The Buss family has spent nearly a decade fighting over who gets to control the Lakers. Now, after selling the franchise’s majority stake and watching the team’s value soar, the battle's been reduced to a sliver of ownership — and whether Jeanie Buss gets to keep the job her father gave her.

The family still owns 17.8% of the Lakers. Jeanie needs at least 15% to stay on as the team’s governor. That leaves only a 2.8-percent cushion between her continued control and the end of the Buss family’s reign over the franchise.

Her five siblings want to erase that cushion.

Johnny, Jim, Janie, Joey, and Jesse Buss voted to include the family’s remaining shares in Mark Walter’s proposed sale to Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner. The deal values the Lakers at $12.5 billion, putting the family’s stake at roughly $2.225 billion.

Jeanie was the only sibling to oppose the move. Her attorney says the vote is invalid, arguing that the family trust cannot sell its Lakers shares without approval from its three co-trustees. He also pointed to a 2017 court order requiring the trustees to preserve enough ownership for Jeanie to stay in charge.

Her siblings say they're united and intend to move forward through the process.

That leaves the Lakers caught between a multibillion-dollar sale and an old family promise.

The Buss family isn't fighting over who gets to hire the coach, run basketball operations, or decide whether to sell the Lakers. Those battles have already been fought. Jeanie won them, one by one, while her siblings gradually lost their roles with the organization.

Now the family's fighting over the last piece of Jerry Buss’ succession plan.

The Most Important 2.8% In Sports

When the Buss family sold controlling ownership to Mark Walter at a $10 billion valuation in 2025, the deal looked like a carefully planned compromise. Walter got the team, the six siblings got life-changing payouts, and Jeanie kept her job.

The NBA unanimously approved the transaction in October and announced that Jeanie would continue as governor for at least five years after the sale closed. That gave her a path to stay in the role through 2030, and the family held on to their 17.8% minority stake.

It was an unusual arrangement, but it gave the Lakers an ownership group with much deeper financial resources without immediately pushing out the person who had run the franchise since Jerry Buss died in 2013. Jeanie kept describing Walter as a partner. In February, she told CNBC that they were comfortable with the setup and even went as far as to say:

I’m not going anywhere.

Six months later, Walter's the one going somewhere.

Iger and Kushner have agreed to buy approximately 65% of the Lakers from Walter at a $12.5 billion valuation. If they also buy the Buss family’s shares, their group would control roughly 83% of the franchise.

The sale still needs NBA approval, and Kushner has to sell his limited stake in the Miami Heat before the league’s Board of Governors can approve him. That process could take months. Walter’s transaction is expected to move forward regardless of what happens with the Buss family, meaning the disputed 17.8% is technically a side deal, even if it’s a very expensive one.

At the new valuation, that stake is worth $445 million more than it was when the family sold to Walter. If the siblings divided that evenly, each sibling’s share would be worth around $371 million before taxes.

That would come on top of the roughly $500 million after-tax payout each sibling already got from the Walter sale, according to ESPN.

There’s an obvious financial argument for selling. Minority shares don’t come with anything close to Jeanie’s authority, and the other five siblings don't work for the Lakers anymore. They can take another enormous payout at the highest valuation ever attached to a sports franchise, or they can stay tied to a team they have no control over.

Their statement said it was time to “exit gracefully while we still can.”

The graceful part lasted a few hours.

Jeanie’s attorney, Adam Streisand, sent a letter challenging the vote and demanding that her siblings publicly acknowledge that she's still the Lakers’ controlling owner. He also accused Joey and Jesse of giving reporters false information to damage Jeanie and the organization.

For the other five siblings, this is about money. For Jeanie, it’s about money, power, identity, and the promise she believes Jerry made when he chose her to run the team.

The Lakers’ governor can’t simply be an employee picked by the new owners. League rules require the governor to represent an ownership interest of at least 15%.

If the trust sells everything, the agreement promising Jeanie five years in the job suddenly doesn't mean anything. Iger and Kushner might want her to stay, but she wouldn’t meet the league’s ownership requirement anymore.

There could be a compromise where her siblings sell their stakes and Jeanie buys back enough to stay as governor.

The math is brutal though. Jerry divided the family’s ownership equally among his six children, so one-sixth of the remaining 17.8% comes out to just under 3% of the Lakers.

Jeanie would somehow need to add roughly 12% to reach the league’s threshold. At a $12.5 billion valuation, that additional equity would be worth approximately $1.5 billion.

There are creative ways wealthy people and ownership groups can structure deals. Iger and Kushner could help finance a solution. Some shares could stay inside a reorganized trust. But it's not something you can just whip up overnight.

That’s why the entire 17.8% matters. It’s barely larger than the minimum, and taking away any meaningful piece would take Jeanie’s control with it.

The Trust Says One Thing. The Sale Agreement Says Another

The legal fight starts with two documents created eight years apart.

The first is a 2017 court order that ended an earlier Buss family power struggle. Think of it as a permanent safety net: it legally required the family trust to use all of its voting power every single year to ensure Jeanie stayed in charge of the Lakers for as long as she lived.

But the order left one door open. A court could still modify the trust if someone showed that circumstances had changed enough to justify it under California law.

Jeanie’s side says that hasn’t happened.

The current co-trustees are Jeanie, Janie, and Joey. Streisand argues that the trust can’t sell its Lakers interest without trustee approval, and that the trustees have a duty to preserve the minimum 15% stake Jeanie needs to remain governor.

Under that reading, the family could vote 5-1, 6-0 or even 100-1. The trust still couldn’t complete a transaction that directly removes Jeanie from the job the court order was meant to protect.

Her siblings are leaning on the second document.

When the family sold controlling ownership to Walter, the agreement included a tag-along provision. That provision allows the Buss trust to participate if Walter later sells his shares, giving the family a chance to receive the same price and terms Walter negotiated for himself.

According to ESPN’s reporting, activating that provision required four of the six siblings to vote in favor. All five of the others did.

That gives the siblings a pretty reasonable argument of their own. Jeanie helped negotiate and approve an agreement that included a way out. Now that they want to use it, she wants an older court order to stop them.

The siblings can also ask a court to modify the old order. When they came to that agreement in 2017, the family controlled 66% of the Lakers. Jeanie was protecting Jerry’s succession plan and trying to prevent a boardroom maneuver that could’ve cost the family control of the franchise.

But the family willingly gave up that control.

Iger didn’t exactly clear up the uncertainty, either. He said the initial plan was for Jeanie to remain governor, then added, “If something changes, then it changes.”

Something's changed.

Jeanie's Already Won This Fight Once

Jerry Buss never wanted his children to spend more than a decade publicly fighting over the Lakers.

He also created a structure that almost guaranteed they’d stay tangled up with each other.

When Jerry died in 2013, his 66% controlling interest passed through family trusts that went to each sibling. They all received an equal share and an equal vote. Jeanie also became the governor, and Jim continued overseeing basketball operations.

On paper, it looked organized. Then the Lakers started losing.

They won 27 games in 2013-14, 21 the following season, and just 17 in 2015-16. Jim had publicly given himself a timeline to rebuild the Lakers into a contender, and Jeanie decided she’d seen enough before that timeline ran out.

In February 2017, she fired Jim and general manager Mitch Kupchak. Magic Johnson became president of basketball operations, and Rob Pelinka replaced Kupchak.

Jim and Johnny responded by calling a shareholders meeting and proposing a Lakers board that didn’t include Jeanie. Since she needed a board seat to be a controlling owner, the move would've pushed her out of power.

Jeanie went to court.

The brothers postponed the meeting, and the family eventually reached that agreement that's sitting right in the middle of all of this. Jim and Johnny left their trustee roles, Janie and Joey replaced them, and Jeanie secured the right to stay as controlling owner for life as long as the trust held the team.

Her lawyer put it pretty plainly afterward:

The message is clear here: Do not underestimate Jeanie Buss.

It was a decisive win. It also left behind scars that never really healed. Jim and Johnny were out of basketball power. Joey and Jesse stayed involved for a few more years, but their relationship with Jeanie deteriorated too.

Jeanie eventually watched every sibling disappear from the organization while she stayed. Now all five of them have voted to remove her too.

There’s no need to pretend the siblings are turning down the money out of principle. They're all worth billions, and there’s no guarantee another buyer will offer the same valuation whenever the family finally does sell.

But money and revenge are perfectly capable of sharing the same room. Walter held control for less than a year before agreeing to flip his stake at a 25% higher valuation.

From the siblings’ perspective, Jeanie pushed them into a sale that cost them their Lakers jobs, preserved her own, and left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. Now a tag-along clause gives them a chance to recover some of that difference and cut the last tie keeping Jeanie in power.

That’s a pretty strong cocktail of motivations.

The End Of The Buss Era Was Always Going To Be Messy

Jerry Buss purchased the Lakers, the Los Angeles Kings, the Forum, and the surrounding real estate from Jack Kent Cooke for $67.5 million in 1979. The Lakers themselves were valued at roughly $16 million as part of that deal.

Today, the Lakers are changing hands at a $12.5 billion valuation. Under Jerry, the Lakers won 10 championships. The family added another title in 2020 with Jeanie as governor, making her the first woman controlling owner to lead an NBA team to a championship.

Her tenure has included some real accomplishments. The Lakers landed LeBron James, traded for Anthony Davis, won the title, and even landed Luka Dončić. But it’s also been messier and not nearly as consistently successful as the empire Jerry built.

Jeanie defended the Walter sale by saying her father cared most about keeping the Lakers at the top of the league. To do that now, she argued, the team needed more resources, and everyone needed to be pulling in the same direction.

The resources showed up. The unity didn’t.

For years, selling was the one decision big enough to end these family feuds. That's not the case anymore.

Now five siblings have decided that $2.225 billion and a clean break are worth more than preserving the last piece of Jerry’s plan. Jeanie's using the promise he made her to hold onto the only position her family has left. She may win again. The court order is real, and the trust can’t just ignore it because five beneficiaries found a better price.

Whatever happens, the argument has already made one thing clear about this final Lakers decision. The Buss family is done running the team together. Honestly, they’ve been done for years.

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