The Buss family’s 47-year hold on the Lakers is coming to an end, and it is taking Jeanie Buss’ seat at the top of the franchise with it.
The family has decided to sell its remaining 17.8 percent ownership stake to incoming majority owners Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Monday, closing the book on an ownership run that began when Dr. Jerry Buss bought the team in 1979.
Breaking: The Buss family has decided to sell its remaining 17.8% ownership stake in the Los Angeles Lakers to new majority owners Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, sources tell ESPN.
The Buss family trust — composed of siblings Jeanie, Jim, Johnny, Janie, Joey and Jesse — received… pic.twitter.com/hPVqOvsuZ0
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) August 17, 2026
The most consequential line in the report is not about the family at all. Once the deal closes, Buss falls below the league’s ownership floor for governors — NBA rules require anyone in that seat to hold at least 15 percent of the franchise — which means the woman who has represented the Lakers at the league level since her father’s death in 2013 will no longer be eligible to do so.
No one fired her, and no one tore up an agreement. Her own family’s vote simply moved her below the threshold.
What the family decided and why it ends Jeanie Buss’ run
According to the full report, the Buss family trust — made up of siblings Jeanie, Jim, Johnny, Janie, Joey and Jesse — received the majority votes needed for its trustees to execute the sale. Four of the six votes were required to trigger the tag-along provision attached to Mark Walter’s sale of the franchise to Kushner and Iger, a transaction that valued the Lakers at $12.5 billion.
“We have decided as a family to sell the remaining Buss Family Trust shares to the Bob Iger group as part of the ongoing transaction,” the family said in a statement. “We love the Lakers, Laker fans and will continue to support Los Angeles; but it is time to use this opportunity to move on and exit gracefully while we still can.”
At the $12.5 billion valuation attached to the broader transaction, the family’s 17.8 percent share would be worth approximately $2.2 billion before taxes and adjustments — a staggering final return on a franchise their father purchased as part of a $67.5 million deal with Jack Kent Cooke in 1979.
Five days ago, Bob Iger said he would keep her
What makes Monday’s development so jarring is how directly it collides with what the incoming ownership said less than a week ago. When Walter bought the team from the family in 2025, Jeanie Buss’ continued role as governor through 2030 was written into the agreement, and Iger addressed that arrangement head-on in an exclusive interview.
“We have enormous respect and appreciation for Jeanie, her father and what they’ve contributed to this franchise,” Iger said. “And we have every intention to honor the agreement that was made between Mark and Jeanie. If things change, they’ll change, but we’re going into this with enormous respect and appreciation for who she is and what she represents in the organization.”
Iger also allowed in the same interview that circumstances could shift, and circumstances have now shifted in a way that has nothing to do with his intentions. The agreement he pledged to honor was built on the family retaining its minority stake, because that stake is what kept Buss above the NBA’s 15 percent line.
With the family selling everything, there is no ownership position left for the arrangement to protect. The league’s rule is not a preference or a courtesy that new owners can extend, and no amount of goodwill from Kushner and Iger changes the arithmetic.
That distinction matters for how fans should read Monday’s news. This is not a story about a new owner going back on his word within a week. It is a story about a family vote that made the promise impossible to keep.
The week that unraveled behind the scenes
The timeline that emerged Monday afternoon suggests the family’s exit came together with remarkable speed — and that parts of the family were working in the opposite direction days earlier.
Lakers senior vice president of finance Joe McCormack called an emergency meeting of the Buss siblings last Monday to discuss dissolving the family trust and to seek unanimous approval to lock all family shares down for four years under a new trust.
Lakers senior VP of finance, Joe McCormack, called for an emergency meeting of the Buss siblings last Monday to discuss a dissolution of the family trust and seeking unanimous approval to lock down all family shares for four years under a new trust, sources told ESPN.
— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) August 17, 2026
That meeting was held Tuesday, and there was no mention during it of any pending sale between Walter and the Kushner-Iger group. The next day, Walter had agreed to sell the team.
In the span of a single week, the family went from exploring a four-year lockup of its shares to voting to sell every last one of them. The vote also lands against the backdrop of lingering tension from the original sale.
When the family agreed to sell control to Walter at a $10 billion valuation in June 2025, multiple siblings felt frustrated with Jeanie and misled about what they viewed as a rushed process, according to sources cited in ESPN’s report, though all six ultimately voted to approve that deal and each collected roughly $500 million after taxes when it closed last October.
The agreement preserved Jeanie’s governorship through 2030, but her siblings were let go from their positions with the organization in the months that followed. One person familiar with the process told ESPN the siblings had been assured the Walter sale served the family’s long-term interest and instead came to view it as an embarrassment worth moving on from cleanly.
What has to happen before the sale is final
None of this is official yet, and the league’s machinery will take time. The transaction requires approval from the NBA’s board of governors, whose next scheduled meeting is Sept. 15 and 16 in New York.
Kushner must also divest his limited equity stake in the Heat before that approval process can move forward.
Once both deals are complete, Kushner and Iger’s group — which is purchasing approximately 65 percent of the franchise from Walter — would control roughly 83 percent of the Lakers.
Walter’s tenure as controlling owner will end up lasting less than a year from his unanimous league approval last October, and his exit comes while federal investigators examine alleged tax fraud at other companies tied to him, a probe that has not been connected to the sale in any reporting.
What the end of the Buss era means for the Lakers
The scale of what is ending is hard to overstate. Under Jerry Buss and then his children, the Lakers won 11 championships, most recently in 2020, and piled up 2,289 wins since the start of the 1979-80 season — the most of any franchise over that span, per ESPN.
The Showtime era, the Shaq-and-Kobe three-peat and the Bubble title all happened under the same family’s stewardship, first at the Forum and then at what is now Crypto.com Arena.
For the roster, nothing changes on Monday. Luka Doncic’s franchise cornerstone status, the front office’s structure and the team’s offseason plans are all questions for the new ownership group to address once the league signs off, and the honest answer is that nobody outside the organization knows yet how Kushner and Iger intend to operate.
What fans can watch for between now and mid-September is whether the new group makes any public commitment about basketball leadership — and whether Jeanie Buss, stripped of the governor’s chair by arithmetic rather than by choice, retains any formal role in the franchise her father built.
Until someone answers that directly, her future is the most compelling open question at the top of the organization.
