Lakers Sale: Jeanie Buss Is Fighting Her Own Siblings for Control

For years, Jeanie Buss has been the Los Angeles Lakers — the face on the sideline, the name on the banner runs, the daughter who won the family throne when her brothers came for it. What this week revealed is how little of that was ever really hers to keep.

Her control was never the same thing as ownership. It was a structure: a trust obligation, a court order, a floor beneath her feet that her siblings were bound to hold in place. The arrangement worked as long as nobody had a reason to walk away from it. Now somebody has waved a check large enough to make the whole family reconsider what loyalty is worth.

The remaining Buss stake in the Lakers is 17.8%, and five of the six siblings have voted to sell it to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner — the same buyers, at the same $12.5 billion valuation, that Mark Walter agreed to only the week before. Jeanie was the lone holdout. On paper it is a minority stake. In practice it is the last thing standing between the family name and a clean exit.

Here is the part the family-feud framing misses. Jeanie’s governorship rests on a number: by NBA rule a controlling owner must hold at least 15% of the team. A 2017 court order and the family trust bind the co-trustees — Jeanie, her sister Janie and her brother Joey — to vote the shares in a way that keeps her above that line. Her power, in other words, has always depended on other people choosing to protect it. That was fine for years. It becomes a liability the moment the money gets big enough.

And the money is now the largest in the history of American sport. The 2025 sale of controlling interest to Walter — chief executive of TWG Global and owner of the Dodgers — valued the Lakers at $10 billion and handed each sibling a reported $500 million after tax. The new deal reprices the family’s remaining shares at $12.5 billion. For siblings already nine figures richer, the case for holding a sentimental sliver against that kind of liquidity is a hard one to win at a dinner table, let alone a trust vote.

Jeanie’s lawyer, Adam Streisand, has met the vote with the only weapon she has left: the paperwork. His letter calls any sibling vote “void,” insists no sale can be “effectuated without approval by the current co-trustees,” and warns that pushing ahead would be a breach of trust and fiduciary duty, and contempt of a court order. He also accused two of the brothers of leaking to the press to force the issue. It is a serious legal position. It is also, tellingly, a defensive one — the argument of someone protecting a seat, not someone holding the cards.

The buyers have already read the room. Iger has said he intends to honor Jeanie’s agreement to run the team as controlling owner through 2030, and then added the five words that give the game away: “If something changes, then it changes.” That is not a guarantee. That is a landlord reminding a tenant who owns the building. Once the family’s shares are absorbed, Iger and Kushner will control roughly 83% of the Lakers. A governorship held at their pleasure is not the same as control.

This is the quiet lesson of the Buss endgame, and it reaches well past one family. A structure built to keep a single person in charge is only as durable as everyone else’s willingness to leave money on the table for her. Jerry Buss’s dying wish, his children have said, was that they keep the team and get along. His daughter may end up proving that you cannot will someone control — you can only will them the fight to keep it.

Tags: nba, Los Angeles Lakers, Bob Iger, Buss family, Jeanie Buss