Lakers sale to Iger and Kushner awaits NBA approval as Buss dispute continues

Seventy-two hours

Bob Iger was on a sailing yacht in Europe on Aug. 12, winding down a monthlong vacation, when he spent the day working the phones instead of watching a solar eclipse. By the evening of Aug. 11, Mark Walter had agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers to Iger and Josh Kushner at a $12.5 billion valuation, 72 hours after the idea was first put to him.

The two buyers had spent much of 2026 bidding for a Las Vegas expansion team, a process the NBA had projected at $6 billion to $8 billion. Those bids climbed toward $10 billion, and the winner would still have needed to build an arena, which sources estimated at $2 billion or more. A call about the Lakers was a way to buy an existing brand instead.

Walter was at a ranch with poor cell service on Aug. 9 when a friend asked whether he would consider selling. He said no. Two days earlier, Kushner and Iger had called a financial industry source close enough to Walter to suggest he might restructure assets amid federal investigations of his business empire. They decided the offer had to be fast and quiet, and Kushner gave Walter 24 hours to answer.

The offer was $12.5 billion, a 25% increase in 14 months over the $10 billion valuation at which Walter had bought the Buss family's majority stake. Walter cut his weekend short, returned to his Florida estate, and asked his wife and daughter what they thought. ESPN reported that he weighed a return of nearly $4 billion on the first 27% of the team he bought in 2021 and the liquidity it would give him for remediation plans he had proposed to state insurance regulators.

Walter says he was not selling

Walter gave his first public account of the sale to The California Post this week. He said the decision was not premeditated and that he had planned to keep control of the team until Kushner called.

"We just received an offer on the Lakers that was quite a good offer," Walter said, "that we decided we'd pursue selling it." He added: "If he hadn't called me the way he did, we wouldn't be selling the Lakers, either."

He also said he would keep the Dodgers "no matter what" and had no plans to sell them for at least a decade. He declined to discuss the federal investigation, saying it was not appropriate to comment while it was ongoing. His account matches the sequence ESPN reported, in which Walter first told an intermediary the team was not for sale.

Jeanie Buss and the five seasons

Jeanie Buss learned of the agreement hours before ESPN reported it on the morning of Aug. 12, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. She was stunned.

She had chosen Walter as her successor. In 2021 she suggested he buy Philip Anschutz's minority shares, which gave him the right of first refusal on the Buss family's controlling stake. Last year she negotiated the sale of that stake at a $10 billion valuation, about $800 million for each sibling, with written language keeping her as controlling owner for five seasons.

She showed that paperwork to Luka Doncic and his representatives to reassure them that she would still have final say over his future, his manager said. Ten months later, that promise depends on a dispute she is fighting in court.

The family vote and the court date

Five of the six Buss siblings voted on Aug. 17 to sell the family's remaining 17.8% stake, using go-along rights they received in the sale to Walter. Jeanie did not vote and did not respond to the vote call a week earlier.

Her lawyer, Adam Streisand, wrote to the five siblings challenging the legality of the vote under a 2017 court order that required the two co-trustees to vote to keep her as controlling owner. The siblings said they needed only a majority, four of six votes and two of three co-trustees. Each sibling stands to make an additional $371 million if the family sells the full stake.

The dispute went public again on Oct. 7, when the five siblings filed a formal response to Jeanie's suit, and again nine days later when they challenged her petition to remove them as co-trustees. A court date is set for Dec. 8 if the two sides do not settle.

The friction inside the family predates the sale. Janie, Joey and Jesse Buss were fired from their roles within two months of the family's 2025 sale to Walter, and Janie told ESPN last season that her sister's actions made her feel like a "crumpled-up piece of paper thrown into the trash."

The investigation in the background

Walter was under multiple federal criminal investigations before the Lakers purchase closed, according to ESPN, which cited Wall Street Journal reporting that the FBI raided a private plane at Chicago's Midway Airport in September 2025 and seized a laptop and a phone.

His company, The Walter Group, said it had been the target of "multipronged attacks" from "unnamed sources with self-serving interests." It said it had presented a plan to state insurance regulators about affiliated transactions it had misreported and had swapped out $6.5 billion of assets. The company has denied that it is selling sports assets at fire-sale prices. No charges against Walter are described in the ESPN account.

The sale of Walter's 12.8% stake in Chelsea and reported early talks about the WNBA's Sparks, at an estimated $700 million, added to the questions about his finances. Inquiries about the Dodgers have been rebuffed, according to ESPN.

What is not settled

The NBA still has to approve Kushner and Iger, a step expected by the end of the year or early next year. If it goes through, they would be Doncic's fifth team owners across two franchises in three years.

Doncic had been planning a five-day bonding retreat in Slovenia for his new teammates when his manager called him before dawn with a tip that something was happening. He told her there was not much that could shock him anymore, then posted on X: "I've gotten used to big changes over these last few years."

The basketball side has its own questions. Our report on the Lakers' opener without Doncic covers the roster he is expected to lead. Our look at the Warriors-Lakers game covers the end of one era and the start of another, and the league's opening-week viewership numbers show how many people watched it begin.