Today I must tell the tale of a high-flying financier who became the king of Los Angeles sports only for his empire to suddenly begin to crumble: insurance billionaire Mark Walter who briefly owned both baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers and basketball’s Los Angeles Lakers.
LA’s Sports King Suddenly Falls From Grace
Last fall, Walter was on top of the world as his Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the third time in the 2020s after winning the National League pennant five times under Walter’s ownership.
Sean Paul Kelley waxed romantic about the team and their incredible star Shohei Ohtani, as close to the second coming of Babe Ruth as the game is ever likely to see.
And in 2024, the business press was just as effusive about the man who owned the team, via Fortune:
When Mark Walter, founder of investment firm Guggenheim Partners, bought the bankrupt Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012, many thought he’d overpaid. The $2.1 billion was almost double what anyone had ever spent for a sports team, and he had to outbid billionaire hedge funder Steve Cohen to get it.
Few would quibble with the price now. That amount has since been eclipsed nine times in deals for sports franchises, including the $2.4 billion Cohen paid for the New York Mets in 2020, while the Dodgers have gone on to become Major League Baseball’s most perennially competitive team.
The Dodgers purchase was “a forerunner in financial engineering and institutional money being put into sports team ownership,” said Marc Ganis, co-founder of consulting firm Sportscorp.
Of the deals since completed at a higher price than the Dodgers, six were led by individuals with a background in finance as sports teams have become one of the hottest investments around.
The resulting surge in values — the Dodgers are now worth $6.3 billion, according to a valuation by Sportico — helped power Walter to a personal fortune of $12.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 64-year-old’s sports portfolio includes stakes in the Premier League’s Chelsea football club, the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Sparks basketball teams, auto racing groups and the Women’s Professional Hockey League, which together total more than $3.7 billion, according to the index.
And the source of that fortune?
His biggest asset remains Guggenheim Partners, the $335 billion investment adviser that was a pioneer in raising permanent capital through insurance relationships. Walter founded the firm in 1999 along with partners including Peter Lawson-Johnston II, a descendent of mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim.
Walter, who is Guggenheim’s chief executive officer, also controls nine insurers with total adjusted capital of more than $4.7 billion at the end of 2023. His economic stake in them is worth roughly $900 million, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index.
But too much is never enough for these guys, is it?
Buying the Lakers Was One Franchise Over the Line
And the sudden sale raises a LOT of questions:
