Did the lakers sale provide a window into our next financial crisis?

I spent a good chunk of last week and the weekend trying to answer what I thought was a fairly simple question: Why were the Los Angeles Lakers sold again so quickly?

For those who know me, this particular rabbit hole probably isn’t surprising. I have two great professional passions, politics and sports, and I’ve always been as interested in what happens off the field as what happens on it. Early in my career, I helped start the publication that eventually became SportsBusiness Journal. So when a story combines sports, politics, and finance, yes, I’m probably going to spend more time on it than a normal person should.

And this one had all three.

Mark Walter, already the controlling owner of the Dodgers, completed his purchase of control of the Lakers on October 30, 2025. Less than ten months later, on August 12, we learned that he had agreed to sell the team to a group led by Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for $12.5 billion.

Kushner was one reason I initially got interested. His brother is Jared Kushner, his sister-in-law is Ivanka Trump, and at the time of the sale Walter’s business empire was already under federal investigation. In February, two life insurers controlled by Walter received grand-jury subpoenas from federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who wanted to know whether the insurers had failed to disclose that billions of dollars they had invested in private loans were actually connected to other parts of Walter’s business empire.

So, naturally, I wondered whether these things were connected. Did the investigation put pressure on Walter to sell? Did Kushner and Iger get an opportunity to buy the Lakers that might not otherwise have existed? I haven’t found evidence that the federal investigation was used to force Walter to sell.

But I don’t think my initial suspicion was unreasonable, either.

Twelve days before the Lakers deal became public, FIFA abandoned a proposed multibillion-dollar deal involving Thrive Eternal, a fund run by Kushner’s Thrive Capital. That deal had become politically combustible in part because of Kushner’s family connections and FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s relationship with President Trump. Then Kushner and Iger learned Walter was willing to sell the Lakers and put together a deal remarkably quickly, without what appears to have been a formal bidding process.

There was also a more conventional explanation worth examining. Bloomberg has reported that Walter’s holding company, TWG Global, has been approaching firms about raising cash against loans held by the insurers. In other words, there were financial reasons to ask why Walter might want quick liquidity at this particular moment.

All of that made me want to understand Walter’s financial situation and how he had built the fortune that allowed him to buy the Dodgers, the Lakers, and an extraordinary collection of other sports properties.

That led me into his connections to Guggenheim, then into the insurance business, and eventually into the enormous and rapidly growing world of private credit.

That’s where this stopped being a sports story for me.

One of the things I hadn’t fully appreciated is how important life insurance companies have become to some of these giant investment operations. The basic reason isn’t terribly complicated. An insurance company takes in a lot of money today in exchange for promises that may not have to be paid for years or decades. That creates an enormous pool of money that has to be invested somewhere.

Now consider what happens when the person controlling that pool of insurance money also owns other businesses that need financing.

This is where the Walter story gets interesting. (Quick caveat: for my friends steeped in finance, you may not think any of this is news, but I promise you, to the political world, this is still a developing story.)

After Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life and Annuity received federal subpoenas in February, the companies reviewed their books and found errors in how they had reported billions of dollars of investments. They subsequently filed corrected numbers with insurance regulators.

The official terminology involves “related parties” and “affiliates.” Let me put that in plain American.

If I am investing your money, and I decide to lend some of it to a business that I also own, you probably want to know that. And you definitely want the regulator overseeing me to know it.

Walter controls the Dodgers. The insurers he controls held roughly $587 million of debt connected to the Dodgers’ television business. So money held by Walter-controlled insurance companies was being used to help finance another business Walter controlled.

The Dodgers debt is not representative of the full amount we’re talking about. It’s simply the easiest piece of it to understand because everybody knows what the Dodgers are. Much of the rest involves private loans to companies most Americans have never heard of, with relationships between borrower and lender that can be considerably harder to follow.

Nor does the Dodgers example automatically make the investment a bad one. The Dodgers are an enormously valuable franchise, and lending money connected to their television operation may have been a perfectly sound investment for the insurers.

But the relationship matters. If the same owner is effectively sitting on both sides of a transaction, there are obvious questions about whose interests are being served. That’s why insurance regulators require these relationships to be disclosed and limit how much exposure an insurer can have to affiliated businesses.

And the size of the correction is what got my attention.

Delaware Life had previously reported roughly $1.4 billion in related-party investments (i.e investments in properties that Walter had some say over). After the review, that number increased to more than $17 billion, representing roughly 39 percent of its invested assets.

That doesn’t mean $17 billion disappeared or that the investments are worthless, and it doesn’t establish criminal wrongdoing. What changed was our understanding of the relationships behind those investments. A very large amount of money that had previously been presented as being invested outside Walter’s business interests turned out to be connected to them.

And then came the development that makes it much harder to dismiss this as an argument over accounting terminology.

This week, TWG Global said it would buy as much as $6.5 billion of those investments back from Delaware Life and give the insurer an equivalent amount of unaffiliated assets in return.

You don’t restructure $6.5 billion worth of investments because somebody checked the wrong box. Once I understood that, my Lakers rabbit hole turned into something much bigger.

After the financial crisis of 2008, we tightened the rules governing banks because we had learned, at enormous cost, what could happen when too much risk accumulated inside institutions everybody assumed were safe. Banks had to hold more money against potential losses, submit to stress tests, and live with much closer scrutiny from regulators.

What we didn’t do was eliminate the demand for credit. Businesses still needed to borrow, and investors still wanted the returns that came from lending to them. Increasingly, that business has moved outside traditional banks and into private credit.

The concept itself is pretty simple. Instead of borrowing from a bank or selling bonds that trade publicly, a company borrows directly from an investment fund or another private lender. There are legitimate reasons to do this, and private credit has become a major part of American finance because it serves a real purpose.

What worries me is how much harder the resulting loans can be to evaluate from the outside.

If I own a share of Apple, millions of people can buy and sell that same stock, and every trading day tells us what people are actually willing to pay for it. A privately negotiated loan doesn’t have that constant reality check. Somebody still has to put a value on it, though, because that number determines how healthy the owner’s balance sheet looks and can affect how much additional money can be borrowed.

That doesn’t mean a private valuation is wrong. It means there is less outside information available to tell us whether it is right.

I have a pretty simple rule about finance: when it takes more than 10 minutes to explain how a transaction works, I become more interested in why it needs to be so complicated. Usually, the complexity is a feature that is hiding something, or at least that’s the lesson I took from the 2008 financial crisis.

After spending days trying to understand this system, I kept coming back to one question: How do we know what this stuff is really worth?

And there are real people at the other end of that question.

Delaware Life has hundreds of thousands of active annuity and life insurance policies. Many of the people who buy fixed annuities are doing something decidedly unglamorous with their money. They’re trying to make sure the savings they accumulated during their working lives will still be there when they retire. The insurance company makes that promise and invests the money behind it.

That’s why this matters beyond Mark Walter, the Dodgers or the Lakers.

I’m not predicting another 2008, and there is an important difference this time. The federal investigation demonstrates that somebody is asking questions before a crisis has occurred. The subpoenas caused the insurers to go back through their investments, the companies acknowledged significant errors in their previous disclosures, and now TWG is taking billions of dollars of affiliated investments off Delaware Life’s books.

That’s encouraging, although I wouldn’t call it reassuring.

The original filings existed. The investments existed. Billions of dollars had already moved through this system before federal investigators prompted another look.

We responded to the last crisis by strengthening the part of the financial system that had just failed. What I’m beginning to wonder is whether we changed the behavior or simply encouraged some of the risk to migrate somewhere else, into a world of private loans, private valuations and complicated relationships between investment firms and insurance companies.

And this is where the stakes become larger than another argument about financial regulation.

Markets need prices people can believe.

The more financial activity moves into private markets, the harder it becomes for outsiders to test those prices. If an asset is privately held, financed with a private loan and valued without an active public market, there are fewer independent ways of knowing whether the number attached to it reflects what somebody would actually pay.

That doesn’t make the number wrong. But a system that outsiders cannot independently price is going to have a very difficult time defending itself if those valuations ever turn out to have been too optimistic. And when the institutions holding some of those assets are making long-term promises to people’s retirement savings, transparency isn’t an academic concern.

To me, my friends in the political space and my friends who run the major sports leagues who are obsessed with growing valuations of their franchises, pay particular attention!

It’s what makes this more than a Lakers story to me.

Capitalism is already struggling with a crisis of confidence, particularly among younger Americans. A generation that believes housing is unaffordable, college has left them buried in debt, and enormous fortunes seem increasingly disconnected from their own economic lives doesn’t need much encouragement to conclude the entire game is rigged.

I don’t share that conclusion. But people who believe in capitalism ought to be the ones most interested in making sure the numbers underneath it are real.

It‘s why I’ve put together a two-part deep dive on my independent podcast that lives outside this app. It is longer and more detailed than this column because I wanted to follow the trail as far as I reasonably could, from the Lakers sale to Walter, from Walter to the insurance companies, and eventually into this much larger question of where financial risk has migrated since 2008.

Maybe what we’re seeing is a system working the way it is supposed to work. Federal investigators asked questions, errors were uncovered, regulators were informed, and investments are now being moved. If the safeguards worked before anybody lost money, that’s good news.

But there’s another possibility, and it’s the one I intend to keep exploring over the next few months.

We may have spent the years after the financial crisis making sure the banks couldn’t burn down the economy the same way again, while enormous amounts of money and risk moved outside the banking system into places that are much harder for the rest of us to see.

If that’s what happened, then the sudden sale of the Los Angeles Lakers may have been a dead canary in the coal mine telling us it’s time to check the air.

In this episode, J.A. Adande and I explore the origins of the Crimson Tide and the remarkable rise of Bear Bryant. We go from Alabama’s early Rose Bowl triumphs and the beginnings of the Crimson Tide name to Bryant’s near-departure for the Miami Dolphins, tracing the moments that turned Alabama into the standard of college football.

We also dig into one of the most complicated chapters in the program’s history: integration, Bryant’s role in a changing South, and Alabama’s landmark 1970 matchup with USC.

It’s the story of how football became inseparable from Alabama—and how the foundation was laid for one of the greatest dynasties in sports history. Listen HERE.

What started for me as a simple sports question—why did Mark Walter sell the Los Angeles Lakers after just 14 months?—quickly turned into something much bigger. In Part 1 of this two-part ToddCast Special Report, I follow the thread from a record $12.5 billion franchise sale into the world of life insurance companies, private credit, and obscure corporate structures at the center of one of the least understood transformations in American finance since 2008.

I walk through what we know from the public record, including the grand jury subpoenas received by Walter’s Delaware Life Insurance Co. and Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co., the companies’ subsequent revisions to regulatory disclosures, and Delaware Life’s disclosure of an additional $16 billion in private credit assets linked to affiliated entities. But I also want to be very clear about what we don’t know: no charges have been announced, no money has been shown to have disappeared, and a change in disclosure does not equal a financial loss.

From there, I try to explain the larger system in plain English—how we got from a retiree buying an annuity to a post-2008 financial world where risk didn’t disappear so much as move away from traditional banks and public markets. Along the way, I trace Walter’s career, the financial structures surrounding his sports empire, and the terrific reporting from Katie Baker at The Ringer, Nick Nemeth at Mispriced Assets, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times that helped me pull this story together.

The question I’m interested in isn’t whether someone broke the law—that’s for investigators to determine. It’s whether we understand this increasingly opaque financial system well enough to know what happens when it comes under real stress.

Part 2 continues the story.