The Los Angeles Lakers have been sold to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for $12.5 billion, a record price for any NBA franchise. What makes the number stranger than it already sounds: Mark Walter, the previous owner, bought the team for a then-record $10 billion less than a year ago. The Lakers gained roughly a quarter of their value again in under twelve months, without a single game being played differently.
The bigger question isn’t why the Lakers are worth that much. It’s how two people worth a combined $6 billion just bought something valued at more than double that.
The math that shouldn’t work, on paper
Iger and Kushner’s combined net worth is estimated at around $6 billion. The deal they just closed is worth $12.5 billion. That gap is the whole story, and the answer is leveraged financing: buying an asset largely with borrowed money and outside capital rather than personal wealth, with up to 30% of the deal reportedly held by institutional funds, including Thrive Capital, the venture firm Kushner founded. The Buss family, meanwhile, kept a 15% stake, with Jeanie Buss staying on as governor.
This is a familiar structure in private equity and increasingly familiar in sports ownership: the buyers don’t need to personally hold the full price, they need to control enough of the deal and convince lenders and institutional partners the asset is safe enough to lend heavily against.
Why an NBA team is bankable collateral in the first place
None of this works unless a bank or fund believes a basketball team’s cash flow and appreciation are predictable enough to lend against, the same logic used for real estate or infrastructure. Franchise values across the NBA have been rising steadily, part of a broader trend this site has already covered: the NBA’s new $76 billion media rights deal is being phased in over more than a decade specifically so it doesn’t destabilise the league overnight, but the mere existence of that guaranteed future revenue is exactly the kind of predictable cash flow that makes lenders comfortable financing a $12.5 billion purchase in the first place.
Why this matters
A year ago, $10 billion looked like the ceiling for what anyone would pay for an NBA team. It wasn’t. What actually changed in twelve months wasn’t the Lakers, it was confidence, from buyers and lenders alike, that a team’s value only moves one direction. Buying with leverage only makes sense if you believe that. On the evidence of this deal, plenty of people with a lot of money to lend agree.
The Wage Bill