The Lakers Just Sold for $12.5 Billion, a Year After Selling for $10 Billion

The Los Angeles Lakers are changing hands again, and at a number that resets the ceiling for professional sports franchises in North America. Josh Kushner and Bob Iger have agreed to acquire the team for $12.5 billion, according to multiple reports citing people familiar with the transaction.

What makes the figure worth pausing on is not just its size. It is the second Lakers ownership transition in roughly a year, and the last one closed at about $10 billion when Mark Walter bought in. Two and a half billion dollars of appreciation on the same asset, over that span, is the part that says something.

Who is buying

Kushner founded Thrive Capital and co-founded Oscar Health, and he is already a minority owner of the Miami Heat, so this is not his first time on an NBA cap table. Iger ran Disney from 2005 to 2020 and again from 2022 to 2026, which is about as direct a background in monetising intellectual property at global scale as the buyer list for a sports team is likely to produce.

That combination is the tell. The Lakers are being bought by people whose experience is in distribution and rights, not in running a basketball operation. The franchise has been both a team and a media property for a long time; the buyer profile now matches.

Why the number holds up

Elite sports properties keep clearing prices that look detached from their operating economics, and the reason is that they are not being priced as operating businesses. A team with global recognition, a large domestic media market and reliable on-court relevance is closer to a scarce rights asset, and there are only thirty of them in this league.

The higher-rate environment has not changed that. It has changed who can write the cheque, which is a different thing, and it partly explains why the buyer here is a private-capital founder alongside a former media chief executive rather than a single operating owner.

League approval and the formal closing process will set the real timeline. But the headline valuation is already the story: scarce sports assets with international reach are still being bid as strategic holdings, and nothing in the current rate picture has interrupted that.