The Los Angeles Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion, and the part that should make every Wolves fan put the coffee down is how fast it happened.
Mark Walter bought a controlling stake in the Lakers for $10 billion in 2025. Fourteen months later he sold the franchise to Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger for two and a half billion more, a record price for any pro sports team, past the $6.1 billion the Celtics fetched in 2025 and the $9.6 billion paid for the Seahawks. Iger, asked how it all came together, said the quiet part into a microphone.
https://twitter.com/AP/status/2087556463031996419
“The deal came together in three days,” Iger said, in a quote the AP carried everywhere. Three days. Hold that number against a different one.
It took Minnesota fifty-one months to change owners. Glen Taylor agreed to sell the Timberwolves and Lynx to Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez in April 2021, and the deal did not clear the NBA’s Board of Governors until June 24, 2025, only after Taylor tried to blow it up in 2024, dragged the buyers into arbitration, lost in front of a three-judge panel, and declined to appeal. Four years of our franchise held hostage to one man’s second thoughts, for a sale price of $1.5 billion. Walter flipped the most valuable team in the sport in seventy-two hours for a profit bigger than our whole franchise was worth.
Here is where it stops being fun rich-guy trivia. Walter sold the Lakers while under federal investigation. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan and the SEC are examining how nearly $21 billion in loans tied to Walter or his conglomerate TWG Global ended up on the books of insurance companies he owns, after routing through a third entity. Per the Wall Street Journal, federal agents seized devices in September 2025 and subpoenas went out in February. No one has been charged and nothing has been proven, and I am going to be careful about that, because grandpa taught me the fine print is where they get you, not where you get to guess.
But the sentence matters, because it is the whole game: the fine print is insurance money. Somewhere there is a retiree holding an annuity from Delaware Life who has no idea their retirement is a line item in the same empire that used to own LeBron James. That is the person on the hook here, and it is not “the fans” in the abstract; it is somebody who bought a boring, safe insurance product and became collateral in a story they will never be told, while the guy running it cashes a $2.5 billion check on his way out the door with the whole thing still under a microscope.
Now zoom out, because this is the future the league is selling all of us. The NBA signed a $76 billion, eleven-year media deal that kicked in last season, and that number is the engine under every one of these valuations. Franchises aren’t teams anymore in the eyes of the men who own them; they are the most reliable appreciating asset a billionaire can park money in, a place where $10 billion becomes $12.5 billion in the time it takes a rookie to play a single season. That is why Walter could treat the Lakers like a house he flipped, and why the next guy will too.
The family up in Hibbing that just wants to watch Ant is paying for cable and a streaming subscription and getting told it’s the cost of being a fan. The owners’ box appreciated better than 20 percent in fourteen months. Your bill climbs too. Only one of those gets called an investment, and the other one gets called the cost of doing business, which is the same tired bullshit they have always sold us.
I am not even mad at Iger for saying it took three days. I am mad that he is right, that it took us four years to do the honest version of the same thing, and that the league will rubber-stamp this sale in a boardroom while a federal building across the country keeps a light on. Welcome to the asset class. Try to enjoy the games.
