Kushner and Iger Buy Lakers for Record $12.5B. Ask Who Benefits.

Funny how these things work. LeBron James, the greatest player alive, plays eight years for the Lakers, carries the franchise on his back, and then walks to Philadelphia as a free agent. A few weeks later, two billionaires nobody elected swoop in and buy the team for $12.5 billion. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to notice the calendar. You just have to have eyes.

Josh Kushner. Bob Iger. One is the brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of a president, raised in one of the most connected real estate families in New York. The other ran Disney for fifteen years and openly flirted with running for president as a Democrat. A Republican-adjacent dynasty and a Democratic kingmaker, joining hands over a basketball team. And people still tell you there’s two parties in this country. There’s one party. It’s the money party, and you’re not in it.

Angela George (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

The price tag is $12.5 billion. That’s not a typo. Twelve and a half billion dollars for a basketball team. Three years ago, Michael Jordan sold the Charlotte Hornets for $3 billion, and people thought that was insane. The Boston Celtics went for $6 billion last year. Now we’re at $12.5 billion, and nobody blinks. Ask yourself what happened in three years to triple the value of an NBA franchise. Nothing happened to the game. The game is the same. What changed is that the people with the money decided the price, and the rest of us are supposed to nod along.

Here’s the part the media is glossing over. Mark Walter bought a controlling stake in the Lakers from the Buss family in June 2025 for $10 billion. That deal got approved by NBA owners last October. Now, less than a year later, Walter flips the team to Kushner and Iger for $12.5 billion. He made $2.5 billion sitting on his hands for ten months. Walter called it an “extraordinary investment.” I bet it was. The rest of us call that rigging the game, but when billionaires do it, it’s called “stewardship.”

Clément Bardot (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Kushner and Iger released a statement saying they’re “deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers.” Stewards. That’s a word you use when you’re managing something that belongs to someone else. But the Lakers don’t belong to the fans. They never did. The Buss family held them for decades and treated the thing like a family heirloom. Now it’s a line item on a billionaire’s portfolio.

And here’s the detail nobody