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By Anna Rahmanan
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Josh Kushner and Bob Iger have reportedly agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for more than $12 billion, barely nine months after Mark Walter completed his own $10 billion takeover.
This is a remarkable reversal that could say more about the scarcity value of elite sports franchises than about basketball in Los Angeles. ESPN reported the agreement Wednesday, citing multiple sources, but the transaction has not yet been announced as approved by the NBA.
Although the obvious story is the record price, perhaps the more interesting angle is how rapidly Kushner is moving into the most exclusive corners of global sports, from the NBA and Major League Baseball to a recent, unsuccessful attempt to invest in FIFA’s commercial business.
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That expansion also brings political scrutiny: Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, while FIFA President Gianni Infantino has developed a notably close public relationship with Trump. No evidence links the Trump administration to the Lakers transaction. But Kushner’s growing sports portfolio raises a broader question about whether access, relationships and scarce assets are becoming increasingly intertwined around the Trump orbit.
Here are five things the potential Lakers deal could mean.
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1. The Lakers Just Reset the Price of an NBA Team
Walter’s purchase of the Lakers was unanimously approved by NBA governors on October 30, 2025, closing a transaction that valued the franchise at $10 billion.
Less than a year later, Kushner and Iger are reportedly willing to pay more than $12 billion.
That implies an increase of at least 20 percent in the Lakers’ headline valuation in roughly nine months. More startling is the comparison with Boston: the Celtics sale approved in August 2025 valued that franchise at $6.1 billion, then an American professional sports record. The Lakers’ reported price is approaching twice that figure.
Has every NBA team suddenly doubled in value? No, because Los Angeles has advantages few franchises can replicate, including its market, history and unusually strong international profile.
That being said, the transaction price can become negotiation ammunition: the next NBA owner considering a sale can point to the Lakers and argue that valuations established in 2024 or 2025 no longer describe the market.
2. Even the Lakers Can Now Be Flipped
For 46 years, the Lakers were controlled by the Buss family. The NBA formally ended that run in October 2025, when governors unanimously approved the sale of the family’s majority interest to Walter, while the family retained a minority stake. Now, control could change again less than a year later.
That is more than an unusual timetable; it suggests that even the most emotionally rooted sports franchises are starting to behave more like trophy financial assets: scarce, globally desirable and potentially sellable whenever another buyer is willing to pay a sufficiently large premium.
Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979 and envisioned keeping the team in the family. Now, Walter could end up holding control for less than a year before handing it to Kushner and Iger.
There is no evidence that Walter bought the Lakers intending to resell them so quickly, and the jump from a $10 billion valuation to more than $12 billion does not translate directly into a $2 billion profit. But the reported deal still changes the assumption that buying a franchise like the Lakers means owning it for decades.
If this transaction closes, the lesson for other owners may be: even a generational sports asset can become a short-duration holding when the next bidder is rich enough.
3. Kushner’s Sports Push Is Becoming a Political Story
Kushner has been moving quickly into elite sports, with stakes in the Miami Heat and San Francisco Giants before the reported Lakers deal.
The FIFA episode is what changes the context: Thrive Eternal, his capital holding company, was recently lined up as an investor in a proposed FIFA commercial vehicle before the plan collapsed amid opposition from major soccer confederations.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino has built a close public relationship with President Donald Trump, while Josh Kushner is Jared Kushner’s younger brother, so you can understand why the overlap looks opaque from the outside, even without evidence of any improper involvement in the Lakers deal.
The scrutiny problem is pretty obvious: Kushner is rapidly expanding into some of the world’s most valuable sports assets at the same time that one of the institutions he sought to invest in has become unusually close to the Trump White House.
A minority stake in the Heat or Giants is one thing. Control of the Lakers would make Kushner’s sports ambitions much harder to separate from questions about access, relationships and the broader business activity surrounding the Trump family.
4. Bob Iger Suggests the Real Bet Is on the Lakers Brand
Iger’s involvement suggests Kushner and his partners may be buying more than a basketball franchise.
At Disney, Iger spent years expanding the value of recognizable brands across movies, streaming, merchandise, theme parks and international markets. The Lakers are a different kind of asset, but the commercial logic is similar: once a brand has a huge built-in audience, the question becomes how many businesses can be built around it.
Considering the reported price of more than $12 billion, ticket sales and basketball operations alone are unlikely to explain the valuation. The upside would have to come from finding more ways to monetize the Lakers name through sponsorships, licensing, media, consumer products, experiences and international growth. Are we a year away from Lakers: The Movie appearing on a theater marquee?
None of those plans has been announced, so this remains an analytical reading of Iger’s presence rather than a stated strategy, but his involvement is definitely a clue. Kushner may be buying scarcity while Iger may be there to help turn that scarcity into more revenue.
5. The Lakers May Be the Ultimate Anti-AI Investment
Upon further scrutiny, there is a neat contradiction at the center of Kushner’s strategy.
Thrive Capital, the venture-capital firm he founded in 2009, made its name backing technology companies such as Stripe and OpenAI, businesses built around scale. Thrive Eternal, his newer long-term investment vehicle, is pursuing almost the opposite kind of asset: sports franchises and other properties whose value comes from scarcity, and the Lakers may be the clearest example.
Technology can create new products, new platforms and new competitors almost overnight, but it cannot create another Lakers franchise with decades of history, championships, star players and inherited fan loyalty in Los Angeles.
That is why investors steeped in technology are willing to pay more than $12 billion for a sports team: they want to own an asset that nobody else can reproduce.
The catch is that scarcity can support a huge valuation without guaranteeing a huge return. An irreplaceable asset can still be overpriced, after all.
Can Kushner and Iger turn the Lakers’ scarcity into enough new revenue to make $12 billion look rational? If they can, the deal could become a template for a new kind of sports investing. If they cannot, the scarcity premium may have run ahead of the business underneath it.
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