The Lakers sale and a federal probe put Mark Walter in a spotlight he never sought

Mark Walter stood next to Donald Trump with his hands clasped and his eyes focused on the president, who spoke to a crowd about the power of the Oval Office and the “most important people in the world” who visit it.

Walter, 66, was among those visitors. So were members of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the MLB juggernaut that Walter has owned since 2012. The team was attending a ceremony in July at the White House to celebrate its 2025 World Series victory, marking the Dodgers’ second consecutive championship and third in six seasons.

During his speech, Trump hailed the Dodgers as winners and mentioned the late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, whom he called a friend. “He would do anything to win. … But, you’re doing the same thing. It’s amazing, Mark,” Trump said.

Walter made a brief speech in which he thanked the president, and later presented him with an engraved World Series ring and a jersey with “Trump 47” on the back.

The event gave the public a rare look at a billionaire who has maintained a low profile for years despite running a sprawling business empire that includes some of the most famous franchises in sports.

But last week, Walter found himself in the headlines not for any team he owned but rather for one he sold, the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers.

Just 14 months after agreeing to buy the iconic franchise, Walter agreed to sell the Lakers to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The stunning deal reportedly valued the Lakers at $12.5 billion — $2.5 billion more than when Walter agreed to purchase the team. The timing of the sale has raised eyebrows not just for the brevity of Walter’s tenure as owner. Federal investigators are investigating insurance companies he owns.

Walter did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story, and federal officials at the agencies conducting the probe declined to comment.

Walter’s appearance at the White House put the owner in the public eye. The Lakers sale has now put his business empire there, too.

Long before Walter became a sports mogul, he built his fortune in finance.

An Iowa native, Walter attended Creighton for his undergraduate degree in business and earned his law degree from Northwestern. Beginning in the 1990s in Chicago, he co-founded multiple financing and investment firms, and now serves as CEO of both Guggenheim Partners and TWG Global, a holding company with investments across industries, including sports, entertainment, technology and artificial intelligence.

The Bloomberg Billionaire Index estimates Walter’s net worth at $18.3 billion, and his sports portfolio includes the Premier League’s Chelsea FC, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, the Professional Women’s Hockey League, Cadillac F1 and the Billie Jean King Cup in addition to the Dodgers and, until last week, the Lakers.

But as he accumulated such enormous wealth, he kept an unassuming public profile. His hometown paper in Cedar Rapids wrote in 2012 that many in Walter’s high school class of 1978 had no idea what he was up to until news broke that he had purchased the Dodgers. Unlike some of the NBA’s more flashy team owners, Walter was an understated figure during his occasional courtside appearances, favoring jeans and sneakers.

Recently, though, he has found himself receiving some unwelcome attention.

Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized Walter’s phone and laptop last year. A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment.

Two of Walter’s companies — Delaware Life Insurance Company and its affiliate Clear Spring Life and Annuity — received grand jury subpoenas in February as part of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the company acknowledged in a March regulatory filing. A parallel investigation is underway by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the filing noted. (The U.S. Attorney’s Office and SEC declined to comment.)

Life insurers typically invest in relatively safe and low-risk assets to provide predictable returns, and insurers are required to report transactions with affiliated businesses to regulators as a safeguard to protect policyholders and guard against conflicts of interest. Delaware Life said investigators are examining whether investments tied to affiliated businesses had been improperly reported as unaffiliated.

The company said through a subsequent internal investigation it had identified errors in how related business investments were presented in the company’s 2025 annual statement. In all, the filings show Delaware Life revised its disclosures to identify nearly $17 billion more in investments tied to related businesses, increasing its share of the company’s portfolio from about 3 percent to 42 percent.

One of the investments that appears to be caught up in the reclassified dealings was a $4.1 million loan to Dodger Tickets LLC, a subsidiary tied to the Dodgers and involved with ticketing and other business operations. Delaware Life listed that loan as unaffiliated in its 2025 annual statement. In the March filing, the same investment was listed as affiliated.

Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten was listed as CEO of Dodger Tickets LLC on an April 2025 business filing with California’s Secretary of State. Kasten declined to comment on the organization’s corporate entities.

As a result of the revised investments, S&P Global Ratings last month changed its outlook for Delaware Life from “stable” to “negative.” S&P at the time also affirmed its A- financial strength rating for the company.

Group 1001, the Walter-controlled holding company that owns Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life, said last month in a statement to The Athletic that it was “cooperating fully” with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and SEC investigations, and its policy was not to comment on pending governmental inquiries. Group 1001 also said it plans to “reduce and restructure certain of the investments at issue” in response to the errors, though it did not specify which investments.

“Our capital position and liquidity remain strong, and our financial strength ratings are unchanged,” the statement said. “We remain focused on delivering exceptional value and service to our contract and policyholders and their financial representatives.”

The probes related to Walter’s insurance companies are not the first time his business dealings have faced federal scrutiny. Most recently, Guggenheim agreed in 2024 to pay the SEC $15 million over “widespread and longstanding” recordkeeping violations involving employees’ off-channel communications.

Those recordkeeping rules are designed to protect investors and to allow the SEC to ensure securities laws, including antifraud provisions, are followed.

“The Commission staff’s investigation uncovered pervasive off-channel communications at various seniority levels” at Guggenheim, according to the SEC administrative order. “The investigation determined that nearly all broker-dealer and investment adviser personnel sampled had engaged in at least some level of off-channel communications.”

Walter led a consortium that purchased the Dodgers in 2012 and included Magic Johnson, Todd Boehly and Kasten as minority partners. At the time, Walter was a Chicago Cubs season ticket holder, according to the Chicago Tribune.

He told the paper he signed on to the deal to buy the Dodgers because you “don’t get two chances to buy the Dodgers.” He added: “I just saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

He told the Los Angeles Times that he viewed the purchase as a legacy.

“It’s a multi-generational thing my daughters’ granddaughters will own,” he said at the time.

Kasten, a longtime sports executive, praised Walter’s leadership style, saying he closely follows the franchise but is comfortable delegating rather than micromanaging.

According to Kasten, when the two partnered for their Dodgers bid, Walter told him, “Look, Stan, I am a baseball fan, and I have a lot of opinions, and you’re gonna hear all of them, and you are to disregard all of them, because if I was making these decisions, I didn’t need you.”

Kasten said Walter has indeed given executives latitude over time, including encouragement to flex the organization’s financial muscle, resulting in eye-popping free-agent signings and investment in scouting and player development.

Walter poses with Shohei Ohtani at a news conference at Dodger Stadium. Kirby Lee / USA Today Sports

Since 2024, the Dodgers have topped all MLB teams in luxury-tax payrolls and signed megadeals with players such as Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Tucker and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, structuring some of those contracts with significant deferred payments. In August, the Dodgers surprised the baseball world by landing coveted pitcher Tarik Skubal in a blockbuster trade with the Detroit Tigers.

“Mark has continued to remind us of the value of spending a little more if it was gonna deliver a bigger ROI, to be a little bold when necessary,” Kasten said Thursday.

Kasten said he wasn’t aware of Walter’s plan to sell the Lakers, and his understanding was that the deal came together quickly.

“It was a surprise to me,” Kasten said, “but Mark’s an awfully smart guy and a savvy investor, and if this is what he thinks is best, I feel pretty confident that’s exactly what it is.”

Kasten maintained that the sale of the Lakers is not related to the Dodgers and changes are not coming to the organization. “We don’t have visibility into every other company he owns or any other company he owns,” he said.

Two years after Walter bought the Dodgers, he made a play for the NBA.

In 2014, Walter was part of a group reportedly offering $1.6 billion to buy the Los Angeles Clippers; the group included billionaire media executive David Geffen, Oprah Winfrey and Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison, according to reports at the time. The winning bid, however, went to former Microsoft Corp CEO Steve Ballmer, who purchased the Clippers for $2 billion, then a record for a professional basketball team.

It would take more than a decade, but Walter would land a Los Angeles basketball team.

Walter, who first took a minority stake in the Lakers in 2021, purchased the team from the Buss family in 2025 — at a then-record $10 billion valuation at the time of the agreement. The purchase made him the team’s first new controlling owner in 46 years.

Just 14 months later, the Walter period was the shortest majority ownership tenure in the organization’s history.

Walter’s purchase of the Lakers was supposed to lead them from their family ownership past into a new era of modernization. Essential infrastructure was to be bolstered, and innovative ideas regarding analytics, scouting and medical were to be assembled. To those around the NBA, the influx of capital and brain power was a formidable combination — the Lakers, who already enjoy geographic and brand-recognition advantages, were now getting a heaping of baseball’s best front office and ownership group.

But at least on the basketball side of the operation, few of those changes took hold. The bigger moves under Walter’s leadership were designed to increase profits. The Lakers conducted multiple rounds of layoffs and announced a significant increase in season-ticket prices, with some raised by more than 40 percent.

“It was a weird vibe last year,” said one well-placed league source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of an ongoing relationship with the team.

The Lakers also moved their G League affiliate from inside its El Segundo facility to the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs, a business decision that frustrated Lakers basketball executives because it distanced the team from its developmental players and coaches. The Lakers often utilized that arrangement, such as last season when LeBron James needed full-contact practices after returning from injury.

The business department, led by Walter’s longtime Dodger associate Lon Rosen, negotiated sponsorship deals for the Lakers’ jersey and, in an organizational first, for the Laker Girls dance team. They also added more courtside seating and relocated media members so the team could sell those lower-level seats.

The Lakers weren’t Walter’s only sports property that saw changes. The PWHL, originally owned entirely by Walter, added its first outside investors in June — reportedly $100 million from Kilmer Sports Ventures and Ilitch Companies, according to Sportico. The league finished its third season in May, and Kasten, who also serves as a PWHL executive, said in June that the infusion of cash will help “continue the momentum.” Meanwhile, the high-spending Dodgers are looking ahead to another postseason run.

David Carter, a longtime southern California-based sports-business strategist and principal of the Sports Business Group, said the timing of the Lakers sale has led to wide speculation about Walter’s motivations. Meanwhile, Kushner’s family connections to Trump sparked theories about whether the President was involved. A White House spokesperson told Front Office Sports: “This has nothing to do with President Trump or his administration.”

At this point, with few details known about the status of the federal investigation, Carter urged caution in connecting dots.

“I think we probably need to give this thing a few months for it to settle and then I think there will be an opportunity to look back in a little bit more of a sober fashion and say ‘Gosh, of course that made sense, he wanted to do it for this express purpose,’” Carter said.

Dan Woike contributed to this report.