JESSE BUSS WAS at his Los Angeles area home when his phone buzzed with a text message from Joe McCormack, the Los Angeles Lakers’ senior vice president of finance and chief financial officer. It was 8:45 a.m. PT on Nov. 20.
Good morning, Jesse. I need to talk with you today about several organizational changes that will affect you. Please let me know when you have time. Thank you, Joe.
Jesse, a Lakers co-owner and the team’s assistant general manager, quickly texted back.
One minute later, his brother Joey, a fellow co-owner, called. Joey, the team’s vice president of research and development, had received a similar message from McCormack, followed by a call. McCormack told Joey he was being fired immediately and so was his brother.
Buss family tree
Dr. Jerry Buss, family patriarch, died in 2013
Four eldest siblings
Johnny Buss, 69
Jim Buss, 66
Jeanie Buss, 64
Janie Buss, 62
Two younger half-siblings
Joey Buss, 41
Jesse Buss, 38
Gone, too, were brothers Jim and Johnny, who held Lakers administrative roles, and sister Janie, who was 62, and near retirement.
The Lakers were 15 games into the season and playing well, with an 11-4 record. The team’s sale to Mark Walter — at a $10 billion valuation — had closed nearly three weeks prior, in late October. While leadership changes are often a given in any such transaction, this timing seemed off: Why now? What had they done?
Janie pleaded to not be fired: “Please, let me resign.” She was out but would be paid through the end of the calendar year.
She told ESPN she felt disappointed and disrespected, like a crumpled-up piece of paper thrown into the trash.
The only Buss still part of the team was Jeanie, driver of the sale to Walter and the team’s governor since Jerry Buss died in 2013.
Jeanie Buss took control of the Lakers after Jerry Buss, her father and the family patriarch, died in 2013. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
“She fired everyone,” a team official told ESPN.
Jim, Joey and Jesse Buss declined to comment for this story.
The firings and sale marked the official end of a tumultuous decade for the Busses — an unceremonious ending for the family whose father had built the Lakers into the most popular and valuable family-owned sports enterprise in the world.
Jerry Buss’ dream was to leave what he had created to his six children; generational wealth, of course, but also a business empire that would tie familial bonds together forever.
It didn’t happen. Instead, the dream began to fall apart soon after the family patriarch died more than a decade ago.
Interviews with current and former Lakers staffers with direct knowledge of key events and sources close to and within the Buss family reveal the post-Jerry Buss era with the Lakers has been defined largely by sibling infighting and subterfuge, attempted coups and deep familial distrust. Even after the sale closed, questions linger among some family members about whether the sale was in line with the family trust. And whether a sibling quietly took financial care of her allies and friends — at the expense of her own family.
“I don’t think my dad would be happy with the way things just went down,” Janie said.
“Not at all.”
IN MAY 1979, Jerry Buss paid $67.5 million to Jack Kent Cooke in a sprawling financial deal that netted Buss the Lakers, the NHL’s LA Kings, the Forum arena in Inglewood, and Cooke’s 13,000-acre California ranch.
One month later, Buss drafted star point guard Magic Johnson with the No. 1 pick. The Lakers won the NBA championship in Buss’ first season. That title established an era known by a single word: Showtime.
Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in May 1979. A month later, the team drafted Michigan State guard Magic Johnson. Dave Gatley /Los Angeles Times via Getty Images; Gene Puskar/AP
But less than a decade into his tenure as owner, Buss faced financial trouble. He was asked by someone on the Lakers’ roster if he’d ever consider selling the Lakers.
“He looked at me and he said, ‘If I sold the team, I’d have a lot of money. And then I’d be sitting around my house saying to myself, ‘Wow, I’ve got a lot of money now, what should I do with it?'” the former player told ESPN.
Buss explained that, if he were in that situation and flush with that kind of money, he’d want to buy the Lakers.
In 1997, Buss had had a similar chat with his son, Johnny, who believed a sale would net $1 billion.
“He’d say, ‘The only reason I would ever sell right now is because my family wanted me to, because they want to go do something else — like, let’s go buy Disneyland or something like that.'” Johnny told ESPN. But his father said, “Johnny, we own the Lakers. What’s more fun than that?”
In the early 2000s, Buss declined a $1 billion offer for the team.
“He said, ‘You know, Jeanie, the problem with that is that’s so much money,” Jeanie said on a 2023 appearance on “The Athletic NBA Show” podcast. “I would get the money, and people would say what are you going to do with all that money?
“The first thing I’d want to do is buy the Lakers.'”
Jeanie said it was around this time that she and her siblings began having conversations with their father about how he wanted to be remembered.
Jerry Buss and his wife JoAnn raised four children: Johnny, Jim, Jeanie and Janie (clockwise from top right). Gunther / mptvimages.com
“Legacy was important to him,” she said in the 2022 10-part Hulu documentary series “Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers.” “He wanted to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He wanted to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. But really what was most important to him was his family and his team.”
In the same episode, Jim said, “He would say, ‘I trust you guys to keep this going the way that I want it to go.'”
In 2006, Buss received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Four years later, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
And one year after that, Buss convened his children to discuss the family legacy. By then, the Lakers had become a global sports brand on par with the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys.
He asked them about the possibility of selling the team.
“Do you think everybody wants to sell — and should we?” Johnny recalled his father asking. “I know that this is just going to cause a lot of infighting with the family after I pass away. Should we just do it now so that we get it all said and done?”
If they did sell, Buss asked his kids, what would they do? Their answer, Janie told ESPN, mimicked what their father had said time and again.
“Everyone said, ‘Well, we’d buy the Lakers,'” she said.
She said he wanted to keep it within the family.
“He wanted to make sure the Lakers were in the Buss family,” Johnny told ESPN, “for generation after generation.”
STILL, ONE WEEK after Buss’ death in February 2013 at age 80, the six Buss siblings met at the team’s practice facility, where Jim and Johnny, the two oldest siblings, expressed an openness to selling.
Janie was apprehensive, she said.
Half of the Buss siblings wanting to sell wouldn’t be enough; at least four would need to be in favor. Jeanie remained resistant. “She was always the swing vote,” Johnny told ESPN.
Looming over the idea was the structure of the trust itself, which Janie described to ESPN as “last man standing.” The design dated back many years, Janie explained, as her father had become obsessed with the idea of a tontine — a pooled investment where the shares of any member who dies are redistributed among surviving members.
“My dad, at the end of his life, wanted peace,” Jeanie said in the 2022 Hulu series, for which she was an executive producer. “He didn’t want disgruntled children complaining.”
Yet jealousy and infighting had been a staple of the siblings for years. Many around the Lakers told ESPN that Jerry Buss was “the glue that was holding a broken family together.”
In 2017, after just 65 wins the prior three seasons, Jeanie fired her brother Jim as the president of basketball operations. In response, Jim and Johnny tried to remove her as controlling owner. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images; Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Despite just 65 combined wins over the next three seasons, infighting between the siblings had largely quieted, until late February 2017, when Jeanie fired Jim as the team’s president of basketball operations and also removed longtime general manager Mitch Kupchak. In their place, she hired Rob Pelinka, Kobe Bryant’s longtime agent, and Magic Johnson.
Jim and Johnny were incensed.
“It was like, ‘Whoa!’ First of all, how can you be fired?'” Johnny said in the Hulu series. “You’re part of the family. You can’t be fired. Jeanie, no, you can’t do that. That’s not right.”
“We involved attorneys so we can understand what the trust says,” Jim said in the series. Said Johnny: “We were trying to figure out, ‘Well, is Jeanie the absolute dictator of the Lakers?”
Jim said the attorneys told them that the best strategy was to put other people on the board of directors. So the two brothers submitted a list of four names for the three Buss family board seats — none of whom were Jeanie.
“It wasn’t like we were trying to get rid of Jeanie as president of the Lakers,” Johnny said in the series. “We wanted Jeanie to understand that Dad would not have wanted you to just take total control, hire and fire whoever you wanted, without the rest of us being involved.”
Jeanie shot back.
“Clearly, the intention that my father had in the trust is that I would be named controlling owner, because he wrote the trust exactly the way the judge interpreted it. Those were his wishes,” she responded in the series.
“And they tried to disregard what their father wanted. That’s a betrayal of all the hard work and what he did on our behalf to make this possible. I felt that there was this desire to remove me or stab me in the heart.”
Jeanie’s lawyers filed a temporary restraining order against her brothers and a lawsuit. She prevailed, with three siblings — Janie, Jesse and Joey — agreeing for her to serve as controlling owner while Jim resigned from his role as a co-trustee.
“From that point on, I’ve probably talked to Jeanie, I don’t know, four or five times,” Johnny told ESPN. “And that’s sad.”
After Jeanie fired her brother Jim, she hired longtime members of her inner circle to lead the Lakers’ front office: Kobe Bryant’s agent, Rob Pelinka, and Magic Johnson. Marcin Golba/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Pelinka had long been part of Jeanie’s inner circle, which also included former Laker Kurt Rambis and his wife, Linda, but that inner circle did not always include her siblings. “She has viewed her friends as her family and her family as her foes for the longest time,” said one person close to the family. The Lakers didn’t respond to multiple interview requests for Jeanie.
But in times of tumult, Jeanie often brought in her younger brothers. In the wake of the coup attempt by her elder brothers, she included Joey and Jesse months later in the head coaching search to replace Luke Walton, with whom the team had parted ways in April 2019.
Then, nearly three months later, team sources and others close to the family say, the post-Jerry Buss era faced an unexpected, and critical, turning point.
On July 13, 2019, the Lakers held a news conference at the team’s practice facility to introduce superstar big man Anthony Davis. The trade with the New Orleans Pelicans to pair Davis with LeBron James instantly vaulted the Lakers back into title contention after the team had struggled for nearly a decade under Jeanie’s stewardship.
AT THE NEWS conference, Jesse and Joey sat up front as Pelinka took the microphone and welcomed reporters.
First he thanked Jeanie, whom he called “the strongest and most wise leader that I’ve ever been around in my life.” He thanked Linda Rambis, Jeanie’s longtime confidant and the Lakers’ executive director of special projects. He thanked Kurt Rambis, a senior basketball adviser for the Lakers. He thanked Tim Harris, the team’s president of business operations. He thanked Davis’ agents at Klutch Sports, the Pelicans’ management and the players the Lakers had traded away.
Pelinka also mentioned Johnny, an older Buss sibling.
Upcoming NBA games on ESPN/ABC
Wednesday, Jan. 21 (ESPN)
Cavaliers at Hornets, 7 p.m. ET
Thunder at Bucks, 9:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Jan. 24 (ABC)
Knicks at 76ers, 3 p.m. ET
Warriors at Timberwolves, 5:30 p.m. ET
Lakers at Mavericks, 8:30 p.m. ET
Wednesday, Jan. 28 (ESPN)
Lakers at Cavaliers, 7 p.m. ET
Spurs at Rockets, 9:30 p.m. ET
“I had lunch about three months ago with Johnny Buss, and it was a special moment,” Pelinka told the assembled media. “He had called me out of the blue to get together and just shared a whole bunch of things about the pillars of the Buss family and what the Lakers franchise stands for, and that was a key moment for me in getting to today as well. So, I wanted to thank him.”
The reference struck Jesse and Joey as odd, people familiar with the events say, given the coup that Johnny had attempted with Jim just two years prior.
Jesse called Jeanie later that day, and he asked about Pelinka’s remark about Johnny. The conversation took a dark turn, multiple people told ESPN, when Jeanie began to tell a story about her mother, JoAnn.
By then, JoAnn — the mother of Jeanie, Jim, Johnny and their other sister Janie — was ill and in the final months of her life. Jeanie had been spending more time with her at a hospital. She told Jesse the two had frequently been talking about a new revelation that had recently rocked the Buss family.
Six months earlier, in December 2018, the six siblings had learned about a woman named Lee Klose, who had written to Jeanie and said that she had been the first child of JoAnn and Jerry Buss.
Lee was born in 1953, and, at the time, JoAnn and Jerry Buss lacked the financial resources to support her, so they made the difficult decision to place her up for adoption. But JoAnn made Buss promise her that he’d never have children with anyone else. He agreed. The couple would later divorce in 1972.
Janie learned about that promise many years ago from her mother, JoAnn, who said she was heartbroken when Buss later had two sons with his girlfriend Karen Demel in the mid-1980s. But Janie said that JoAnn ultimately supported Buss and those two sons, who were named Joey and Jesse.
There’s nearly a three-decade age gap between the four older Buss siblings and their two younger half-brothers, Joey and Jesse. Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
It’s not clear when Jeanie learned about the promise between JoAnn and her father, but when she spoke over the phone with Jesse on that 2019 call, in what multiple sources with knowledge of it say marked a sharp pivot from the topic of the Davis news conference, she brought it up.
Given that promise between her mother and father, Jeanie told Jesse, “You should’ve never been born.”
Jesse processed the words, according to the three people briefed on the call.
“You should’ve never been born.”
The words echoed in more ways than one. There had always been distance between the four older and the two younger siblings — and not just because of the pronounced age gap, with 31 years separating the oldest (Johnny) and youngest (Jesse). The older siblings often said that their father was frequently absent during their childhoods and that his empire was built by the time Joey and Jesse were born.
“When Joey and Jesse arrived, watching my dad and the joyful part of fatherhood and watching him engage with them, it reminded me of the things that he missed when I was growing up,” Jeanie said in the 2022 Hulu series.
News of Jeanie’s comments on the call with Jesse soon made the rounds within the organization and to Joey.
“It’s mind-blowing that she would say that,” said someone on the team who became aware of the remarks. “I don’t care who you are. You don’t say that to somebody else.”
Said another: “Why would that ever get thrown into somebody’s face? I don’t know.”
Of Jeanie’s alleged remark to Jesse, Janie said, “I can’t imagine my sister saying that, but that was the truth. They [Jerry and JoAnn] did have an understanding.”
An obvious but ominous dynamic had revealed itself from that call, people close to the family told ESPN — the remark was perhaps a sign of something more, a deep-rooted resentment that for decades had lingered.
“That,” someone close to the family said, “was the beginning of the end.”
IN THE YEARS since, multiple team sources said they sensed Jeanie’s priorities beginning to shift. The organization took significant criticism over how it was being run, and she often took it personally, those close to her said.
When external critics called the organization cheap, they were calling her cheap. When critics questioned why she listened to Linda and Kurt Rambis, they were questioning her judgment. When Pelinka came under public fire for the team’s roster construction, she took barbs for standing by him. She was quick to label critics as wrong, cruel and biased.
She tightened her circle. She grew more suspicious of leaks. She crafted her public image — and narrative — through favorable media coverage. “She’s PR savvy, and she utilizes it,” a team member said. “She prioritizes that.”
She also came to be known in some circles for turning against those who were close to her and dear to the franchise. She had done so to Jerry West. She had done so to her brother Jim.
And team sources tell ESPN she even began to turn against the Lakers’ star player, LeBron James.
Jeanie privately grumbled, people close to the team say, about what she felt was James’ outsized ego and the overt control that he and Klutch Sports, which represents both James and Anthony Davis, exerted over the organization at times.
She didn’t like that James was considered a savior for a foundering franchise when he arrived in 2018 and that it was he who chose the Lakers rather than the team’s leadership receiving praise for landing him. Team sources have been adamant for years that James’ camp informed the Lakers as early as 2017 that he was coming to join them when he became a free agent the following year.
The distance between Jeanie and James widened after the Lakers traded for Russell Westbrook in July 2021, people close to the team said. The team had made the trade in an effort to appease James, but the acquisition backfired in catastrophic fashion. L.A. went 33-49 and missed the playoffs, and James seemed to wash his hands of his role in the acquisition.
Team sources say Jeanie privately bristled at LeBron James’ outsized influence within the organization, even considering trading him in 2022, and believed James wasn’t grateful enough for the team drafting his son, Bronny, in 2024. Jeff Haynes/NBAE via Getty Images
Jeanie privately bristled about what she felt was his lack of accountability and the way James would shift blame onto others after the Westbrook trade, the people said.
In 2022, in the aftermath of the Westbrook trade, multiple people said Jeanie privately mused about not giving James a contract extension and, later that year, even about trading James, with the LA Clippers floated as a possibility. (This was before James received a no-trade clause in July 2024 after signing a new two-year, $104 million contract.)
And when the Lakers drafted James’ son Bronny with the 55th pick in the 2024 draft, Jeanie privately remarked that James should be grateful for such a gesture, but she felt that he wasn’t, people close to the team told ESPN.
That summer, as she discussed a new contract for James, Jeanie seemed more resigned to the fact that they’d have to do it — almost begrudgingly accepting that they’d take a massive PR hit by not doing so.
Under Jeanie’s leadership, the team had been through years of dysfunction — of distrust, increasing isolation and discord — and then, there was the on-court product.
The Lakers had missed the playoffs twice in 34 seasons under Jerry Buss; by spring 2024, they had missed the playoffs seven times in the 11 seasons since.
They had won 10 titles under Buss; they had won one since. They had posted the NBA’s best winning percentage under Buss; they had posted the 26th-best since.
Since the team moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, seven of the team’s 11 worst seasons in terms of winning percentage — including the four worst — had all come since Buss died and Jeanie took over.
By the spring of 2024, multiple people close to the team began to believe it had taken a toll, and Jesse began to believe Jeanie would sell the team within the next five years, people close to the family said. He told Joey of his suspicion; Joey didn’t think the idea was far-fetched.
Jesse and Joey had long known, those close to the family said, that as their four siblings grew older, the possibility that they would want to sell would only grow, especially as the valuation of the team soared into the billions.
Such wealth dwarfed their current financial realities: The siblings drew salaries from the team but largely lived off annual ownership distributions, which, after taxes, netted them anywhere from $3 million to $5 million each, depending on the team’s revenue each year.
The windfall from a sale — one that could provide hundreds of millions each — was no doubt appealing, but it would cost them their identities, forged over decades via the NBA’s crown jewel.
To Johnny, selling gave hope to something beyond money. He told ESPN that the Buss siblings might only see each other at an occasional Lakers game or at Thanksgiving, if they did at all. When talk veered away from the Lakers, he said, they could be jovial with each other, with laughter filling the room at rare gatherings.
“The Lakers were the tension point in the family,” he said.
As more time passed, Johnny said he thought more and more about selling.
It all depended on Jeanie. Joey and Jesse weren’t sure whether she had reached a tipping point, sources close to the family said, but they agreed that they needed to do something.
SO THEY HATCHED a plan. What if, the two brothers mused, they persuaded their siblings to sell a smaller percentage of the family’s 66% ownership share — maybe 5%, 10% or even 15% — rather than a controlling share?
The two combed through the family trust and hired lawyers to do the same. In December 2024, they presented the concept to McCormack, the Lakers’ chief financial officer, and Dan Grigsby, the team’s chief legal counsel.
McCormack and Grigsby asked them why they’d want to do this. Their answers were simple: to provide cash for the older siblings while maintaining a controlling stake in the team, thus ensuring the family’s majority stake for years to come, just as, they said, their father had stated he wanted long ago.
On one hand, preserving the family’s stake significantly benefited Joey and Jesse, given the trust’s structure. As the siblings all aged, the younger Buss siblings could’ve simply waited for their older siblings to die. But for the two brothers, protecting their stake also meant protecting a lifelong dream.
That dream could be traced back years earlier, when Jerry Buss had remarked to some around him that he envisioned the two running the team.
After winning 10 championships under Jerry Buss, the Lakers have won just one since, in 2020. Elsa/Getty Images
Janie and Johnny separately told ESPN they didn’t know about Joey and Jesse being tabbed to one day take over basketball operations, but they each said that their father always had ambitions for the family to rise through its ranks, as they all had done.
Jerry had spoken to Joey and Jesse about such a role on several occasions, people close to the family said, and they were on board.
“He was preparing them,” said one team source who was with Buss in his final years. “Like, Hey, Jesse, you’re going to do this, Joey, you’re going to do this.” Said another team source who was close with Buss: “He definitely told me he envisioned a scenario where Jesse and Joey would eventually take over as the other siblings became older.” Another person who was close to Buss shared a similar sentiment.
But Buss knew well that some of his children might eventually feel pressure to sell, and he took steps to alleviate it.
In the final 10 years of his life, Buss prepaid inheritance taxes to prevent the six siblings from having to do so after he died, people close to the family said. He also created a buyout provision that allowed siblings to potentially buy out each other’s shares.
And if any of the siblings worried about making sure they had enough to pass down to their own children, Buss had also created a provision known as the grandchild clause that essentially acted as a life insurance policy. That provision dictated that, for the six Buss siblings named in the trust, each of their children would be provided with a payment of 1.67% of the value of the trust’s assets — essentially the valuation of the franchise — upon the death of that child’s parent.
In essence, those grandchildren would stand to gain millions. The grandchild clause applied to all siblings except for Jeanie, who did not have children.
Each of these mechanisms was geared toward keeping controlling ownership of the team within the Buss family, people close to the family said.
But by the end of 2024, the two brothers feared that Jeanie’s hesitance to sell might be loosening.
Still, they didn’t think they were racing against time — or against her.
AS 2024 TURNED to 2025, the brothers held multiple meetings with McCormack and Grigsby, who they believed were sharing the ideas with Jeanie. The two brothers also began sharing their plans with Jim and Johnny. Multiple options were discussed, people familiar with the events said.
They studied transactions involving other major sports professional teams and believed a minority sale could reach a full valuation as high as $10 billion. Depending on the plans, the siblings stood to pocket between $50 million and $150 million each while the family held on to a controlling stake of the team.
Johnny told ESPN that he and Jim were enthusiastic. By selling off a piece of the team while they were alive, the older siblings stood to gain a windfall they might not otherwise have lived to see, given the way the trust was written. “And that would be really nice to enjoy at my age and with my family,” Johnny recalled thinking.
More than a year before the sale, Jesse and Joey proposed a plan to sell a minority share of the team that they believed would’ve netted each sibling as much as $150M — and kept the team in the family. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images; Mario Tama/Getty Images; Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
After the meetings, Joey and Jesse believed they had the support of Johnny and Jim. At times, people familiar with the events said, Janie could be hard to get in touch with, and by mid-June, she was vacationing in Canada, where Joey tried several times to reach her by phone.
“I never heard about any of the proposals to sell a smaller share, but maybe that’s what he was calling me about,” Janie said.
After talking with Jim and Johnny, and their attempts to reach Janie, that left Jeanie. On June 12, Joey reached out to Jeanie, seeking to meet. He didn’t hear back.
Then, three days later, on June 15, McCormack asked Joey and Jesse, separately, if they could come to the team’s facility in two days. Neither knew what this meeting would be about.
Johnny said when he got the same call from McCormack, he presumed it was regarding the efforts from Joey and Jesse. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, gosh. [Jeanie is] upset about this possibility of selling a minor portion of the team,” Johnny told ESPN.
On June 17, Joey and Jesse showed up to the facility.
McCormack, Grigsby and Jeanie spoke with members of the Buss family one by one, with most of them joining via Zoom or via phone, sources familiar with the events said. Joey and Jesse met with them last, with Joey going first. After Joey left the conference room, he walked back down the hall and turned to Jesse, who was preparing for his meeting to begin.
“They’re trying to sell the team,” Joey said.
WHEN JESSE WALKED down the hall and entered the conference room with Jeanie, McCormack and Grigsby, he soon learned what had just been explained to Joey.
Walter, who in addition to the Dodgers also owns the L.A. Sparks and is a part-owner of the English Premier League’s Chelsea FC, had made an offer to buy roughly 50% of the family’s ownership stake at a $10 billion valuation.
The siblings each stood to pocket about a half billion dollars after taxes. They’d still own about 17%, just meeting the 15% threshold required by NBA rules for Jeanie to remain governor. Indeed that was part of the plan: She would hold that role for at least the next five years, pending approval by the NBA’s board of governors.
On June 18, 2025, news broke that the Lakers were being sold to billionaire Mark Walter at a valuation of $10B. Each sibling, after taxes, would net nearly half a billion dollars. Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images; Rob Tringali/MLB Photos via Getty Images
Janie joined her meeting over Zoom and said she was blown away by the dollar amount. The year prior, she said, Jim had approached her and asked whether she’d be interested in selling. There was no buyer in place then, but Janie agreed, saying she’d sign off. She wanted to take care of her family, and she said she knew Jim and Johnny felt the same way.
When Walter’s offer arose, Janie said it was an easy decision for herself, Johnny and Jim: “We all came together, like, OK, we’ve got to sell.”
When Janie learned about Walter’s offer to buy the team, she was promised that nothing would change for five years, she told ESPN. Joey and Jesse had heard the same promise from McCormack, sources familiar with the events said. All of them were also told that only Jeanie would be given a contract moving forward — one for five years — because “Walter cared about the Buss family legacy,” sources said.
All the siblings would have until that Friday — 72 hours — to vote. Johnny said that Jeanie, on his call with her and McCormack, had confirmed she would vote to sell.
“Once Jeanie said she was on board, I understood the vote was finished,” Johnny said.
Still, he wondered why Jeanie had flipped after all these years. “I really have no idea why Jeanie decided to do this,” Johnny said. But he said he didn’t care, either. “Truthfully, if she did have a reason, I didn’t want to hear it.”
“I have not talked to her,” he said. “I have not discussed it with her. All I know is that she voted to sell.”
In their meetings, people familiar with the events said, Jesse and Joey asked Jeanie why she felt the need to sell, and the answers largely centered on money. In short, Jeanie told them she was unsure whether the Buss family could keep the Lakers competitive in the current financial climate in which more and more teams were owned by billionaires with staggering wealth, those sources said.
The brothers considered her reasoning flawed, people familiar with their thinking said. In baseball, teams could outspend each other for players. (And, indeed, Walter’s Dodgers had seemingly done so en route to a dynastic MLB run.) But the NBA was governed by an increasingly restrictive collective bargaining agreement that was specifically designed to level the playing field.
The two teams that were then in the NBA Finals — the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers — were small-market teams that hadn’t spent over the salary cap. All told, the wealth of an NBA owner mattered significantly when it came to paying a head coach or general manager or funding a large medical or scouting staff, but it didn’t matter so much when it came to roster construction.
In their meetings, people with knowledge of the events said, the two brothers also asked why — if money was so important — the family wouldn’t try to sell its majority stake on the open market? Was this the highest offer they could get? Joey and Jesse believed that a majority stake in the Lakers could fetch a valuation as high as $12 billion or perhaps even more, those sources said.
In response, they were told that Walter’s formal offer would be put to a vote. Had the majority stake gone on the open market, perhaps the two brothers could’ve found financial partners, raised money and, in some fashion, been part of the group to buy it, people with knowledge of their thinking say.
Now, they wouldn’t have a chance.
Mark Walter, who in 2012 bought the Los Angeles Dodgers for $2.15B and has led them to three World Series wins, had previously owned 26% of the Lakers, a stake he bought in 2021. Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images
“This is what Jeanie wanted,” said one person close to the family. “I think the only thing she cared about was getting the votes.”
In his meeting, Jesse took note of how McCormack, Grigsby and Jeanie kept saying that Walter had made an “offer” to buy the team, and yet here they were, being asked to vote nearly immediately.
The $10 billion valuation — the same figure that Jesse and Joey had used in their written proposals to the siblings — paired with the fact that Jeanie would be receiving a new contract to stay with the organization raised questions for Jesse: Was there a secret negotiation after an initial offer? Had they used the brothers’ proposal as a way to set a value Jeanie knew they would accept?
“This sounds like collusion,” he told Jeanie, McCormack and Grigsby, according to a person familiar with the interaction. “No, no, no, we did not negotiate,” all three reiterated. “This was an offer.”
After leaving the facility, Joey and Jesse grappled with the whiplash of the moment. They knew Jeanie was on board to sell a majority stake to Walter, but they remained unsure about Johnny, Jim and Janie. Answers were hard to come by. Janie seemed on board. Jim had gone radio silent. Johnny recalled both Joey and Jesse reaching out and suggesting that they should sell a minority percentage instead, but Johnny said he was more inclined for the family to sell their entire percentage — all 66%.
The vote was set for June 18. Joey and Jesse suspected that the team would be sold, that they were outnumbered 4-2, people close to the family said, and they later learned — from a 1:48 p.m. PT tweet by ESPN’s Shams Charania — that was the case.
BREAKING: The Buss family is entering an agreement to sell majority ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers to Mark Walter, the CEO and chairman of diversified holding company TWG Global, sources tell ESPN. Jeanie Buss will continue to serve in her role as Governor after the sale. pic.twitter.com/1Da6LDD7TJ
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) June 18, 2025
The two brothers faced a decision: Do they vote against their siblings, even though it would only be symbolic? Or do they go along, siding with the family, presenting a unified front?
They ultimately chose the latter. The final vote was 6-0.
When it was over, the two brothers couldn’t help but feel betrayed, people close to the family said. Years earlier, when Jeanie faced the 2017 coup from Johnny and Jim, Jesse and Joey had each backed her.
“Jeanie’s always supported me if there’s ever been something I needed to talk about, whether it’s with basketball operations or something personal,” Jesse told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne in 2017. “I know she always has my back. I’m a loyal person, so I’m forever going to have her back.”
“I support her 100 percent and the decision she had to make to right the operation, not only for us, but also all the shareholders and the entire NBA,” Joey told Shelburne in the same story.
Janie said she thought that the relationship between Jeanie, Joey and Jesse was “really strong” but that there had been a lot of stress with the sale. She said that Jeanie has “always been a big sister to them” and that she never saw any strain. She said that since their dad passed in 2013, Jeanie has had to be the glue in the family: “She’s had to keep us all together and happy.”
The two brothers also couldn’t help but wonder whether their recent efforts to explore a smaller sale had forced Jeanie’s hand — in effect putting her in a position to fast-track a larger sale.
Maybe it had, or maybe she had been planning to sell the team all along and the timelines just happened to coincide. Ultimately, it didn’t matter.
“At the end of the day,” one person close to the family said, “Jeanie just didn’t want any more Buss family members to own the team.”
THE NBA DRAFT was one week later, on June 25. Joey and Jesse weren’t spotted at the facility until the week of the draft.
“I mean, you grow up thinking you’re going to be able to run this business, make your dad proud, and then all of a sudden it’s just gone within a couple of days.
“[Jesse] was at a loss for words,” one team source said. “There was no consoling him. That’s a part of you leaving. And Jesse and Joey just took it so hard, and I can understand why. I mean, it was super devastating.”
The fallout was immediate — and questions lingered.
The two brothers, along with some of their siblings, had learned during their June meetings and then in the days after that some members of Jeanie’s inner circle stood to receive substantial bonuses from the sale.
One person with knowledge of the events said that those people included Linda and Kurt Rambis, Grigsby, McCormack and Harris, the team’s president of business operations.
Linda Rambis stood to pocket $24 million, the same as McCormack, Grigsby and Harris. Kurt, meanwhile, stood to make $8 million.
The figures were a nod, of all things, to Kobe Bryant, who wore the numbers 24 and 8 during his 20-year Lakers career.
The total figure for such payouts was $114 million, the same figure that Janie said she was told during her June meeting with Grigsby, McCormack and Jeanie.
Multiple members of Jeanie’s inner circle, including Linda and Kurt Rambis, received bonuses off the sale, taking home between $8M and $24M, figures nodding to franchise icon Kobe Bryant. The total payout for the bonuses was $114M. Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images; Kevork Djansezian/AP
When she learned of the number, Janie asked for specifics, she told ESPN. Who was getting bonuses? How much were they getting? She was never given them.
“I just want the truth,” she said. “I’m not saying they don’t deserve it.”
She added, “What it comes down to is the negotiation should have involved all of us. Instead, the deals were made behind closed doors and then presented to all of us.”
The Lakers did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the sale and details of the payments, and they did not make Joe McCormack, Dan Grigsby, Tim Harris, Linda Rambis, Kurt Rambis or Mark Walter available for interviews.
Johnny told ESPN he doesn’t know how the number for the payments came up or who received them. He declined to say how he feels about the bonuses but did say he thinks of the people who did not receive payments — the former longtime staffers who had helped build the Lakers into an empire.
“All I knew is that, ‘Hey, Jeanie is going to vote to sell the Lakers, and here’s some of the things that she wants to do in order to facilitate that vote,'” Johnny told ESPN.
For the two younger brothers, those bonuses raised questions, people familiar with the events said. Why would Walter include them in an offer? How would he even know to do so? Had these been privately negotiated with Jeanie?
The two brothers questioned the propriety of Jeanie negotiating an offer with Walter without including the other siblings and considered taking legal action, but ultimately decided against it.
In the end, they didn’t have the votes to overturn the sale, and they knew no one would offer them any sympathy given they were each to receive a check for nearly half a billion dollars.
“Joey and Jesse, they stood to inherit everything,” said one team source. “And they loved the Lakers as much as anybody and were hoping to work there and run them for 20, 30 years. That was the goal of their life. That’s gone now.”
IN LATE SEPTEMBER, four months after Walter agreed to buy a controlling share of the Lakers but before the sale had closed, Joey and Jesse announced that they would be launching Buss Sports Capital. The venture is an investment firm aimed at identifying acquisitions and partnerships across the global sports landscape.
“I look forward to working with my brother, Joey, for the next 50 years and hopefully this is something that can live through our children,” Jesse told ESPN in announcing the venture. “That’s what our dad would have wanted.”
Jesse’s quote sent a clear message about how the sale had transpired — especially the line about what Buss would have wanted — and those who know him well heard it loud and clear.
“He dropped the mic on that one,” one team source says.
After they were fired in November, Jesse and Joey Buss issued a statement that read, in part, “At times like this, we wish we could ask our Dad what he would think about it all.” Los Angeles Lakers
The two brothers thought the Lakers might have asked them to step down from their roles after the announcement, sources close to the family said, but that didn’t happen.
Then, in late November, they were fired.
When Jesse and McCormack then spoke at 11 a.m. that November day, McCormack asked how Jesse was feeling. Jesse said that he had undergone a recent immunotherapy appointment for an unspecified illness that had plagued him for nearly two years and that he hadn’t felt well in months. McCormack paused, then noted that the team could keep him on his health insurance for an undetermined time period moving forward. Jesse laughed to himself.
McCormack asked whether the two brothers wanted to release a joint statement through the team and their new venture, Buss Sports Capital. Jesse said he’d think about it.
Soon after, Jesse learned that the team was also firing much of the small scouting department he oversaw, including Aaron Jackson, Moses Zapata, Can Pelister and Sean Buss, who shares the same mother as Joey and Jesse. The firings came at the beginning of the college basketball season before what experts believe is a strong draft in which the Lakers control their first-round pick.
The two brothers then released a joint statement to ESPN:
“We are extremely honored to have been part of this organization for the last 20 seasons. Thank you to Laker Nation for embracing our family every step of the way. We wish things could be different with the way our time ended with the team. At times like this, we wish we could ask our Dad what he would think about it all.”
Privately, the two brothers wondered who was behind their firing. While McCormack had told each of them that “new ownership” had made the decision, they would also separately learn, through backchannels, that it was Jeanie who had directed it.
Neither brother spoke to Jeanie the day the two were fired, people familiar with the events told ESPN, but Jesse released a separate statement to ESPN that hinted not only at the revelation that Jeanie was behind the firings but at a potential motive the two brothers had come to suspect more and more.
“Dr. Buss’ idea was for Joey and I to run basketball operations one day,” Jesse told ESPN. “But Jeanie has effectively kept herself in place with her siblings fired.”
JANIE HASN’T HEARD from Jeanie since she was fired, but she doesn’t blame her sister. Time has helped her move past her initial feeling that she had been tossed aside.
“Jeanie doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, and so she just has to make these tough decisions,” Janie told ESPN. “And she’s been having to make them … I just wish she would’ve done it differently.”
After the sale, Jeanie is the only one of the Buss siblings to maintain a role with the organization. Says one team source, “She fired everybody.” Jesse Rambis/Hulu
Janie added, “Obviously it’s turned into an ugly situation, and I can understand Joey and Jesse should not have been fired in that way because it’s embarrassing, and I can understand that they’re already upset. They thought that they were going to end up with the Lakers all by themselves and leave everybody out, but that’s not what the plan was. That was never the plan. Actually, they shouldn’t have even been in the plan, according to my mom and my dad originally. It was never meant for them to have the whole piece of pie. It was for all of us to share in.”
Johnny told ESPN that he knew when the agreement was reached in June that he wouldn’t be with the team much longer.
“I always understood that, ‘Hey, once this goes through, we’re all gone,'” he told ESPN. Johnny said he doesn’t really know the reasoning behind it, or who directed it, nor does he care. He said he learned soon before the sale formally closed in late October that his position was being eliminated.
In the hours after their termination, Joey and Jesse wondered about their future.
Maybe they could find other opportunities in high school basketball, they thought, or college basketball, or professional basketball abroad — maybe the potential NBA league in Europe.
They were still part of the Buss family trust that owned about 17% of the team, and NBA rules dictate that individuals can’t own shares in one NBA team and work for another. Put another way, they were boxed in.
But it wasn’t as if either wanted to work for another NBA team. They were, as someone close to them said, “Lakers to the bone.”
Johnny said it is sad that bitterness lingers following the sale, given how much money the siblings made. “What more do you need?” he asked. “What more do you want?” He said Jeanie had done a “fantastic job.”
“It’s hurtful,” Johnny said, “but it’s the end of an era.”
Still, Johnny hoped the siblings could be united on some distant day, free from the ownership friction that had caused so much familial strife. But he acknowledges that it seems an unlikely dream: He couldn’t remember the last time the family gathered as one.
Perhaps, he said, it was when their father died more than a decade ago.
