Bob Iger’s joining of Lakers ownership group is just his latest big deal

Well before he positioned himself to be part of a group with Joshua Kushner to purchase the Los Angeles Lakers at an estimated $12.5 billion valuation, Bob Iger was no stranger to big-ticket deal-making in Hollywood.

As CEO of The Walt Disney Company from 2005-2020, Iger led the way when the company acquired some of its most important components: Pixar for $7.4 billion in 2006, Marvel for $4 billion in 2009, Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in 2012 and a portfolio of entertainment assets from 21st Century Fox for $71.3 billion in 2019.

Those deals turned Disney into an entertainment behemoth and made Iger, who started his career as a small-market TV weatherman in the 1970s, one of the most successful and recognizable chief executives of his generation.

Iger, 75, is also familiar with sports. During his stewardship of Disney, he was involved in every major sports-rights decision at ESPN, including the NFL, NBA and MLB. He even had a hand in Pat McAfee joining ESPN and has always had a strong reputation among Hollywood’s creative community. He understood sports and was a huge fan, attending many games.

Iger stepped down as CEO at the end of 2020, spending the next year as executive chairman of the company. During that time, he appeared on future Lakers coach J.J. Redick’s podcast “The Old Man and the Three.”

As part of a conversation on leadership, Iger was clear about his NBA allegiances: “I am a Clippers fan,” he said, noting that having grown up a New York Knicks fan, he could not bring himself to support the Lakers when his career brought him to Los Angeles.

“I couldn’t root for the Lakers very easily, just was not in my DNA, so I decided to adopt the Clippers, which was actually a good thing because their seats were a lot cheaper than the Lakers,” Iger quipped.

The Lakers are not Iger’s first investment in professional sports. In the summer of 2024, he and his wife, Willow Bay, dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, acquired a controlling stake in Angel City FC for $100 million in a deal that valued the NWSL club at $250 million, which was at the time the highest valuation ever for a women’s professional sports team. Today the club is valued at $335 million, the highest in the league, a 34 percent increase in 18 months.

Bay has her own connection to the NBA, having served as host of the “NBA Inside Stuff” TV show for most of the 1990s.

After leaving Disney in 2021, Iger joined Kushner’s Thrive Capital as a partner in 2022. In November of that year, however, he returned to Disney as CEO for a second time to replace his successor, Bob Chapek. A little more than three years later, in March, he stepped aside again and was succeeded as CEO by Josh D’Amaro. Iger re-joined Thrive Capital as an advisor in April.

Being part of an NBA team ownership group will be a new role for Iger, but he will bring a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge to the Lakers’ boardroom.

Andrew Marchand and Asli Pelit contributed to this story.