I recently wrote about AI-made microdramas in China, Elon Musk’s AI-Odyssey plans, what a failed Instagram experiment tells us about Hollywood’s engagement trap and A24’s deal with Google DeepMind.
Bob Iger is buying the Lakers for $12.5 billion. Jeff Bezos wants a piece of Liverpool Football Club in a deal that values the team at roughly $6 billion. Increasingly, media and technology titans seem to be looking at sports and seeing something they can’t find anywhere else: scarce, global intellectual property that gets more valuable as the rest of entertainment gets harder to price. (Plus, Iger gets permanent courtside seats between Jack Nicholson and a random Kardashian.)
Iger, the former Disney CEO and arguably the most consequential media executive of his generation, along with venture capitalist Josh Kushner, with whom Iger has had a working relationship through Thrive Capital, is buying the Lakers less than a year after Mark Walter bought controlling interest in a deal that valued the franchise at $10 billion.
If the deal closes, Walter’s group will have captured roughly $2.5 billion in valuation appreciation in less than a year — a staggering return and a vivid sign of how quickly the economics of elite sports franchises are shifting. Bezos’ Liverpool investment tells the same story from the other side of the Atlantic, with Fenway Sports Group realizing a staggering return on their 2010 investment, when they paid $405 million for the club.
The media business has spent the past decade creating an extraordinary amount of entertainment — and an extraordinary amount of uncertainty about what any of it is worth. There are more shows, movies, creators and platforms than audiences can possibly consume. Streaming has made distribution global while fragmenting attention. Social media has made hits instantaneous and ephemeral. Artificial intelligence is about to make the supply of programming even larger.
Try putting a number on the enduring value of a television show in five years’ time. Now try putting a number on the Lakers. Everybody knows what the Lakers are. There are only 30 NBA franchises, not all of them created equal. Only a handful of those franchises come with global followings. The Lakers offer Iger celebrity sizzle, 17 championships, generations of stars, a global fan base, a recognizable logo and eight decades of cultural history. It’s Showtime. Every season creates another chapter. Every superstar becomes another piece of the mythology. The Lakers are among the most valuable and enduring pieces of IP in sports, with a moat that would leave Ted Sarandos and David Zaslav pink with envy.
Below, I break down:
- Why the Lakers arrive with the expensive part already finished
- How the playbook Iger ran on Mickey Mouse, Marvel and Star Wars maps onto a basketball team
- Why the league’s new 11-year deals with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon make a franchise look like a distribution platform
- What an 8 p.m. tipoff is worth in a business that spent a decade building endless on-demand libraries
- Why Iger shifted from an NBA expansion bid to a record-setting team acquisition
- And the most valuable thing a franchise confers, which never shows up on the P&L
Don’t stop here
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