Published: August 24, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A

The Bloom desk here. When Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers at a $12.5 billion valuation, the headline number was the record, but the more revealing figure is the one that never appears in the press release: the share of that price the new owners will book as a deduction.

A trophy franchise changing hands at the highest valuation in the history of American sports is a good story on its own. The better one is why the richest buyers keep paying these prices, and how a basketball team turns into one of the most efficient tax shields a billionaire can own.

The price, and the man selling

The deal values the Lakers at $12.5 billion, a record for a US sports franchise. It is also a fast flip. Mark Walter, who also controls the Los Angeles Dodgers, bought majority control of the Lakers from the Buss family in 2025 at a then-record valuation of about $10 billion. Barely a year later he is selling that stake to Kushner, the Thrive Capital founder, and Iger, the former Disney chief executive, at a $2.5 billion markup.

For Kushner this is not a first move into sports. He previously held a minority stake in the Memphis Grizzlies, later took a small position in the Miami Heat, which he must now sell to complete the Lakers purchase, and earlier this year bought into the San Francisco Giants.

The ownership math is not settled

Kushner and Iger are acquiring roughly 65 percent of the franchise from Walter. A separate agreement to buy the Buss family’s remaining 17.8 percent minority stake would lift their combined ownership to about 83 percent.

That second piece is contested. Jeanie Buss, who took over the team after her father’s death and stayed on as the Lakers’ governor, is fighting the sale of the family’s remaining shares. Five of her siblings signed to sell, triggering a tag-along clause, but her lawyer says she has not agreed and that any vote to sell “would be and is void.” The whole transaction still needs approval from the NBA’s board of governors, so nothing is final until the league signs off.

Why the tax code makes this cheaper than it looks

Here is the part that separates a sports headline from a finance story. Sports teams have become a favored shelter for the very wealthy, and the mechanism is specific rather than vague.

Under Section 197 of the tax code, a buyer can treat most of the purchase price as intangible assets, media rights, player contracts, and goodwill, then amortize that value over 15 years. A team’s roster, for example, counts as an intangible that depreciates on paper, generating losses that offset taxable income earned elsewhere. It works even as the team itself rises in value and its operations turn a profit.

The amounts are not marginal. As much as 80 percent of a team’s value can sit in intangibles. Sports-finance analyst Joe Pompliano predicts that once the Lakers deal closes, the new owners will allocate 90 percent or more of the price to intangible assets, then deduct that amortization against team income over 15 years under Section 197.

For a buyer like Kushner, the timing lines up with the rest of his balance sheet. “My guess is he is preparing to offset a boatload of carried interest income,” Ram Ahluwalia, founder of Lumida Wealth Management, wrote on X. “If you own a sports team, done correctly, you can get a deduction against income.” Kushner is sitting on large potential gains from stakes in SpaceX, OpenAI, and Stripe, exactly the kind of income a 15-year amortization schedule is built to absorb.

What it signals

Record franchise prices are usually read as a bet on scarcity, and that read is not wrong: there are 30 NBA teams and a growing line of billionaires who want one. But the tax treatment quietly changes the arithmetic. When a large slice of a $12.5 billion check comes back as deductions against carried interest and capital gains, the real cost to the buyer is lower than the sticker, and the price a rational owner will pay is correspondingly higher.

That is the loop worth watching. Franchise valuations keep setting records partly because the after-tax math keeps improving for the people writing the checks. The Lakers are the trophy. The 15-year amortization schedule is the reason the trophy keeps getting more expensive.

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