The Information’s Database of the Tech Moguls Who Own Sports Teams
Sports leagues have proliferated just as Silicon Valley has gotten incredibly wealthy.
Last June, the Boston Celtics clinched their 18th NBA Championship, making them the most decorated pro basketball franchise of all time. On Thursday, Symphony Technology co-founder Bill Chisholm reached an agreement to buy the team at a valuation of $6.1 billion, giving the Celtics yet another title: the most expensive U.S. sports club ever sold.
Once the transaction is approved, it’ll mark the latest American sports team sold to someone rooted in the world of tech. There have been many such transactions lately. To mark this moment, we’re debuting a new searchable database of all the tech titans with majority stakes in U.S. sports franchises: a list of around five dozen people across 11 sports leagues.
Taken together, the list presents a definitive picture of how sports and tech have become increasingly intertwined. Just in the last five years, the number of sports teams bought by tech moguls has roughly doubled, according to our dataset.
The uptick corresponds to both the overall growth of the sports industry—with the emergence of new leagues in cricket, pickleball and other sports—as well as the rapidly appreciating valuations for top teams, leaving tech and venture capital billionaires on the short list of those who can afford to buy clubs outright.
Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith is one such figure. In 2020, he bought the NBA’s Utah Jazz, and last year he added the NHL’s Utah Hockey Club. Smith is now an emerging leader in the sports industry, of which he says, “Where we are going, the tech expertise is really a benefit.” He now serves on the NBA’s media committee, which last year approved a record $76 billion broadcast rights package to Disney, Comcast and for the first time Amazon.
Our list also reveals interesting patterns of where tech ownership is concentrated. Of the big four leagues, the NBA reigns supreme: 11 of its 30 teams feature at least one owner from the tech world. On the opposite end, the NFL and the MLB have just two tech owners each. In women’s leagues, four of the WNBA’s 14 existing and expansion clubs have tech owners, and so do five of the 15 National Women’s Soccer League clubs.
For the list, we included only the people who have controlling ownership in teams, and we examined both major and emerging leagues. And we took a broad definition of who qualifies, including tech founders, board members, C-suite executives and venture capitalists.
Other prominent sports owners who made their fortunes in tech include former HP and eBay CEO Meg Whitman, Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai and SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.
Many in sports and tech credit the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen with starting the trend of Silicon Valley titans buying into sports when he bought the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers in 1988 and the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks in 1996. Indeed, Microsoft is the institution with the largest representation of current and former executives on our list. There’s Satya Nadella (a co-owner of Major League Cricket’s Seattle Orcas), Steve Ballmer (the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers) and board member John W. Stanton (MLB’s Seattle Mariners), to name just a handful.
Two of the three owners of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm are also Microsoft alums. One is Lisa Brummel, who worked at Microsoft for 25 years and who laughed when asked if there was a “Microsoft Mafia” running sports these days. While they don’t have a quippy name for themselves, “we do talk to each other quite a bit,” she said. In fact, she and Ballmer make a point to attend one another’s games each year, and she trades frequent notes with Stanton as a fellow owner of a Seattle-based pro club.
Across town, Nadella, two more Microsoft alums—Sanjay Parthasarathy and Soma Somasegar—and a clutch of other tech vets launched cricket’s Seattle Orcas in 2023.
Unlike owners in more established U.S. leagues, the Orcas crew are betting they can take a globally popular sport with scant infrastructure in the U.S. and build a league from the ground up. Cricket attracts serious investment overseas—the Indian Premier League was valued at $16.4 billion last year. With the sport returning to the Olympics in 2028 in Los Angeles, Somasegar senses an opportunity.
“If I dream the dream, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be at least as big economically as the IPL,” he said.
The surge in techies buying teams reflects dual phenomena in the sports industry. First, investors like Somasegar are building new leagues from scratch. Cricket, pickleball, table tennis and golf have all established new professional competitions since the start of the pandemic. And second, existing leagues are seeking owners with tech expertise to round out their board of governors as they navigate the future of live sports in the streaming era.
Smith, the Jazz and Utah Hockey Club owner, said the NBA and NHL, respectively, enlisted him to buy both franchises.
In hockey, Smith came in as a surprise buyer of the troubled Arizona Coyotes franchise last spring, which he relocated to Utah within five months at the request of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, he said.
“Gary called up and basically said, ‘Can you start?’” said Smith. “He wanted a little bit of that forward thinking—that big tech component.”
Like Smith, former AOL president Ted Leonsis has built a multiclub ownership model within a single metropolitan area: He bought the NHL’s Washington Capitals in 1999, then the NBA’s Wizards and the WNBA’s Mystics.
He also serves on the NBA’s media committee, where he said the focus is building the best broadcast model for the next quarter century. “All roads are leading toward: It has to be digital. It has to be global. India has to be as important as Indiana for the next generation,” said Leonsis, who has also integrated AI software into club operations, including for roster modeling.
While tech is only increasing its foothold in sports, there have already been some notable exits. Mark Cuban, for example, sold his majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks in late 2023, which is why he doesn’t appear on our list. And last year, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian sold his controlling stake in the NWSL’s Angel City FC last year. Nonetheless, we’re including Ohanian as a team owner in Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s new Tmrw Golf League.
Ultimately, the tech executives who have stuck around in sports say there is a lot of overlap between building or investing in a startup and running a team. Brummel, the Storm owner, said people who have worked in the tech industry are already adept at thinking about where innovation could happen and where the returns could come from.
“There’s a lot of like thinking between what you do in tech and what you’re doing in sports,” she said. Understanding the economics of both sectors “helps you go from one to the other more easily than another industry might.”