many Americans look at their expenses and think that number is low.