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With a $10 billion deal for the Los Angeles Lakers, Guggenheim CEO Mark Walter is adding another trophy asset to a portfolio that makes him one of the most influential individuals in sports

Over the course of Mark Walter’s slow journey to build one of the most glittering portfolios in sports, doing a $10 billion deal to buy the Los Angeles Lakers turned out to be the easy part.

Every other major acquisition—including the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chelsea FC, and the Cadillac Formula One team—had turned into protracted affairs that required the involvement of bankruptcy courts, suspicious rivals, or the British government. But when news first emerged last month that Walter, the CEO of Guggenheim Partners, was taking over the Lakers, it was already a fait accompli.

The transaction not only made Walter the overnight owner of the world’s priciest team. It also turned the shy billionaire from Cedar Rapids, Iowa into one of the most influential people in sports.

“A few things I can tell you about Mark—he is driven by winning, excellence, and doing everything the right way,” tweeted Lakers legend Magic Johnson, who is also one of Walter’s business partners in the Dodgers. “AND he will put in the resources needed to win.”

At a time when the soaring price of buying a top-tier professional team has shrunk the pool of possible owners, the 65-year-old Walter is in elite company among investors whose sports portfolios span the richest leagues on several continents.

The club includes a handful of other billionaires expanding personal empires, such as Los Angeles Rams and Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke or John Henry and Tom Werner at Fenway Sports Group. But the very top of the pyramid is increasingly populated by private equity-led consortia and sovereign-wealth funds, who are prepared to plow billions into building superteams.

“I hate losing,” Walter said in a rare interview alongside Johnson a year ago at a Milken Institute conference. “I just can’t stand it.”

Not that Walter is terribly familiar with defeat. His personal wealth, widely estimated to be in the 10 figures, came from starting the bond manager and investment bank Guggenheim Partners 25 years ago with backing from a member of the Guggenheim family and a Texas conglomerate. He later branched into insurance and spotted a rare efficiency: Walter realized that years of steady premiums could be a good match for multigenerational investments in sports, fast food and technology.

Alongside Hollywood producer Thomas Tull and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala investment fund, he has also used a company called TWG Global to put money into life insurance companies, western rodeos, a stake in online car dealer Carvana and an investment in Colossal Biosciences, which aims to bring back the woolly mammoth and the dodo.

But it was the 2012 purchase of the Dodgers, for an MLB-record $2.15 billion, that thrust Walter into the limelight beyond the world of finance. Though many critics had seen it as too expensive, Walter’s investing group registered an almost immediate paper gain by raising $3 billion in funding from the team’s broadcasting rights. The team is now worth around $7 billion, boasts the best player of his generation in Shohei Ohtani, and streams its games to a huge market Japan.

“The market drove the price,” Walter, who hadn’t attended a live major-league game until his 20s, said at the time. The investment was “a multigenerational thing my daughter’s granddaughters will own.”

That purchase set the tone for Walter’s investment in brands with broad appeal and multiple revenue sources. Beyond the usual array of sponsorships, merchandise and fan experiences, he has targeted long-term gain from projects such as developing a new London home for Chelsea and hundreds of acres of land around Dodgers Stadium.

The same philosophy guided his entry into one of the fastest-growing sports of the past five years, Formula One. TWG has partnered with General Motors to build Cadillac F1 from scratch and make it the 11th team on the grid from next year. The 10 other outfits took some convincing—after all, why should they carve out an extra slice of their pie? But a one-time fee of $450 million paid by Cadillac’s backers and divided equally among the teams helped soften the blow.

“We needed to be sure that it would have been the right decision for the sport without being too selfish,” F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali said.

Walter’s associates refer to him as a business genius, who demands results (with Midwestern manners), but strategizes in years and decades. Though he and his wife Kimbra are rarely seen at glitzy events, they have owned some of the finest homes in Chicago, Newport, R.I. and Los Angeles, including an $85 million mansion on Malibu’s Carbon Beach that burned to the ground in this year’s wildfires.

“I’m a fairly quiet and private person,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2012. “So I haven’t sought publicity.”

That explains why Walter has usually let someone else be the face of his various sports properties. At the time of the Dodgers acquisition, the name in the headlines wasn’t the consortium’s largest investor, but rather its most recognizable, a charismatic superstar named Magic. At Chelsea, meanwhile, the club’s most visible presence is Walter’s co-owner Todd Boehly, who is routinely spotted at home games at Stamford Bridge—and is the one on the receiving end of supporters’ anger.

But wherever he invests his money, there is no question over who calls the shots for the long term. As Johnson put it in May 2024, “We just follow the leader.”