Bob Iger and Josh Kushner. Image via: Tommaso Boddi/Variety via Getty Images | Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images
Bob Iger and Josh Kushner have reportedly agreed to buy the franchise from Mark Walter in a deal worth $12.5 billion, the highest price ever paid for a North American sports team. The agreement comes barely 14 months after Walter purchased the Lakers from the Buss family at a $10 billion valuation, and it lands as Walter faces reported federal scrutiny over his broader business holdings. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company has received major Thrive investment, including another $1 billion round in December, once told Fortune, “Josh makes high-conviction bets on high-quality companies and founders, and he doesn’t care too much about what other investors think. In just 14 months, the Lakers’ valuation jumped from $10 billion to $12.5 billion. Federal agents seized his phone last fall, according to Bloomberg, and investigators are reportedly examining whether Mubadala Capital was misled about company valuations before the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund invested $10 billion into Walter’s firm, months before that firm bought the Lakers.
There’s no confirmed link between the investigation and the sale, but the optics haven’t gone unnoticed.
Beyond the boardroom, Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, a former host of “NBA Inside Stuff,” have owned Angel City FC, the Los Angeles-based NWSL club, since 2024. Kushner reached out to Walter on a Friday, and the deal came together over the following weekend, according to a source who told The Athletic. Walter wasn’t actively shopping the franchise, the source said, but the offer proved too strong to walk away from. “Having moved from New York to Los Angeles back in 2000 and being a big NBA fan, I needed a team to root for,” Iger told Redick. “Lakers were a big rival of the Knicks, the team I grew up rooting for, so I couldn’t root for the Lakers very easily; it just was not in my DNA.”
The Los Angeles Lakers have a new ownership group, and it doesn’t look anything like the last one. Two men with almost no shared history in pro sports ownership are now steering one of the NBA’s flagship franchises. He rejoined Thrive as an adviser this past April, a relationship that laid the groundwork for the Lakers deal. The Lakers now become his second major sports ownership stake. I feel a lot of camaraderie with that. Kushner and Iger had reportedly explored bringing an NBA expansion franchise to Las Vegas before pivoting toward the Lakers. The sale does not include Walter’s ownership of the Dodgers or the Sparks, and it still requires approval from at least three-quarters of the NBA’s Board of Governors.
