Bob Iger’s New Magic Kingdom: Fans Hope He Can Add Disney Sparkle To Lakers

As the new co-owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, Bob Iger brings with him arguably the most significant Hollywood profile of any owner in the history of U.S. major professional sports.

The question fans and Angelenos have now is: What kind of Disney magic can he make?

Iger and Josh Kushner unveiled the stunning deal Wednesday morning, saying they pivoted from pursuing an expansion franchise based in Las Vegas to buying the majority stake held by Mark Walter. The whole Lakers negotiation from start to finish took, according to Iger, just 72 hours. In 2025, Walter ended Buss the family’s 46-year dominion over the team by taking control in a deal valuing the Lakers at around $10 billion. It was a new record in U.S. pro sports. A little more than a year later, Iger and Kushner have brought in at a valuation of $12.5 billion, a new record.

More than a few eyebrows have been raised about Walter’s entrance and exit from the Lakers given the fact that the billionaire’s corporate empire is currently the subject of a federal investigation. Bill Simmons, founder of The Ringer, a longtime Lakers hater and the head of talk at Spotify, wrote in an X post that “Conspiracy Bill is overheating” after “the most shocking NBA sale in a long time. The Lakers got flipped!”

A number of fans were stunned by the timing, noting that Walter had steered the Dodgers to two straight titles and seemed a viable longtime owner after the long reign of the Buss family. The Buss family became NBA royalty by presiding over both the “Showtime” run of titles in the 1970s and ’80s with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, and the 2000s-2010s juggernauts featuring Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.

The Buss family had shepherded the franchise capably for decades, but infighting had led to disarray in the front office. The league had also changed. While the Busses were wealthy by nearly any measure, they weren’t rich like the league’s new wave of owners.

When Walter came in, Lakers fans were excited to have their very own billionaire in charge. Fans hoped for some facsimile of what Walter has done across town with the Dodgers. The team over in Chavez Ravine has the second-highest payroll in baseball, has invested heavily in beefing up the front office and has won three MLB championships since Walter became majority owner in 2012.

And Walter has been investing in the Lakers. In February, he made his most significant change, bringing over the Dodgers’ longtime executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Lon Rosen, as the Lakers’ president of business operations. The franchise’s G-league (or developmental) team was relocated. There were initiatives to bolster the squad’s assistant general manager ranks and its sports science resources. The team also let a number of longtime staffers go last spring. Now, with Walter gone, it is unclear what the team’s direction will be going forward.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” said Pete Zayas, co-host of the Laker Film Room podcast, after today’s news was announced. “We don’t have the family that had been running it for 40 years. We’re in some different waters for sure.”

“Still Sinking In”

In an interview with the California Post, Iger didn’t address speculation about what might have motivated the Walter sale. He said the deal “came together in three days,” a remarkably swift timeline. Former majority owner Jeanie Buss, who had agreed with Walter to remain for five years as the team’s governor, is expected to continue for now in that role, Iger said. “We have enormous respect and appreciation for Jeanie, her father and what they’ve contributed to this franchise,” Iger said.

The former Disney mogul said the news is “still sinking in” and his role is “very new.” In terms of future plans, he said, “We’re smart enough to know what we know and what we don’t know. It’s just premature to speculate at all about what we plan to do, because frankly, we haven’t made any plans yet. Again, we go into this with an appreciation of who the Lakers are. And we just want to build value from today on.”

Iger came on as a minority investor in Kushner’s Thrive Capital in 2022. Earlier this year, Thrive Capital launched a holding company called Thrive Eternal whose investments, said Kushner, would be in “iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition, identity, and shared experience” that would could not be easily replaced by digital innovations, but could enhanced by them. That holding company is, according to The Athletic, the vehicle by which Kushner and Iger intend to buy the Lakers.

Iger approaches the team’s new era from a fan’s perspective. He has been known for his passion for the NBA and close relationships with prominent players like Chris Paul. In L.A., he is taking over just after the high-profile departure of LeBron James, who headed to Philadelphia in a free-agent deal earlier this summer. That leaves Luka Doncic and Austin Reeves as the team’s primary stars, with a number of questions about the rest of the roster.

The Lakers have won 17 total championships. James helped lead them to the one-of-a-kind Covid bubble title in 2020, but their last non-pandemic crown came in 2010. Apart from 2020, their best recent showing in the playoffs has been a Western Conference Finals appearance in 2023 in which they were swept by the Denver Nuggets.

Off the court, the team is still one of the league’s most potent money-makers, but there’s plenty of potential to improve the business. According to a recent ranking compiled by Deadline sister publication Sportico, the team’s 2025 revenue was well behind that of the No. 1 NBA franchise, the Golden State Warriors at $833 million. L.A. was also elbowed out by the New York Knicks, which took in $620 million.

Crypto.com Arena, the awkwardly named venue in downtown L.A. once known as Staples Center, is one area where Iger could put his Disney magic to good use. The arena opened in 1999, at a time when downtown was seeing a massive influx in development spending. Today, DTLA’s mojo has ebbed. The NBA’s L.A. Clippers, longtime former tenants at Staples/Crypto.com, opened their own beyond state-of-the-art venue in Inglewood, CA, the Intuit Dome, in 2024. The result? According to Sportico, “The Clippers took the biggest financial leap in 2024-25 in Year 1 of the Intuit Dome at just over $100 million in sponsor revenue, good for second in the NBA.”

Iger made his reputation during his time at Disney in part by acquiring Marvel, Fox, Pixar and Lucasfilm, but also by presiding over a successful expansion of the company’s theme park empire. As even Disney super-fans might wincingly acknowledge, he became a master of extracting revenue from the parks. From opening branded areas like Galaxy’s Edge and Avengers Campus to venturing to China with Shanghai Disney to introducing dynamic pricing, Iger proved adept in overseeing experiential businesses. A number of major sports teams, especially in the NBA, have shown that kind of savvy. Surely, a number of moves by the Warriors, from their Rakuten jersey sponsorship to their “Thrive City” mixed-use area around the San Francisco arena they own, have caught Iger’s eye.

Rethinking Local Media

Then there’s the local media footprint, a key complement to the national NBA rights deals that took effect in 2025. Last year, the Lakers received a hefty $200 million payment from Charter’s Spectrum SportsNet, the regional sports network whose 20-year deal for team rights runs through the 2031-32 season. While the deal is the league’s richest Walter, according a report last year in Puck, has “shown openness to taking ownership of Spectrum SportsNet away from Charter.”

The upside for the cable company is getting the unattractive financials of the RSN off its books. For the former Lakers owner, the appeal was to be able to potentially rework the team’s media plan to take more of an ownership role, as Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees and others do. Iger, as the former overseer of ESPN and the architect of the latter’s recent swap of 10% of its equity for control of NFL media properties like the NFL network, seems to be pretty ideal casting for an owner looking to reinvent TV and streaming.

As the RSN model continues to erode, the NBA is among the leagues overhauling its media plan. It is aiming to launch a hub for local rights by the 2027-28 season. ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro, Iger’s former direct report, said at a CNBC conference in June that there is “a local RSN problem that the entire industry is grappling with right now.” The ESPN app, which relaunched in dramatically expanded form a year ago, has been onboarding non-ESPN sports programming like CW game coverage. As leagues grapple with the RSN issue, Pitaro said, “they should be looking for reach, which we can provide.”

When Iger returned to the Disney CEO role in 2023 for his second stint, which ended earlier this year when he passed the baton to Josh D’Amaro, his flair for showmanship, on top of his business acumen, was mentioned by many inside the company. That begs the obvious question of how the experience of attending a Laker game might change in the Iger era.

Whether they find a new home or remodel the faded Crypto.com, the team has plenty of ways to improve the experience. That said, Laker games have already been an industry staple, with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez rubbing elbows courtside with industry heavyweights like Jeffrey Katzenberg.

As visions of even loftier, star-packed gatherings take flight, some fans haven’t been able to look past the inherent confusion of having one of the most prominent teams in sports change hands twice in 14 months. “How deep are their pockets?” wondered Laker Film Room co-host Darius Soriano. “They just paid an extraordinary amount of money for this franchise, and putting so much money on the table can be tricky. Are you going to follow through on that investment?”

Tom Tapp contributed to this report.