Is a Private Credit scandal brewing behind the LA Lakers Sale?

The LA Lakers --- a prestigious basketball franchise that didn't change hands for 46 years --- just sold twice in ten months, the second time for $2.5 billion more than the first. The seller is Mark Walter, CEO of Guggenheim, owner of the Dodgers and part of Chelsea FC, and the man whose laptop and phone the FBI seized off his private jet just as the Lakers deal was coming together. Since then, one of the insurance companies in his orbit has revised its reported related-party investments from $1.4 billion to $17 billion. Quite the rounding error.

In this episode, we get into the questions everyone on the Street is suddenly asking. Why would anyone sell the crown jewel of American sports a year after fighting to buy it? What do a bunch of boring life insurance companies most people have never heard of have to do with the trophy assets of the billionaire class? Why do private equity and private credit firms keep buying insurers in the first place — and what happens to that entire model when the disclosures around "related parties" turn out to be, let's say, incomplete? And why did Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, who spent months chasing a Las Vegas expansion team, pivot to the Lakers over a single weekend?

The bigger question hanging over all of it: this structure — asset managers selling their own loans to insurance companies they control — underpins a massive share of the boom in private credit. If regulators start pulling on this thread, how many other portfolios look like this one?

By way of disclaimer, no charges have been filed and no wrongdoing has been established nor is implied here; our research merely summarizes reporting from Bloomberg, the FT, the WSJ, and the LA Times.