Filing shows Jeanie Buss locked in five years as Lakers governor under Walter deal

LOS ANGELES — Oct. 8, 2026 — A side agreement Jeanie Buss signed with Mark Walter on Oct. 30, 2025, was built to keep her in the Lakers’ control seat for five years after she sold the controlling stake. Front Office Sports’ Ben Horney reported the terms from a California state-court filing in which Buss’s siblings answered her petition. The full agreement is not public; the siblings’ response is the clearest window yet into how she tried to preserve the governor role after the sale.

Under the deal, Walter had to take actions “reasonably required or requested by Jeanie” to keep her as a director and as the controlling owner for five years, so long as she or her affiliates held at least a 15% stake — the NBA’s threshold for serving as a team’s governor. After those five years, she would have the right to remain an alternate governor if she still held at least 5%.

What the filing changes

The disclosure lands in a fight among the Buss siblings over the family’s remaining stake. Johnny, James, Janie, Joey and Jesse want to sell the family trust’s leftover 17.8% through a go-along right and expect about $2.2 billion from that sale. Jeanie opposes the move, pointing to a 2017 court order that was meant to keep her as governor with at least a 15% hold. The siblings argue she has no right to block the sale. The side deal with Walter is her strongest documented attempt to turn that 2017 order into ongoing operational control after the controlling interest changed hands.

Walter’s own exit complicates the picture. He sold the controlling stake this summer to Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger at a $12.5 billion valuation after buying in at $10 billion. Whether the Oct. 30, 2025 side agreement carries over to the new controlling owners is not clear from the public filing. That ambiguity is now part of the siblings’ litigation and part of how any buyer would underwrite the remaining 17.8%.

Why five years matters in NBA sales

Retaining the governor title after selling control is rare, and recent history is not kind to sellers who try. Mark Cuban’s path with the Mavericks and Wyc Grousbeck’s with the Celtics both showed how hard it is to keep meaningful control once the check clears. Buss’s structure — five years as governor at 15% or more, then alternate status at 5% — is an attempt to write that history differently on paper. Whether a court, the NBA and the new ownership group honor that paper is the open question.

For Kushner and Iger, the filing is a reminder that the Lakers’ governance is still contested even after a record valuation. For the siblings chasing $2.2 billion, it is evidence that Jeanie built contractual armor around the governor seat. For Jeanie, it is the document she will lean on to argue that selling the family’s leftover stake without her consent would break the control bargain she struck when she sold the team. The five-year clock started with Walter; the court case will decide how much of that clock still runs.