The Lakers Just Got Sold. Again. Fourteen Months After the Last Time.
Some franchises go generations without changing hands. The Lakers just did it twice before most season-ticket holders even finished adjusting their new parking routine.
Wednesday morning, ESPN's Ramona Shelburne broke the kind of story that makes you re-read the headline twice: Mark Walter — who bought a controlling stake in the Lakers barely fourteen months ago for a then-record $10 billion — is already selling. The buyers are Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, and the price tag is a genuinely staggering $12 billion, which doesn't just top what Walter paid last year, it's now the richest sale of any North American sports franchise, period.
Let that sit for a second. A team can go from record sale to record-breaking-the-previous-record sale in about the time it takes to renew a lease.
How we got here — twice
Rewind to June 2025. The Buss family, who'd owned the Lakers since Dr. Jerry Buss bought the team (plus the Kings and the Forum) for $67.5 million back in 1979, agreed to sell majority ownership to Mark Walter, the Dodgers chairman and Guggenheim Partners CEO. At $10 billion, it blew past the Boston Celtics' $6.1 billion sale from earlier that same year — a record that had itself only been standing for about three months. Jeanie Buss stayed on as governor. The basketball world took a breath, assumed the ownership chapter was settled for a while, and moved on.
Fourteen months is not "a while."
Now Walter is stepping back out, selling to a group fronted by Josh Kushner — founder of Thrive Capital, and brother of Jared Kushner — alongside Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO whose name alone tells you the kind of media-industry weight this new ownership group is bringing to the table. Interestingly, Kushner and Iger had reportedly been circling a completely different opportunity: an NBA expansion franchise in Las Vegas. Somewhere along the way, that pivoted hard into an aggressive offer for one of the league's most storied teams instead. Expansion teams take years to build a roster and a culture. The Lakers already have seventeen championships sitting in the case.
What the new owners are saying
Kushner and Iger didn't wait long to put out a joint statement, and it leans heavily into respecting what's already there rather than promising to blow it up:
"As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world. We have immense respect for the leadership and vision of Jerry and Jeanie Buss. Our long-term commitment is to build on that foundation, compete at the highest level, and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles."
Notice what's not in that statement: any mention of Mark Walter. This is framed explicitly as continuity with the Buss legacy, not with the ownership that's exiting after barely a year.
Why is Walter selling so fast?
This is the part that's generating as much conversation as the sale price itself. Walter isn't hurting for other things to run — he's keeping the Dodgers, and he still holds the WNBA's Sparks and the entire PWHL, plus his role atop Guggenheim Partners. But Guggenheim's massive $362 billion money management arm has reportedly been under examination by federal prosecutors in Manhattan since last year, with regulators looking into how the firm disclosed certain matters. Whether that's connected to the timing of this sale is speculation at this point — nothing here officially ties the two together — but the coincidence is hard to ignore, and it's the question every Lakers reporter is going to be chasing over the next few days.
What this actually means for the team
Ownership turnover at this speed is almost unheard of, but the early tone from the incoming group suggests fans shouldn't expect an immediate culture shock. Jeanie Buss's continued presence through the first sale, and the new statement's explicit nod to her family's leadership, both point toward stability being the priority — at least publicly, at least for now. Whether that holds once Kushner and Iger actually start making organizational decisions is a different question, and one nobody can answer yet.
What we do know: this is now the most expensive sports franchise sale in North American history, the Lakers have changed hands twice in a little over a year, and the Buss family's near-half-century run as the only owners the franchise had ever known already feels like it belongs to a different era.
— The fyiLakers Team
