Los Angeles — The Lakers have been sold twice in fourteen months, and the family that owned them for forty-seven years is now in court against itself over the piece that is left.
The situation, briefly. The Buss family sold roughly two-thirds of the team to Mark Walter last year at a $10 billion valuation and kept 17.8 percent. In August, Walter agreed to pass his majority position to a group fronted by Bob Iger and Josh Kushner at $12.5 billion. Five of Jerry Buss's six children then voted to sell the family's remaining shares alongside him. The sixth, Jeanie Buss, did not, and has petitioned a judge to stop them. If the sale closes she falls below the 15 percent the NBA requires of a team governor and loses the job she has held since her father died in 2013.
A delay to the first hearing has been requested. Adam Streisand, her attorney, told a Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Tuesday that he has two speaking engagements in Europe and cannot appear on Nov. 5. He returns Nov. 18. No new date has been set. The season opens Oct. 20. Judge Lynn Scaduto will decide the petition whenever it reaches her.
Most of the coverage has treated this as a family feud, which it is. It is also a narrow legal question with an unusually clean answer waiting at the end of it, and the answer turns on a single adverb.
How the family holds the team
A trust is an arrangement for holding property. Trustees control it, beneficiaries collect from it, and a person can be both. Jerry Buss and his wife, Jo Ann, established five trusts for their six children to hold Lakers stock. Four were sold to Walter last year and dissolved. One survives: the Jo Ann C. Buss 2006 Children's Electing Small Business Trust, created Sept. 1, 2006, holding 17.8 percent of the franchise. Jeanie, Janie and Joey Buss are its co-trustees and decide by majority. All six siblings are beneficiaries.
That structure matters more than the personalities do. Jerry Buss gave his children equal economic shares but unequal control, and he gave the control to three people who would have to agree with each other. He also, according to what Janie Buss told ESPN in 2017, wrote in a last man standing provision, so that a deceased sibling's interest passes to the surviving siblings instead of to that sibling's own children. ESPN reported he had become interested in tontines, where a dead member's share is redistributed among the living.
Estate lawyers interviewed by CNBC made the obvious point about clauses like that one. A safeguard meant to keep a business in a family can push heirs to sell it, because cash reaches their own children and a locked-up stake does not. Every one of the six has had that incentive sitting in front of them for thirteen years. Five of them acted on it in August.
The word the case turns on
Jeanie Buss's authority comes from two documents that say nearly the same thing. The trust directs that once Jerry Buss is no longer controlling owner, the trustee shall take whatever actions are reasonably available to have Jeanie appointed in his place, and it defines “shall” as mandatory. A 2017 court order, obtained after her brothers Jim and Johnny moved to reconstitute the board without her, instructs the co-trustees to take all actions reasonably available to them, including voting the trust's shares, to ensure she is elected controlling owner on an annual basis during her lifetime, absent a further order modifying the trust. No modification has ever been sought.
Read quickly, that sounds airtight, and her petition treats it that way. Read again and the load is carried entirely by “reasonably available.”
Michael McCann, writing for Sportico, laid out the defense that language invites. A trustee's duties include maximizing the value of the trust. Declining a $12.5 billion valuation, when the same stake was worth a $10 billion valuation ten months ago, can be characterized as the unreasonable choice rather than the required one. On that reading the siblings are not defying the order. They are obeying a different clause of the same obligation.
Neither document appears to contemplate what happens when those two duties separate. For thirteen years, keeping Jeanie in the chair and protecting the trust's value were the same act. In August they stopped being the same act, and nothing in the paperwork says which one wins.
Her petition asks the court to declare the sale resolution void, remove Janie and Joey as trustees for breach of fiduciary duty, hold Jim, Johnny and Jesse liable for aiding them, and order all five to show cause on contempt. The contempt claim looks like the weakest of them. McCann notes the siblings have not sold anything and the NBA has approved nothing, which leaves her arguing that a vote to explore a sale is itself a violation.
Their conduct is “not driven by financial necessity but by animosity toward Jeanie.”From the petition filed Aug. 26 in Los Angeles Superior Court
Why they are selling
Her filing attributes the vote to animosity. There is a simpler explanation available, and her siblings have given it.
Several of them told ESPN they felt misled by Jeanie over the Walter sale, considered it rushed, and felt pressured into voting yes. Each cleared roughly half a billion dollars after taxes. Ten months later Walter agreed to sell for $2.5 billion more than the valuation they had accepted. A person with knowledge of the process told ESPN the earlier deal had been embarrassing and it was time to move on cleanly.
That account, if accurate, leaves Jeanie Buss making an argument her siblings have already heard from her once. She says the trust should hold rather than accept a number that will look small later. Ten months ago, on the sale she ran, they took the number.
It cuts the other way too. All five siblings who voted are former Lakers employees. Jim and Johnny lost their roles in 2017. Janie, Joey and Jesse were terminated after Walter's purchase closed, Joey from the G League affiliate in South Bay, Jesse from scouting, Janie from the team's charitable work. Jeanie is the only one of the six still employed there, which means the five voting to liquidate the family's last position have no remaining stake in the institution except the money.
The transaction nobody is examining
Walter's involvement deserves more scrutiny than the family fight has allowed it.
He bought Phil Anschutz's 26 percent in 2021 and took a right of first refusal on the majority share with it, so from that point no one could acquire control of the Lakers without going through him. In December 2024, six months before anything was public, Joey and Jesse Buss brought the team's chief financial officer and chief legal counsel a proposal to sell part of the family's stake rather than a controlling share. The Walter agreement was reported June 18, 2025. The NBA's board of governors approved it unanimously on Oct. 30.
In September 2025, between those two dates, the FBI seized Walter's phone and computer under a search warrant at a Chicago airport. In July 2026 Bloomberg reported that Delaware Life, an insurer in his group, had told regulators in June 2025 that affiliated investments were about 3 percent of its portfolio, roughly $1.4 billion, when the figure was at least $17 billion, near 39 percent, routed through a third party. Walter-linked companies are under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. No charges have been filed. TWG Global has said Walter and the company acted in good faith, are cooperating and expect the matters to be resolved favorably. Weeks after the reporting became public, ESPN reported, the sale to Iger and Kushner came together in a matter of days.
Six weeks separate the search warrant from the unanimous vote installing him as owner of the league's most valuable franchise. The NBA has not said what it knew on Oct. 30. That question is worth more attention than which Buss sibling is angrier at the others.
What is still open
The accounts of the week of the vote conflict outright. ESPN reported that the team's senior vice president of finance convened an emergency meeting of the siblings to discuss dissolving the trust and locking the family's shares into a new one for four years. Jeanie Buss's petition states no such meeting took place. Both cannot be true, and whichever is wrong belongs to a party with a case to make.
She also contends the vote came too early, because the 2025 agreement requires Walter to send the trust a go-along notice before it can sell alongside him, and none has been sent while the Iger and Kushner purchase remains incomplete. That is her most technical argument and possibly her most useful one, because it does not require the court to weigh anyone's motives.
Her petition names minority owners Patrick Soon-Shiong and Ed Roski as supporting her. Soon-Shiong's attorney has since told ESPN his client will keep his 4 percent and join Iger and Kushner as an active partner once the deal closes. Roski, who holds about 3 percent, has said nothing. Neither Iger nor Kushner has addressed whether they want Buss as governor, and it would be surprising if buyers paying $12.5 billion had no view on who represents the franchise to the league.
Strip away the family history and one thing is clear enough. Jerry Buss built a structure to keep his children together and gave them every financial reason to come apart. It held for thirteen years. It is now being read closely by a judge, and the reading may come down to whether refusing $12.5 billion is a reasonable thing for a trustee to do.