Josh Kushner And Bob Iger Are Worth A Combined $5.6 Billion. So How Can They Afford To Buy The Lakers For $12.5 Billion?

Not long after news broke yesterday that Josh Kushner and Bob Iger had agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5 billion, we started getting the same question over and over: How can they afford it?

FYI: We currently peg Josh Kushner's net worth at $5 billion, while Bob Iger is worth $600 million.

Add those fortunes together, and you get $5.6 billion. That's not even half of $12.5 billion. So what's going on???

Adam Silver, Joshua Kushner, and Bob Iger (Photo by XNY/Star Max/GC Images)

$12.5 Billion Is The Lakers' Valuation

The first thing to clarify is that the Lakers are not being bought for $12.5 billion. Current owner, Mark Walter, is selling his stake for a price that values all the shares combined (aka the whole team) at $12.5 billion.

Mark does not own 100% of the Lakers. It's generally understood that he owned 75%. The six children of former Lakers owner Jerry Buss each own 3% (for a combined 18%). That group of Buss children includes Jeanie Buss, who will remain very involved in the team. The remaining 7% is owned by yet another small group of investors.

To buy a 75%  stake at a $12.5 billion valuation means someone is transferring $9.375 billion worth of value to Mark Walter. And in the world of extremely high finance, that doesn't necessarily mean someone is cutting Walter a clean check for $9.375 billion.

It's An Ownership Group

The second key point is that Kushner and Iger are buying the Lakers through an ownership group they are leading. Kushner is expected to be the principal owner, but he very likely will not own a majority of the 75% stake the group is purchasing. Iger will almost certainly own a significantly smaller percentage of the team overall.

Josh Kushner Has A $50 Billion Investment Machine Behind Him

Kushner founded Thrive Capital in 2009. Today, Thrive manages roughly $50 billion.

The money belongs to Thrive's funds and their investors. Kushner can't simply withdraw $10 billion from Thrive and spend it on a basketball team. But he can work with Thrive's investors to reallocate capital, realize gains from existing investments, and assemble billions for a new opportunity. It's very possible that Mark Walter agreed to sell the Lakers for some mix of cash and shares of Thrive's investments.

Thrive has backed companies including Instagram, Stripe, Spotify, and OpenAI, and is accustomed to assembling and deploying billions of dollars.

Consider OpenAI alone.

A reconstructed OpenAI cap table circulated in April 2026 estimated that Thrive had invested roughly $3.5 billion in the company and owned approximately 1.98%. At an $852 billion OpenAI valuation, that stake would be worth roughly $17 billion. Check out row #9 below.

For example, I could easily imagine a world where Josh is personally chipping in $1 billion of the $9.375 billion. Then perhaps he also organized an agreement for the Thrive investors to allocate the remaining $8.375 billion as a mix of outside cash and shares of the firm's investments. If Thrive's investments grow (as they are expected to), Mark Walter could ultimately walk away with an even bigger win. And that's on top of making around $2 billion for owning the Lakers for less than a year!

So, What Does Bob Iger Bring?

If Kushner is bringing most of the financial firepower, what does Bob Iger bring? Among other things, an extraordinary relationship with the NBA.

During his decades at Disney, Iger oversaw ESPN and worked closely with NBA commissioner Adam Silver on the league's television-rights agreements. The two also collaborated closely on the NBA's 2020 restart at Disney World during the pandemic. Their relationship goes well beyond business: ESPN recently quoted a league source describing Iger and Silver as close personal friends who even vacation together.

Iger therefore brings instant credibility with the league, decades of experience managing global entertainment brands, and a direct relationship with the person whose league ultimately has to approve the transaction.

The Secret And Amazing Tax Benefits Of Owning Sports Teams

And there's one more reason owning the Lakers could be especially attractive to someone like Josh Kushner: the tax benefits are incredible.

When someone buys a professional sports franchise, a huge portion of the purchase price can typically be allocated to intangible assets such as goodwill, franchise rights, player contracts, and other assets connected to the team. Under Section 197 of the tax code, those acquired intangible assets can generally be amortized — essentially depreciated for tax purposes — over 15 years.

The result can be bizarre. A sports franchise can be generating actual profits and soaring in value while simultaneously reporting enormous losses for tax purposes. Depending on how the ownership group is structured and the individual owner's tax situation, those deductions can flow through to owners and potentially reduce taxes on income generated elsewhere.

We know this isn't merely theoretical. ProPublica obtained tax records showing that after Steve Ballmer bought the Clippers for $2 billion, the team reported roughly $700 million in tax losses over several years despite indications that the franchise was profitable in the real world. In one year examined by ProPublica, Ballmer reported $656 million in income and paid $78 million in federal income taxes — an effective rate of just 12%. ProPublica found that his Clippers deductions helped reduce taxes on income generated outside the team.

Congress actually came close to reducing this benefit. The House-passed version of President Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" would have allowed buyers of sports franchises to amortize only 50% of the relevant intangible basis instead of 100%. That provision disappeared before the legislation became law, leaving the existing sports-team tax treatment intact.

And that's where this gets especially interesting for Josh Kushner.

Thrive Capital is sitting on enormous unrealized gains in companies like OpenAI, with potentially significant liquidity events on the horizon. We don't know how the Lakers' ownership group will be structured or exactly which deductions Kushner personally will be able to use. But owning a multibillion-dollar sports franchise that can potentially generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax deductions could be an extremely useful asset for someone who may also be realizing enormous investment gains elsewhere.

So the Lakers aren't merely a trophy asset, a basketball team, or even a potentially great investment.

For the right billionaire, they can also be an extraordinary tax machine.