Meet Mark Walter, the billionaire who agreed to purchase the Lakers
After shelling out a record-breaking sum of roughly $10 billion, Mark Walter is quickly to be the brand new proprietor of the Lakers.
The 65-year-old Walter, a businessman with a web value of $12.5 billion, in keeping with the Bloomberg Billionaires’ index, agreed to purchase the Lakers from the Buss household within the largest-ever sale of a U.S. sports activities franchise, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Wednesday.
He’s the CEO of Guggenheim Companions, a monetary companies agency with greater than $325 billion in property, and of TWG International, a multinational holding firm.
And he’s additionally no stranger to sports activities possession and funding.
Walter is the first proprietor and chairman of the Dodgers, and he additionally has monetary pursuits in a number of different sports activities groups and enterprises, together with Chelsea FC, the Los Angeles Sparks, the Cadillac Formulation 1 racing crew, the Billie Jean Cup and the Skilled Girls’s Hockey League.
Now, he’s including probably the most iconic manufacturers in sports activities to that portfolio.
Walter’s Guggenheim Baseball Administration group bought the Dodgers in 2012 for $2.15 billion in what was then an MLB file.
Below the supervision of Walter, the Dodgers have loved a sustained run of success — the crew has gained the NL West all however one time since 2013, and captured World Sequence titles in 2020 and 2024.
He has co-led the possession group for the Sparks since 2014 alongside six others, together with Lakers legend and former part-owner Magic Johnson.
And he’s concerned with Chelsea by being a co-leader of the BlueCo consortium with Todd Boehly, Clearlake Capital and Hansjörg Wyss.
The consortium took management of the membership in 2022, after former proprietor Roman Abramovich, a Russian businessman, was sanctioned by the U.Okay. authorities in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The PWHL’s creation in 2023 is thanks largely to Walter’s funding, and the league’s championship trophy, the “Walter Cup,” is called after Mark and his spouse, Kimbra.
Walter is concerned with the Cadillac F1 crew, a brand new franchise that can start competing in 2026, as a part-owner by way of TWG Motorsports.
A local of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he’s additionally concerned with a number of philanthropic organizations, together with the Los Angeles Dodgers Basis and LA Rises, a forest fireplace restoration effort he co-founded with Johnson and leisure govt Casey Wasserman.
Walter went to Creighton College for undergrad and acquired a J.D. from Northwestern College earlier than getting into the enterprise world.
