00:00Mark Walter is one of America's wealthiest financiers. And the real story is Mark Walter
00:06was in the backwaters of finance in the late 1990s. No one knew him. He was running a
00:12asset-backed securitization firm tied with the commercial paper marketplace. But the real trick,
00:18the real game changer for him was a meeting with one of the descendants of the original
00:23Guggenheim dynasty, Meyer Guggenheim, the mining baron from the Gilded Age, right?
00:27He meets his great-grandson who's not happy with how advisors have been dealing with that family
00:32money. They come up with this plan where he folds his firm into their family office. And today,
00:37somehow become, no connection to that family, but somehow he's become torchbearer for that great
00:43family name, for that Guggenheim name. Because once he folded that firm, he grew that into Guggenheim
00:49investments, Guggenheim securities run by former Bairston CEO Alan Schwartz. With all that money
00:55expanded into other investments, most prominently a stable of expansive and some glittering sports
01:02teams, Los Angeles Dodgers, the Chelsea Football Club, Cadillac F1 team, and up until recently,
01:09the Los Angeles Lakers. And the only reason we're all talking about this is the shock news that came
01:13out. Here's a professional sports team owner selling a team, flipping a team less than a year
01:20after he bought it. The Lakers are getting the treatment like it's some sort of fixer-upper on
01:24the New Jersey shore.
01:25I know, I've never heard the term flipping in conjunction with like a professional sports team,
01:31only ranch-style homes.
01:33And you get the sense that in some ways it was very lucky for him. We don't have any information
01:40that suggests that he was quietly going around shopping the Lakers because, again, only in October-
01:45He doesn't need the money.
01:46Only in October 2025 did he even get the approval for this. But somehow, someone clearly told Bob
01:51Iger and Josh Kushner, at least that's our understanding, that, hey, you guys should knock
01:55on the door of Mark Walter. You're showing interest in the NBA universe. He might need the money.
01:59They go in there, they make an offer he can't refuse, and suddenly he's flipped the team for
02:03more than $2.5 billion, what he paid for less than a year ago, which is incredible in itself.
02:08As one finance executive put it to us, it feels like a lucrative fire sale.
02:13He's got a lot of money. It accelerates his bid to solve for the other problems in his financial
02:19empire. And that is why this is in the news. That is why we all want to talk about Mark
02:23Walter
02:24is, in addition to the sports team, as we said, he also owns insurers. His whole model, almost
02:29a pioneer on Wall Street in some sense, was to take that sleepy, boring insurance money,
02:35deploy them in not just bonds and equities and treasuries out there, but go and find other
02:41more complex investments, whether that was to back his Dodgers purchase or some of the
02:45other pieces of his sprawling business universe.
02:48So do we know what the problems are at the insurance companies that have kind of started
02:53this whole thing?
02:54Right. And there was a filing from the insurance company that said, oops, we got a subpoena in
02:58February from the government and we did some numbers again. And it looks like our affiliated
03:04investments, which is money that let's just shorthand it as from Walter's insurers going
03:11to other parts of Walter's businesses were much higher than previously thought. How much
03:16higher? We went from some about, at least at one of the insurance firms at Delaware Life,
03:19we went from 3% being affiliated assets to 40% being affiliated assets. You can see why that
03:26would make regulators nervous. That is a big change. The sense here is, and that is what prosecutors
03:31and regulators are looking at were third party intermediaries use just to borrow the money
03:37and then channel them off to other parts of Walter's business without the insurance company
03:43or even the ratings firm having a true picture of where that money was going. And that's been
03:48the focus. That's why Walter, through his holding company TWG, is racing, racing to cut back
03:56this high 40% rate of affiliated investments, presumably to make sure that regulators can
04:02get comfortable again with this remediation plan if they're able to do that. And that's why the
04:08sudden influx from the Lakers sale, when it happens, will be good. There are other options
04:14they're exploring to try and raise money to be able to pay down some of these loans.
04:17Do we know how much the whole is here? Do we know how much the total whole is?
04:20I don't know if whole is necessarily the right term because we don't understand that. It's not like he
04:25has to get rid of all of it, but we're talking about suddenly roughly $20 billion across his two
04:29insurers being in affiliated assets. And the goal is to try and bring it down substantially.
04:33Okay.
04:34Okay.
04:34Is, do we know, I mean, did, so he didn't necessarily want to sell the Lakers, even though he made
04:40a lot
04:40of money on the sale?
04:41He didn't definitely, it stands to reason that someone who's collected sports teams, someone who's,
04:47so invested in the sports team, invested emotionally, not just through his wealth.
04:51One thinks, yeah.
04:52Yeah. And like, look, look at what the Dodgers are doing, two times defending World Series
04:56champion. They were out there at the Rose Garden just last month being feted by President Donald
05:00Trump. So you wouldn't think that he wanted to buy this as if it was some private equity deal where
05:05he could wring out some efficiencies and then sell it for a higher price the very next year.
05:09That wasn't the goal, but from all the mood music we're hearing, it certainly helps.
05:12Yes. So there was some reporting, I think, last week where he had, Mr. Walter,
05:18discussed putting up Guggenheim Securities, you know, maybe either putting up for collateral or
05:24selling it or monetizing it somehow. Where are we with that? I mean, is there, should we expect more
05:30asset sales from his collection?
05:32Look, things are very fluid. That our understanding was even before the first set of news stories in the
05:36probe came out, even before anyone knew anything about the Lakers being up for sale and just judging
05:41by the timeline way before Kushner and Iger even went up to him and said they would like to buy
05:46the Lakers. They have had early deliberations with different folks in the market trying to
05:50find various ways they could raise money. And one of the options was, could we do some
05:55nine month to 12 month loans where you could give us 500 million or a billion and we'd back that,
06:00guarantee that with collateral in the form of various assets, including the equity stake in
06:05Guggenheim partners, which again tells you the stated path to recovery. Some of the lenders
06:10were saying, the potential lenders were saying would have been if they failed to pay back the
06:13money that they could enforce on that collateral, which tells you, you don't, you wouldn't normally
06:17want to put up your crown financial jewel out there and say, okay, I could use that as collateral.
06:22So it tells you what they were thinking about in the realm of the art of the possible.
06:27It is unclear whether that is still a live deal, but what is clear is they're exploring all options
06:33possible to make sure they get out of this insurance.
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