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The Bogus Lakers Sale Is Exactly Why We Need Publicly Owned Sports Teams

These private equity vampires will just keep strip mining the things that give us joy if we let them.

Adou Thiero of the Los Angeles Lakers looks on in the first half of the 2026 NBA Summer League game against the Chicago Bulls on July 16, 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Los Angeles Lakers are one of the marquee sport franchises, and yet they just got flipped like a run-down beach house in Tampa. 

In a move that shocked NBA insiders, Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter, who bought the team less than a year ago for a jaw-dropping $10 billion, just sold the storied squad to former Disney CEO Bob Iber and venture capitalist Josh Kushner for $12 billion. (Kushner is the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared and son of billionaire convicted felon turned Trump-pardoned ambassador Charles Kushner.)

Walter had a reputation as a private equity shark. He also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers—buying the baseball team in 2012 for $2.5 billion—and has spent the last year trying to “merge” the two iconic LA teams—which, in private equity speak, means instituting slash and burn layoffs and squeezing every last penny out of the franchises and their fans for their investors. Among oligarchs and private equity stripminers, he’s considered to be on the cutting edge, known for dramatically overpaying for sports franchises as a way to park money in an asset that historically only rises in value. In the process, Walter has exposed himself as a paper tiger, over-leveraged and searching for financial support to pay for his original Lakers deal and for the Dodgers’s astronomical contracts. The fact that the Lakers compete in a building called Crypto.com Arena is almost too perfect. 

But more important than Walter’s portfolio are his alleged financial felonies, and they are ample. Walter has found himself in the crosshairs of both Todd Blanche’s Department of Justice and the Security and Exchange Commission for over $16 billion in—again, allegedly—improperly reported loans. We shall now see whether selling to Kushner will make Walter’s legal troubles magically go away. Walter needs the $2 billion to pay lawyers, or potentially to settle with the DOJ. That will be up to Blanche, an unqualified, deeply corrupt lackey, who is more Trump’s personal attorney than Attorney........

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