The Los Angeles Lakers have agreed to be sold for the second time in ten months.
“Mark Walter … is selling it to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion.”
— CBS Sports
While most people’s initial reaction to the sale was in regard to LeBron leaving leading to a 25% increase in the value of the Lakers, or the connection to Disney’s deconstructionist woke era in Iger taking over, or the new connection the Lakers have to President Trump in Josh Kushner — the first person that came to my mind was Jay Mohr.
Mohr is a comedian I grew up enjoying that got into sports and podcasting, he hosted Jay Mohr Sports and Mohr Stories. The reason he came into my mind is that he is married to Jeanie Buss, former Lakers majority owner, who sold controlling interest to Mark Walter in June of 2025. Mohr was previously married to one of my childhood crushes, Nikki Cox, the comedy it-girl for a good chunk of the nineties. A series of plastic surgery misfortunes would in large part end her public-facing career. Mohr wrote one of the more surreal articles I’ve read during his time with Fox Sports, about being dosed with LSD at a restaurant while he was married to Nikki. The line I have never forgotten: “When you’re on acid and you’re playing Madden, your fingers are your coaches.” Then after his divorce from Nikki he ended up with Jeanie and became married into Lakers ownership. I say none of this out of envy for the man, but I have always found him funny and interesting so it’s more from a place of fraternal appreciation. He provides a human lens for me into the numbers and names of this story.
As for Kushner, this comes less than two weeks after FIFA scrapped his attempt to buy a private equity stake in the World Cup, a plan UEFA threatened to boycott the tournament over. He’ll also have to sell his current piece of the Miami Heat before this deal can be approved.
These new sports team sale prices and valuations are often used as talking points for whatever someone’s personal ideology is. People typically see this event through whatever their worldview happens to be: corruption in the Trump Administration, the league getting more woke, Jews continuing to take over the world, billionaires being unrestrained oligarchs that are destroying society — usually people’s initial baseline worldview comes out in how these type of events are colored in their minds.
For me, I’m sure that is still true to some degree. Yet the exorbitant valuations of sports franchises today are telling for a few reasons. First, enormous increases in company valuations have taken place over the last decade, and franchise values rose right alongside them. Second, sports are one of the last bastions of attention in a hyper-fractured, niched down marketplace where it’s easier than ever for people to exist in their own bubbles. Sports still unites people across otherwise scattered interests.
Another topic of discussion is the Lakers’ current owner, Mark Walter, who had purchased the team for $10 billion ten months ago, he makes a 25% return on that investment. Walter is the head of Guggenheim Baseball management, owners of the Dodgers since 2012, where he now turns his full attention to, aside from his reported federal investigation. So in a round about way, this one ups the Yankees’ big news of their minority share of Yankee Global to Apollo. That’s not how you make Mona Lisa smile.
These franchises are ultimately worth whatever people are willing to pay for them. Fans should be reminded that their beloved teams are often simply someone’s investment widget to be milked for cash and flipped when the right offer comes. It may be their owner’s hobby or status symbol, or best case scenario: their passion, where they seek to show mastery of leadership, competition, and detail to put the skills that have made them titans of industry on display within the sporting world. The latter describes franchises that are actually worthy of our time and attention. Seeing fans be emotionally decimated by incompetent organizations is like seeing a brand loyalist defend a defective product.
I understand Bob Iger does not equal Disney in this transaction, but he is still the most recognizable public figure from their executive leadership this century. Aside from Kathleen Kennedy and her brand-destroying reign as the head of Star Wars. My hope for the return of Disney to Los Angeles professional sports was always them reacquiring the Anaheim Ducks and bringing back the green and purple uniforms full time. Disney had an incredible setup with the Ducks and incorporated their IP into the live arena experience for fans. While we may not see that with the Lakers, I don’t expect to see any courtside shots of Goofy at Crypto.com arena, should they falter in the postseason, I will happily refer to them as a Mickey Mouse organization.
Photo: Erik Drost / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)