Baxter HolmesJan 21, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseBaxter Holmes (@Baxter) is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print, focusing on the NBA. He has covered the Lakers, the Celtics and previously worked for The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.Follow on X
Inside the Buss family feud that led to the $10 billion sale of the Lakers (3:17)ESPN’s Baxter Holmes breaks down the family drama, behind-the-scenes battles and key moments that pushed the iconic Lakers franchise toward a historic sale. (3:17)
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.
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.
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.
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 L.A. 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.
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?”
“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?
“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.
“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.
“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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.