Jeanie Buss has spent most of her life at the helm of the most glamorous franchise in professional basketball.
She grew up right at the heart of the purple and gold empire that were her father’s Los Angeles Lakers. Jerry Buss had bought the team in the 1970s and led the team to five championships in the 1980s. Jeanie helped oversee another dynastic run in the 2000s, when the Lakers added five more trophies—all while carrying on a Hollywood romance with the team’s head coach.
By 2013, Jeanie was in control of the organization. She eventually won another championship, becoming the first woman in NBA history to do so as a team’s principal owner.
But now, the 64-year-old Buss finds herself in an even more unlikely position. She’s fighting to hold on to a sliver of the Lakers—against five of Jerry Buss’ other children.
When the Lakers were sold out of the blue last week, with Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner striking a deal to purchase the team from Mark Walter at a $12.5 billion valuation, it set off a Buss family succession side-plot. Five of Jerry Buss’ six heirs want to sell their remaining 17.8% stake in the franchise.
That left Jeanie, Jerry’s appointed leader of the franchise, as the lone successor who has absolutely no interest in cashing out of the family business—and views the attempt to do so as a violation of Jerry Buss’ trust. (The outcome isn’t expected to hold up the sale of Walter’s stake.)
“On behalf of Jeanie Buss,” Adam Streisand, Jeanie’s lawyer, wrote to attorneys representing the other Buss siblings, “I demand that your clients make clear publicly that Jeanie Buss is the Controlling Owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and that your clients shall take no action on this supposed ‘vote’ to sell the 17.8% stake.”
Jeanie Buss is as familiar with sibling squabbles as she is with the Larry O’Brien Trophy. When Jerry Buss died in 2013, he left the franchise in a trust for his children. Jerry included instructions to vote Jeanie as the controlling owner in perpetuity, a provision that has led to nearly constant conflict in the years since.
In 2017, Jeanie fired her older brother Jim as president of basketball operations, and her siblings responded with an attempted power-grab that Streisand described as a “coup.” Last season, two of her younger brothers were also relieved of their duties in the Lakers’ scouting department. And when the Buss family sold the majority of the franchise to Walter at a $10 billion valuation in 2025, it was Jeanie who was allowed to stay in her role as the Lakers’ official representative among the league’s governors.
But in recent days, Jeanie had two stunning surprises. The first came when she found out that Walter would be selling the franchise that her family had made famous. And the second was when she learned of her siblings’ plans to offload the family stake—from an ESPN article published on Monday.
Streisand quickly moved to challenge the announced sale on Jeanie’s behalf. Lawyers for her siblings didn’t respond to requests for comment, but had told ESPN that they were “united” in their decision.
The showdown between the first family of the Lakers comes at a time when family ownership is increasingly rare in high-level professional sports, as franchises become astronomically valuable—thanks in part to visionaries like Jerry Buss. When the Buss family ceded majority control of the Lakers in 2025, the franchise was worth nearly 150 times what their patriarch had paid for it in 1979.
And as Jerry’s “Showtime” Lakers, led by Magic Johnson, receded into the past, it was Jeanie who became synonymous with the team. She led its business operations during a booming era of on-court success. Buss started dating Phil Jackson just months after he arrived in L.A. to coach the team in 1999. Jackson would go on to win five more championships for the franchise.
While players came and went, Jeanie was a constant presence who wove the Lakers into the fabric of her daily life. While still in college in the 1980s, she once enlisted Johnson to help her with a marketing class assignment, according to her autobiography. In the 1990s she started attending league meetings as an alternate owner. She oversaw the Lakers’ fall out of contention at the end of Kobe Bryant’s career and its rebirth with the arrival of LeBron James and Luka Doncic.
How the Buss family’s history comes to an end will be determined by a potentially protracted legal battle. Jeanie has had a role in teams that have conquered the entire NBA a half-dozen times. But in order to keep it, she’ll first have to defeat five siblings.
