When the Buss family sold a majority stake in the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers last year to private equity billionaire Mark Walter at a $10 billion valuation, it appeared to be a spectacular windfall for a franchise the late Jerry Buss bought in 1979 for $67.5 million.

But in the context of a half-century of a booming economy, that performance isn’t so remarkable, billionaire wealth advisor Peter Mallouk points out. The compound annualized return of the Lakers investment comes out to 11.5%, compared with 12.4% for the S&P 500 Index from 1979 to 2025 (including dividends)—meaning the same $67.5 million could have instead grown to $16 billion, even if it wouldn’t have come with the thrill of courtside seats to the Showtime Lakers and 11 NBA championship celebrations.

“If you were evaluating it purely as investment,” says Mallouk, the 56-year-old CEO of Overland Park, Kansas-based Creative Planning, “you could have performed better with a lot more anonymity, a lot less hassle and a lot less drama just placing a trade in a Fidelity or Goldman Sachs account.”

It’s a surprising statement from a man who owns a piece of the Kansas City Royals and recently spent hundreds of millions of his own cash to acquire a majority stake in Major League Soccer’s Sporting Kansas City at a roughly $700 million valuation. But Mallouk, who joined Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires earlier this year, says he “didn’t really look at it from an economic perspective” when the opportunity arose to buy Sporting KC. And with an estimated net worth of $16.1 billion—ranking him No. 18 among the world’s richest sports team owners—he can afford to invest for the love of the game and his hometown.

It’s just not necessarily advice he would give to his clients at Creative Planning, a 43-year-old firm that over the last two decades he has built into one of America’s largest financial planning businesses, with $700 billion in assets under management or advisement.

The son of immigrants from Lebanon and Egypt, Mallouk grew up going to Royals games with his family in the 1970s and 1980s—the team’s heyday, featuring Hall of Famer George Brett. After earning dual law and business graduate degrees from the University of Kansas, he began doing estate planning work for several wealth management businesses in the area, including Creative Planning. In 2004, when it had only........

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