Jeanie Buss just hauled five of her own siblings into Los Angeles Superior Court because they treated the Lakers like a stock tip instead of the family business their father built from a $67.5 million buy in 1979 into a $12.5 billion trophy.
I have watched this franchise through every ownership chapter since Jerry Buss walked in the door, and what the petition filed this week lays out is not a polite estate squabble. According to the filing, Johnny, Jimmy, Janie, Joey, and Jesse voted to dump the Buss Family Trust’s remaining 17.8 percent stake and tag along on Mark Walter’s sale to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner. Jeanie never cast a vote. She never got a call. The filing states flatly that “Jeanie never agreed to any sale, was never consulted and was never even informed.”
That is the sentence that should stop every Lakers fan cold. You do not “decide as a family” when the controlling owner is sitting outside the room.
The 2017 Order Was Not a Suggestion
I remember the first round of this war. Jim and Johnny tried to pry the gavel out of Jeanie’s hands after Jerry died. The court shut that down in 2017, named Jeanie, Janie, and Joey as co-trustees, and ordered them to take every available step to keep Jeanie as controlling owner. That order was not decorative. It was the legal translation of Jerry Buss’s will.
Wednesday’s 97-page petition alleges Janie and Joey “brazenly, knowingly and intentionally violated the 2017 Order by secretly signing a purported resolution — void on its face — to sell” the trust’s Lakers shares. Jeanie’s lawyer, Adam Streisand, called the whole maneuver “devious behavior” orchestrated to create a public fait accompli before she could answer. The filing even notes Joey signed his vote one day before ESPN reported Walter’s deal with Iger and Kushner, and that Walter had not yet issued the official notice that would trigger tag-along rights.
Read that again. According to the petition, they moved before the rights were even live.
The five siblings answered with a second statement to Shams Charania: “Johnny, Jimmy, Janie, Joey and Jesse have made the decision to sell the family’s remaining stake, and we remain united in that decision.” United is a generous word when the sixth sibling, the governor, is filing for contempt and asking the court to remove two co-trustees for breach of fiduciary duty.
I am not buying the cash-out logic. At a $12.5 billion valuation, that 17.8 percent is worth roughly $2.2 billion, a little more than $370 million apiece. Real money. Life-changing money. But Jerry Buss did not buy the Lakers, the Forum, and the Kings so his kids could flip the residual and walk. He bought a culture. The petition puts it clean: the resolution “offends the testamentary intent and very legacy that Dr. Buss and Jo Ann entrusted the Buss siblings to protect.”
Control Is the Entire Point
The NBA draws the controlling-owner line at 15 percent. The trust is sitting on 17.8. Drop below that floor and Jeanie’s grip as governor, already structured through the Walter deal to last multiple years, gets thinner in ways no press release can paper over. Minority owners Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and Ed Roski have sided with her and say they intend to hold. That tells you who still understands the difference between a franchise and a balance-sheet line item.
Walter flipped his controlling stake for about a 25 percent profit in roughly fourteen months after the $10 billion purchase. Good for him. That is private equity doing private equity. The Buss name is supposed to mean something else. The filing opens with Yogi Berra for a reason: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Jeanie is back in the same courthouse, enforcing the same parental intent, against the same family impulse to treat the Lakers as extractable value instead of inherited duty.
I have zero patience for the argument that “four of six siblings and two of three co-trustees” is enough to steamroll the governor the court already locked in place. If the 2017 order means anything, the vote is void on arrival. The hearing is set for November 5. Until a judge says otherwise, that resolution is a piece of paper with five signatures and no authority.
The Lakers are not a liquidity event. They are the last major piece of Jerry Buss’s public life still carrying his name in the building. Jeanie Buss is asking the court to keep it that way. On the record in front of me, the siblings who tried to cash out without her just made her case for her.
