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ago 18 2026Forty-seven years after acquiring the franchise, the Buss family is completely exiting the Lakers. The family has decided to sell its remaining 17.8% stake to new majority owners Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, according to ESPN's Shams Charania. Once the deal closes, Jeanie Buss will step down as team governor, a position she has held since her father's death in 2013.
The departure, however, is not unanimous. Jeanie herself challenged the sale hours later through her attorney, in the latest episode of a long-running family feud. But the mechanism her siblings have activated leaves her position severely weakened.
The clause that decides it
The mechanism was written into the 2025 agreement. When the family sold control to Mark Walter, the deal included a tag-along clause that allowed the trust to join any subsequent sale by Walter at the same valuation, requiring only four of the six siblings' votes to activate it.
Five have exercised it: Jim, Johnny, Janie, Joey, and Jesse. Jeanie, according to sources cited by ESPN, did not even respond to a vote that had been open since the previous Tuesday, called after an emergency meeting of the club's financial vice president to discuss dissolving the trust. Notably, at that meeting, no one mentioned that Walter was about to resell the franchise.
The family statement reads like an epitaph: they have decided to sell the remaining shares to Iger's group, they love the Lakers and their fans, and believe this is the right moment to seize the opportunity and exit gracefully while they can.
Jeanie's resistance
The governor's response came by letter. Her attorney, Adam Streisand, sent a document to her siblings' representatives arguing that she has not consented to the sale and that any vote is void from the start, citing a 2017 court order that designates her as controlling owner for life and requires co-trustees to preserve the 15% minimum stake the NBA requires to maintain that status.
The letter also accuses Joey and Jesse Buss of leaking false and defamatory information to ESPN, as part of what she describes as a years-long pattern to damage the successor chosen by their father. Both, it should be noted, were fired from their club positions last November.
The problem with that defense is that it points in the wrong direction. The 2017 order governs the family trust; the tag-along clause is a contractual right tied to the sale to Walter, and the numbers work against her there. In fact, even if she managed to block the sale of the 17.8%, it would not affect the main transaction between Walter, Kushner, and Iger: it would only leave the family as a minority partner in a project they no longer control.
The promise that lasted ten months
There is bitter irony in all this. The 2025 agreement with Walter guaranteed Jeanie the position of governor through 2030. That guarantee has evaporated in less than a year, because Walter resold to Kushner and Iger for $12.5 billion, the highest valuation in sports history, pocketing roughly $2.5 billion in gains in fourteen months.
With the Buss shares incorporated, Kushner and Iger will control roughly 83% of the franchise that Jerry Buss purchased in 1979 for $67.5 million and which, under his family's ownership, won eleven championships, the last in 2020.
What remains for closure
One final step remains. The deal requires approval from the NBA Board of Governors, which meets September 15-16 in New York, and Kushner must divest his minority stake in the Miami Heat.
Until then, Jeanie's challenge looks more like a negotiating position, or a prelude to a damages lawsuit, than a real blockade. The Buss era, barring a surprise, has ended.
