$12.5 billion for a basketball team, and the AI executives quietly buying up sport alongside it

Bob Iger and Josh Kushner are buying the Los Angeles Lakers from Mark Walter at a $12.5 billion valuation, a record for a professional sports franchise and a $2.5 billion jump on what Walter himself paid just 14 months ago. Taken alone, it reads as a media-mogul story: Iger's Disney background, Kushner's existing minority stakes in the Grizzlies and Heat, sports franchises increasingly priced as content-and-data platforms rather than teams with a media deal attached. What makes it worth a closer look is who else has been buying into sport over the past eighteen months. Sundar Pichai, alongside Satya Nadella, Adobe's Shantanu Narayen and several other technology executives, is part of an eleven-member consortium that paid £145 million for a 49% stake in London Spirit, the Lord's-based franchise in cricket's The Hundred, valuing the club at roughly £300 million. Just this week, a group including Jeff Bezos bought roughly 30% of Liverpool FC at a valuation of about $7.4 billion, with an option to take majority control within a year should Fenway Sports Group decide to sell. These are not passive trophy assets bought for prestige. We believe they are a deliberate bet, made by some of the people who understand AI's economics better than anyone, that live sport is one of the few attention assets left that cannot be skipped, streamed later or scrolled past. In a media environment where AI is about to make an almost infinite amount of content available on demand, live, unrepeatable experience is becoming scarcer, and therefore more valuable, not less. (CNBC)