Billionaires reveal what it’s like owning a pro sports team…
In 2023, David Rubenstein, a cofounder of the non-public fairness large Carlyle Group with an estimated internet price of $4.3 billion, was negotiating to purchase the Baltimore Orioles when a Zoom name turned insulting.
Lawyers and funding bankers representing the patrons and the team’s house owners had been discussing the deal. Someone questioned whether or not Rubenstein, now 77, and his potential associate, funding govt Mike Arougheti, 53, understood debt — though they’d spent their careers in finance.
Team proprietor David Rubenstein of the Baltimore Orioles seems on previous to a game against the Minnesota Twins at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland, Saturday, March 28, 2026. Diamond Images/Getty Images
“I announced to everyone that I had heard enough, I was dropping out of the deal and getting off the Zoom, and disconnected,” Rubenstein writes in “Inside the Owner’s Box: Conversations on Power and Leadership in Sports” (Simon & Schuster), out September 22. “That occurred in the space of about ten seconds.”
The blowup almost ended his pursuit of his hometown team. “I began to think that maybe I had no business buying the team in the first place,” he writes. About two weeks later, he revived negotiations, finally finishing a $1.7 billion buy in 2024.
Rubenstein’s new ebook seems at what it’s actually like to be a billionaire proprietor of a pro sports team.
Buying the team gave Rubenstein loads of alternatives to have his judgment questioned again. His ebook, which incorporates interviews with fourteen other house owners, reveals what comes with owning a major skilled sports franchise: followers heckling you in the grocery retailer, trades you’re still defending years later and colleagues telling you just how silly your latest resolution was.
Brooklyn Nets proprietor Joe Tsai, 62, is aware of how shortly an costly commerce can flip an proprietor into a goal. The Alibaba cofounder, price an estimated $12.1 billion, still takes warmth from followers for the January 2021 commerce that introduced James Harden to Brooklyn alongside Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.
Joe Tsai owns the Brooklyn Nets and co-owns the New York Liberty. Getty Images
Durant and Irving had arrived in 2019, before Tsai grew to become controlling proprietor. Harden was his gamble, acquired at the value of gamers and helpful draft property. The trio never delivered a championship.
“The Harden decision was definitely on my watch,” Tsai tells Rubenstein. “That’s why I’m hated by fans on social media.”
Even before taking management, Tsai confronted a resolution that examined his private loyalties. General supervisor Sean Marks called in 2018 to clarify that the Nets had been buying and selling Jeremy Lin.
“Sean, if you trade Jeremy Lin, I will be hated in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong,” Tsai remembers telling him. “The entire Chinese community will hate me forever.”
Tsai took a gamble on bringing James Harden onto the Nets — and it didn’t repay. Getty Images
Marks replied, “That’s why I’m calling you.”
Tsai accepted the rationale. But he wished a strategy to clarify himself to followers, so he opened a Twitter account despite objections from his communications team. He promised to debate sports fairly than Alibaba or politics.
“I need to have a direct channel to communicate with our fans,” he tells Rubenstein. “I can’t have the New York Post interpret.”
Tsai nervous about being hated when the Nets traded Jeremy Lin. Getty Images
Seattle Mariners proprietor John Stanton, 71, will get suggestions without opening an app. An roughly eighty-year-old lady carrying Seahawks gear as soon as planted herself in entrance of his grocery cart, saying that she had important issues to say.
Fortunately, she appreciated how the team was doing. When followers are sad, Stanton tells Rubenstein, “Sometimes you’re hearing yelling from another corner of the grocery store.”
Ted Leonsis, 69 and value an estimated $4.5 billion, made his fortune promoting his advertising and marketing company to AOL and then working as an govt there. He purchased the Washington Capitals in 1999, effectively conscious that success in a single business wouldn’t mechanically switch to sports.
Ted Leonsis admits that pushing for the Capitals to amass hockey famous person Jaromír Jágr was a mistake. Getty Images
Two years later, he helped push for the Capitals to amass hockey famous person Jaromír Jágr.
“I advocated maybe a little more enthusiastically than I should have,” Leonsis tells Rubenstein. “We brought Jaromír here, and that was a disaster. I made a mistake.”
After two-and-a-half disappointing seasons, Washington traded Jágr to the Rangers in 2004, persevering with to pay a part of his wage.
Another intervention labored. Hockey govt Dick Patrick advocated locking up Alex Ovechkin with a thirteen-year contract, and Leonsis accepted it. Then-NBA commissioner David Stern called with a blunt evaluation.
“Thirteen years is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Leonsis remembers Stern saying. Years later, Leonsis’ remorse was that he hadn’t provided 15.
Jaromir Jagr of the Washington Capitals seems on during an NHL hockey game against the Philadelphia Flyers at MCI Center in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2001. Getty Images
Did Stern acknowledge being improper? “No, but they changed the rules, so you can’t give deals like that anymore,” Leonsis tells Rubenstein.
The arithmetic makes satisfaction tough. Atlanta Hawks proprietor Tony Ressler describes “the frustration of the fact that twenty-nine out of thirty teams fail every season.” Every proprietor’s championship plan requires virtually everybody else’s to fail.
Rubenstein also found that possession couldn’t get better all the things he’d misplaced. Visiting his childhood row home for a team-produced movie, he met the current proprietor, who had no concept who he was. She talked about discovering containers of baseball playing cards in the basement and throwing them out.
For a long time, he’d assumed that his mom had gotten rid of his assortment way back. “I did not have the heart to tell the current owner” that the playing cards had been “probably worth much more than the house,” he writes.
Antony Ressler, principal proprietor of the Atlanta Hawks, reacts after their 109-108 win over the New York Knicks in game three of the Eastern Conference first round playoffs at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Thursday, April 23, 2026. Getty Images
Tsai’s basketball reminiscences embody skipping constitutional legislation courses at Yale to play pickup games. One opponent was future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who he calls a “decent player.”
His current ambitions require better gamers. “We need to win a championship,” Tsai tells Rubenstein. “We need to prove ourselves.”Still, possession provides a pleasure that operating Alibaba can not.
“I can be chairman of a public company, but there are thousands of public companies. There are only thirty NBA owners,” Tsai says. “When you have something that other people don’t have, it feels pretty good.”
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