Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner are paying $12.5B for the Lakers. The sale gives Mark Walter cash at a point when federal investigators are examining his insurers.
Mark Walter sold a controlling stake in the Los Angeles Lakers to former Disney chief executive Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner at a $12.5 billion valuation, the highest price ever paid for a sports team. The Wall Street Journal reported that Kushner, chief executive of Thrive Capital, reached out with an offer and that the two men agreed to buy the franchise within days. The newspaper described the deal as one of the most sudden in sports. Walter bought the Lakers a year earlier for $10 billion, and the team had not publicly been on the market.
The sale supplies Walter with cash at a point when federal investigators are examining roughly $16 billion in loans. People familiar with the matter said Walter needed liquidity to keep his insurance companies afloat. The loans went to companies tied to Walter or his conglomerate TWG Global, then landed on the books of insurance companies he controls after passing through a third entity, people familiar with the matter said. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and the SEC are examining whether the activity constituted fraud, one of the people said.
Walter's sports holdings stretched beyond the Lakers. He owns the Los Angeles Dodgers, a stake in Chelsea Football Club, the Los Angeles Sparks, the Women's Professional Hockey League and auto racing groups. The sports portfolio was valued at more than $3.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The Dodgers won the World Series last fall, their third title of the 2020s. The Dodgers alone are worth $6.3 billion, according to Sportico. Walter paid $2.1 billion for the bankrupt Dodgers in 2012, almost double the previous record for a sports franchise, and beat billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen to get the team. The mark has since been surpassed nine times in franchise deals. Six of those later deals were led by buyers with a background in finance. Cohen's $2.4 billion purchase of the New York Mets in 2020 was one of them. Marc Ganis, co-founder of consulting firm Sportscorp, called the Dodgers purchase "a forerunner in financial engineering and institutional money being put into sports team ownership."
Walter, 64, is chief executive of Guggenheim Partners, the $335 billion investment adviser he founded in 1999 with partners including Peter Lawson-Johnston II. The firm was an early pioneer in raising permanent capital through insurance relationships. He controls nine insurers with total adjusted capital of more than $4.7 billion at the end of 2023. His economic stake in those insurers is worth about $900 million, according to Bloomberg's wealth index. The same index lists Walter's total fortune at $12.1 billion.
The federal investigation began with an internal whistleblower complaint about how Guggenheim Investments booked revenue from its dealings with insurance companies. Federal prosecutors had taken interest by last year, people familiar with the matter said. The inquiry later widened to private credit, the lending business that helped fund Walter's 2012 Dodgers purchase alongside partners. Bloomberg has reported that prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating potential financial improprieties at two of Walter's insurers and at Guggenheim Partners.
Bloomberg reported that federal agents seized Walter's mobile phone and computer in September, executing a search warrant aboard his private plane at a Chicago airport. The warrant was one of several executed that month, and it formed part of a probe into Guggenheim's $362 billion money management division and whether revenue information shared with outside parties was accurate, people with knowledge of the matter said. The people didn't say what information was being sought. Inquiries can end without charges, people familiar with the search said.
An early focus of the inquiry was a deal TWG struck with Mubadala Capital, an arm of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund. In April 2025 the companies announced that Mubadala planned to anchor a $10 billion syndicated investment in TWG. Mubadala Capital is a sovereign wealth fund wholly owned by Abu Dhabi. Prosecutors were looking into whether Mubadala had been misled about valuations, people familiar with the matter said. Prosecutors have not said whether that line of inquiry remains active. A representative for Mubadala Capital declined to comment.
More recently, two of Walter's insurers, Delaware Life Insurance Co. and Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co., said in February they received grand jury subpoenas about private credit investments that were more intertwined with other parts of Walter's business than previously disclosed.
Bloomberg reported that regulators have taken more interest in private credit, the opaque lending market that has boomed on Wall Street since the financial crisis of 2008-09. The market has grown into a rival to banks for business lending. Life insurers supply much of the money behind private credit, and firms including Apollo Global Management and KKR have bought insurers to support those businesses. Regulators are wrestling with affiliated transactions, in which a private-asset firm manages investments for its own insurance unit.
Walter's TWG deal with Mubadala was an early focus of the federal inquiry. Mubadala also backs Ari Emanuel's WME Group, which holds a majority stake in TKO, the parent company of the UFC and WWE. Emanuel, TKO's chief executive and executive chairman, has a close relationship with Mubadala chief executive Khaldoon Al Mubarak. Al Mubarak once praised Emanuel for having "one of the sharpest minds in the industry." Endeavor, WME's predecessor, carried $4.6 billion in long-term debt and $7.2 billion in overall liabilities at the time executives shelved its IPO. The pandemic then cut off most of the company's revenue. In 2020, Al Mubarak proposed bringing the UFC to Abu Dhabi. The UFC brought events to Yas Island. Fight Island, a cordoned-off area with hotels, an arena and training facilities, helped Endeavor generate revenue during a period when most live entertainment was shut down.
The Lakers sale is separate from WME and TKO. AlphaScala's risk model scores KKR at 50/100, labeled Mixed, and TKO at 34/100, labeled Weak.
People familiar with the search didn't say where Walter's devices are now. A TWG spokesperson said the company was "confident these matters will be resolved favorably."
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