David Rubenstein谈体育资产估值与洛杉矶湖人队125亿美元交易

Owner David Rubenstein is out with a new book that focuses on leadership through the lens of sports. It is called inside the owner's box. We talked to him about his management philosophy. Let's start with how you came to own the the Baltimore Orioles. You have this long illustrious investment career. There's an inkling that maybe this team will come up for sale. Why was it something that you had any interest in in doing?

Well, I grew up in Baltimore, and I always was a fan of the Orioles as a boy. And when I was a boy, baseball was the big sport. So I was a real baseball fan. The Orioles were my team. I drifted away when I went to college and then law school, and then I worked in a in Washington for most of my career. But I kept the little tabs with Baltimore. And then when the team possibly came for sale, I thought, okay. Maybe I could do something for Baltimore.

I had done a lot philanthropically in the Washington area and in other and in schools outside of of Baltimore and Washington, but I hadn't done that much for Baltimore. I was on the Hopkins board, but I really I had given some money to Hopkins, but I really hadn't done that much compared to Mike Bloomberg who's given $8,000,000,000 or so to to Johns Hopkins and done more from Baltimore than probably anybody. But I thought if I bought the team, reenergized the team, and made it better and would reenergize downtown Baltimore, which Baltimore could use.

When I was growing up, Baltimore was the ninth biggest city in The United States. Population, 930,000. Now it's not even the top 20. There's enormous amount of flight out of Baltimore, and the corporate headquarters have fled as well. So Baltimore has some real problems, and I thought maybe if I could reenergize the Euros, I could reenergize downtown Baltimore, and we're working on it. It takes a while, though. Did you think that you would make a profit off of it eventually?

So it's a it's a unique kind of investment in that owning a team maybe with the exception of a professional football team is not one that's bound to make you a lot of money in real time. People who buy baseball teams don't think they're gonna make a lot of operating profit. In fact, virtually no team makes real operating profit. But people do tend to make money when they sell the teams, but my intention was to make this more of a philanthropic thing.

So I would intended to, you know, die with the team, and then my kids will figure out what to do with it down the road, but I didn't intend to go sell it and make a profit or anything like that. How do you begin to value a professional sports team? I mean, you look at the the recent sales that we've seen here most recently out in Los Angeles, extraordinary sums of money. How how do you begin to piece that together, get a sense of what it's like?

Up until recently, you would look at a multiple of revenue. You don't look at operating profit so much because teams aren't based on operating profit. They don't run the team to make operating profit the way private equity firms do. But you look at the the revenue and you put a multiple on the revenue. I think in the case where as you put a multiple of, like, six and a half times on on those, it's probably standard for a team a team of that size.

Today, people are paying prices that are hard to understand on an operating profit multiple basis. For example, as you allude to, in the the case of the Los Angeles Lakers, they were just sold for $12,500,000,000 after being sold the previous year for $10,000,000,000 and prior to that for maybe $6,000,000,000. We just saw the Boston Celtics being sold for 6,100,000,000. We saw the Seattle Seahawks being sold for 9,600,000,000.

And I should point out Carlisle, my investment firm, is an investor in that at that price. So the prices are hard to believe. Think about this. When the Yankees were sold in 1972 to George Steinbrenner, the price was 8,800,000. And he only had about 250,000 to put in, so he syndicated the rest. And, you know, as one of his partners said, there's nothing so limited as being a limited partner with George Steinbrenner because he ran ran everything even though he only invested $250,000.

In those days, in the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the fifties, the sixties, and seventies, the wealthiest people in The United States didn't obsess from buying teams. When you were having teams for sale and the Yankees for sale, the Rockefellers didn't show up. The the Morgans didn't show up. The wealthiest family said this was declass a. But now wealthy people have an obsession just like regular people with buying teams and getting the benefits of it.

We just saw Jeff Bezos put $1,000,000,000 into buying a soccer team in in Liverpool, and he's not even the majority owner right now. So it's amazing what's happened. And it's happened because populations are bigger, television markets are bigger, TV contracts are bigger, and also the potential profits are bigger. And it's just a different thing. And plus you've got betting now, and more and more people are focused on it.

And you have people from another country who are focused on your team sometimes. We have people from overseas who are obsessed with the Dodgers, the Japanese particularly. We have people in The United States who are obsessed with English premier soccer. It's a different world. How about the the price that teams are paying for players, the size of these contracts? If you look at a Shohoe Otani, for instance, is he worth $700,000,000 over however many many years?

I mean, how how do you begin to assess whether or not it's worth ponying up as much as owners have to pony up for these players? You you put up some substantial money as well as this way. When people wanna buy a house, what's the right price? The price is that whatever it takes to get the house. So if you took that $607,165,000,000 to get the Juan So to, I guess, that was the right price. In the end, we'll from time, we'll tell whether it was a good price or not.

But when Ohtani was got a contract of 701 or $702,000,000, people thought that was crazy. It turns out that he's really worth it. Uh-huh. You buy the team, lead this ownership, buys the buys the team, and you go to spring training, you go to many games. What's your takeaway from sort of the degree to which you can change aspects of the way the team is run versus how much you're a steward of this this organization? In a private equity world, you can make CEO changes repeatedly.

You can do many other things to change the the tenor of the company, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But, usually, you can make a difference. In baseball and other sports, it's harder because for one thing, the owners are not the real experts on who's the best player to draft, who's the player player to trade for. Secondly, you have more competition. In in 1960, the entire NHL was six teams. The entire NBA in 1960 was eight teams.

Wow. Today, each of the major leagues either has 30 or 32 teams. So you have much more competition. It's very tough to have 29 competitors in baseball and try to beat 29 other teams. Whereas, let's say, a private equity world, if you have a competitor, you might have two or three competitors in your industry or maybe four or five, but you don't usually have 29 competitors. So it's much more The book is based on your interviews with other team owners and it makes me wonder just sort of about this kind of team of cognizenti.

Those who are like you owning a team and and what do you get from from them? To to buy this team, you had to get the approval of this group of of owners. What have you learned from other owners broadly about their approach to I I learned from interviewing them. The book has has my story about why I bought it, but then the other the story of other owners why they bought their teams. And when I was looking to learn about ownership, I didn't find a lot of books about it.

So I ultimately put in the back of m