Who's actually buying the Lakers?
Josh Kushner and Bob Iger don't have $12.5 billion
Ramona Shelburne writes: “The Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion, a record-breaking price, multiple sources told ESPN.”
$12.5 billion.
And now Kushner and Iger might also be on the hook for the Buss family holdings, too.
“Under the terms of the deal,” reports The New York Times, “Kushner is putting up personal money, and Iger may as well.”
Iger … may? (Somehow every media outlet is reporting that Bob Iger is buying the Lakers.)
Let’s estimate that Mark Walter now owns 85 percent of the Lakers. The Busses own almost all of the rest. If that’s right, someone has to get Walter $10.625 billion stat, and the Busses would like a couple of billion as well.
Iger is good, according to The New York Times, for perhaps zero.
And so Josh Kushner, worth a reported $5 billion, needs a ton of money.
If we go to lunch, and you generously pay on your credit card, would the media report that I’m buying lunch?
And … what if someone else pays your credit card bill? Because Forbes estimates that Bob Iger is worth around $600 million, and Josh Kushner around $5 billion.
Who in the hell is actually buying the Lakers?
The tidiest answer would be: whoever Mark Walter owes all that money to.
Mark Walter’s business meltdown is far-reaching and complex. But Pablo Torre, Brian Windhorst and others note that Mubadala Capital agreed to anchor a $10 billion syndicated investment for one of Walter’s businesses a few months before he purchased the Lakers for that exact amount.
And then as we discussed in the last installment, Bloomberg reported in July about investigators looking into Walter:
An early focus of the inquiry was a deal TWG struck last year with Mubadala Capital, an arm of an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, according to people familiar with the matter. In April 2025 the companies announced Mubadala Capital would anchor a $10 billion syndicated investment in TWG.
Prosecutors were looking into whether Mubadala Capital had been misled about valuations, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential matters. It’s unclear whether prosecutors are still pursuing that line of inquiry.
Mubadala is a sovereign wealth fund owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. Mubadala is chaired by Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan while Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak is managing director and group CEO.
Khaldoon—he’s often referred to as Khaldoon—will be important. He went to college in Boston, and attended NBA games. Khaldoon lived in Los Angeles where he became so close to Ari Emanuel (the agent who cooked up the idea for LeBron’s Decision and was the model for Ari Gold in Entourage) that Emanuel found doctors when Khaldoon’s kids got sick. Khaldoon funded Emanuel’s ascension to run a giant sports conglomerate, but appears to have a particular interest in the NBA.
Now that Walter has become radioactive, is it possible Khaldoon would feel comfortable doing business with someone like Bob Iger?
Here’s Iger announcing Disney’s seventh theme park, in Abu Dhabi. It’s a complex deal that took some negotiating between Disney and … Khaldoon’s brother. Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak chairs the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi.
If Khaldoon and Mubadala was OK with Walter “owning” the Lakers reportedly purchased with Mubadollars, might he be OK with Bob Iger and Josh Kushner doing the same thing?
