Legal wrangling over $12.5B Lakers sale shows how family trusts don’t guarantee a business stays in the family

Reid Kress Weisbord, Naomi Cahn, University of Virginia

The Buss family’s 47-year ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers, 17-time NBA champions, could soon come to an end despite their patriarch’s clear wishes before he died. A group of investors that includes former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner – the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law – wants to buy the basketball team for US$12.5 billion.

The pending deal would set a record: No other sports franchise has ever fetched that high a price.

After news about the pending sale broke on Aug. 12, 2026, Jeanie Buss, who has run the Lakers since her father, Jerry Buss, died in 2013, said she wasn’t on board. Her five siblings, however, are ready to sell their stakes.

This transaction isn’t only evidence that investors are willing to pay eye-popping sums to buy teams. It also illustrates how hard it was for the late Jerry Buss to structure his estate so that his family could continue to own and run the Lakers for years to come. And it raises a thorny legal question: Who has the authority to sell property held jointly by multiple relatives in a family trust?

The succession plan

As law professors who study what happens to property after someone dies, we are fascinated by questions like this because they cast light on the complexities of family dynamics and the challenges that arise when people jointly own unusual assets, such as professional sports teams.

And we’re not alone. Jeanie Buss’ leadership of the Lakers inspired a television series, “Running Point,” starring Kate Hudson. Netflix renewed the comedy for a third season in May 2026.

The Buss family has owned the Lakers since Jerry Buss bought it in 1979. Jerry Buss put the family’s Lakers shares into trusts for his six children.

A trust is a legal arrangement for owning and managing property and other assets. The person who creates the trust must fund it with property and provide instructions to the trustee for how the property should be managed and distributed.

Trustees have legal control over property in the trust. Beneficiaries have the right to receive and benefit from the property. You can be both a trustee and a beneficiary of a trust.

Following the succession plan that Jerry Buss reportedly wrote into the family trust, Jeanie Buss became the team’s controlling owner and the Lakers’ “governor” after he died. In the NBA, the governor has the final say over a team and represents it to the league. And the NBA’s board of governors has to approve any team’s sale.

The Lakers were worth about $1 billion when Jerry Buss died in 2013, and the Buss family owned about two-thirds of the team at the time.

Most of their stakes already sold

The Buss siblings sold most of their majority stake in the Lakers in 2025 to businessman Mark Walter in a deal that valued the team at $10 billion. But they kept a 17.8% share, and Jeanie Buss was to stay on as governor until 2030.

Walter has now agreed to sell his share to the Iger-Kushner group, although the NBA still needs to approve the deal.

Jeanie Buss’ five siblings reportedly want to sell the family’s remaining stake, but she does not. If the family sells its remaining stake, Jeanie Buss would probably lose her position as the Lakers’ governor because NBA rules require that a governor hold at least a 15% ownership stake.

2 sides of the family fight

Jerry Buss’ six adult children share the team’s financial benefits, but only the trustees have the legal power to manage the property.

Three of the siblings – Jeanie Buss, Janie Buss and Joey Buss – currently serve as co-trustees.

Jeanie Buss’ position appears to rest on conditions written into the trust itself. According to her attorney, it requires the trustees to do everything possible to ensure that she remain the controlling owner of the Lakers for her lifetime.

That was apparently what their father wanted. In 2017, according to Jeanie Buss’ lawyer, when a prior dispute arose over the trust, a California court reaffirmed that Jeanie Buss remain as controlling owner.

Jeanie Buss’ siblings may counter that the 2017 order does not expressly prohibit a sale and that the trust, according to a prior court filing, permits the trustees to act by majority vote, which they appear to have done.

The 2025 deal struck with Walter also reportedly included a “tag-along” provision that would allow the trust to sell its interest for the same valuation as Walter. The siblings may argue that the currently proposed sale is exactly what was contemplated in the tag-along provision because it exceeds the 2025 valuation.

Ultimately, who prevails will depend on the terms of the trust and the 2025 agreement – neither of which is public – and the 2017 court order.

Family feuds over franchises

Owning a sports team has become a popular asset for billionaires, who sometimes see them as a way to strengthen family ties.

The Buss family drama shows that sharing ownership of a professional sports team can instead cause family disputes that play out publicly. One heir might prefer to remain actively involved in managing it, while the others may want to sell their stakes.

The Denver Broncos were controlled by a family trust until 2022. The family sold the football team because the siblings could not agree on which of them would otherwise own it.

Another dispute involving the Los Angeles Chargers arose in 2021 when one sibling, who served as co-trustee, sought to force a sale of the family trust’s stake in the football team, while her brother and other siblings sought to preserve family control.

A similar trust dispute cropped up in 2022 over family ownership of the Baltimore Orioles, when one of the owner’s sons sued the other over control of the trust and the baseball franchise, including whether to sell the team.

These cases underscore an important lesson for estate planning: Giving several heirs equal shares of an estate does not mean that they will amicably decide how to manage the property they own together.

Sibling disputes aren’t unusual

Anyone can establish a trust, and disputes over trusts usually have nothing to do with professional sports.

One of us (Weisbord) worked with two colleagues on a study of trust lawsuits filed in California that will be published in September 2026. It found that in 25% of those 640 cases, siblings were fighting each other in court.

Conflicts when parents do what Jerry Buss did by naming some of his children as both trustees and beneficiaries, but leaving others with beneficiary status only, were the most common type of dispute.

For the Buss family, the question of what happens to its trust could decide whether a basketball dynasty ends.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.