Yesterday, it was revealed that the Buss family has sold majority control of the Los Angeles Lakers at a $10 billion valuation – the most expensive sports team sale of all time (so far). The sale brings to a close more than four decades of Buss family ownership of the legendary franchise.
The family first acquired the Lakers in 1979, when the late patriarch, Dr. Jerry Buss, bought the team in a $67.5 million package deal that also included the Los Angeles Kings and The Forum arena. At the time, it was the most expensive sports franchise sale ever completed.
But why were the Lakers, Kings, and The Forum even up for sale in the first place? Who would ever willingly let go of such valuable assets?
The answer is Jack Kent Cooke — a man who rose from rags to riches during the Great Depression, and whose 1979 divorce resulted in the largest divorce settlement in history at the time…
Jack Kent Cooke in 1994 (Doug Pensinger/ALLSPORT)
From Soap Salesman to Media Mogul
Jack Kent Cooke’s life didn’t begin in boardrooms or luxury skyboxes. It began in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1912, during an era of global economic struggle. When Cooke was still a boy, his father’s picture-frame business collapsed in the early days of the Great Depression. Suddenly, the family had nothing. At just 14 years old, Jack dropped everything to help keep the household afloat. He started selling soap and encyclopedias door to door, developing the persuasive instincts that would serve him for the rest of his life.
By his late teens, Cooke had landed a job at a small radio station in Stratford, Ontario. There, he met Roy Thomson, a rising Canadian media entrepreneur who later created what became the media powerhouse Thomson Reuters. Thomson saw promise in the fast-talking, hard-charging teenager and took him under his wing. By his early twenties, Cooke was managing radio stations and buying stakes in struggling newspapers. He developed a knack for taking distressed assets and turning them into cash machines. With Thomson’s backing, Cooke began managing radio stations, making small investments, and laying the foundation for what would become his own sprawling business empire. He revived failing radio stations, acquired magazines and newspapers, and even bought a plastics company. He was a millionaire by the age of 31, and was already eyeing the next stage of his life—one that would take him across the border and into the heart of American business and sport.
Sports Teams
In the 1950s, Cooke moved to California, where he set about reinventing himself. He became a U.S. citizen in 1960 through a special act of Congress, bypassing the usual five-year residency requirement.
Jack’s dream was to own a sports team. Specifically, a professional baseball team. In the 1950s, he owned a minor league team called the Toronto Maple Leafs, and he hoped to either win the right to turn the Leafs into an official MLB expansion team OR to buy an existing MLB team and move it to Toronto. Neither option ever came to fruition.
Unable to break into Major League Baseball, Jack did the next best thing. In 1960, he bought a 25% stake in the Washington Redskins for just $300,000 (he became 100% owner after two later transactions, the first in 1974 and the second in 1985).
It was the beginning of a decades-long run that would see him assemble one of the most impressive portfolios in American sports history.
The Lakers were founded in 1947 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The original owner was Ben Berger, who purchased the Detroit Gems (a disbanded NBL team) and relocated them to Minneapolis, renaming them the Lakers in honor of Minnesota’s nickname, “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Under coach John Kundla and with superstar George Mikan, the Lakers became the NBA’s first dynasty, winning five championships between 1949 and 1954. By the late 1950s, attendance and revenue in Minneapolis declined sharply, and in 1960, the team was sold to a group led by Bob Short, a businessman who moved the franchise to Los Angeles to take advantage of the much larger West Coast market.
In 1965, Jack Kent Cooke purchased the Lakers from Bob Short for $5.1 million. The following year, he acquired the expansion Los Angeles Kings hockey team for $2 million. In 1967, he completed construction on a brand-new arena in Inglewood: the Inglewood Forum. Cooke spent $16 million building the venue, which, within a decade —thanks to the star power of the Lakers— became world famous as simply “The Forum.”
Unfortunately for Jack, he was no longer the owner by the time the Lakers and The Forum became global sensations.
At the height of his powers, Cooke controlled teams in the NBA, NHL, NFL, and soccer. He also financed the 1971 Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight, the first global closed-circuit TV event, pioneering the future of pay-per-view sports broadcasting.
But while his business instincts were unmatched, Cooke’s personal life was far more volatile—and it would eventually upend his Los Angeles empire.
The Most Expensive Divorce in History (At the Time)
By the late 1970s, Jack Kent Cooke had it all: a media empire, real estate across North America, and ownership stakes in the Lakers, Kings, Redskins, and The Forum. He split his time between a Bel Air mansion, a Virginia estate, a 13,000-acre ranch in Southern California, and a horse breeding farm in Kentucky. He threw lavish parties and hosted senators, celebrities, and power brokers in his private boxes. He was, quite literally, the owner of Los Angeles sports.
And then came the divorce.
In 1979, Cooke’s 45-year marriage to his first wife, Barbara Jean Carnegie, ended in a highly public and costly split. When the dust had settled, Jack was ordered to pay Barbara $42 million. After adjusting for inflation, that’s the same as around $185 million today. And while that may not sound like a lot in today’s world of centi-billionaires, at the time it was absolutely staggering. In fact, it was the most expensive divorce payout in history up to that point. The settlement was so massive that it earned Cooke a spot in The Guinness Book of Records.
Unfortunately, just because someone is extremely wealthy, that doesn’t mean they can simply write a check for $42 million. This was especially true for Jack, whose net worth was almost entirely tied up in illiquid assets… his sports franchises. To satisfy the settlement, he needed liquidity fast. That meant selling off some of his most valuable holdings, including his entire Los Angeles sports portfolio.
The timing was perfect for a rising real estate tycoon named Jerry Buss, who had been quietly building a fortune through apartment buildings and commercial property in Southern California. Buss had long dreamed of owning a sports franchise, and now he had the chance to buy three marquee assets in one shot.
In 1979, Jack Kent Cooke agreed to sell the Lakers, Kings, The Forum, and a 13,000-acre ranch to Buss for $67.5 million—a record at the time. Only about $16 million of that was allocated to the Lakers themselves.
Jerry Buss (via Getty)
After acquiring the Lakers in 1979, Dr. Jerry Buss quickly turned the franchise into a global powerhouse. Within a year, the team drafted Magic Johnson and captured an NBA championship. Over the next three decades, under Buss’s ownership, the Lakers would win 10 NBA titles, feature superstars like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James, and become synonymous with glamour, winning, and “Showtime.” Jerry Buss died in 2013 at the age of 80. Upon his death, his six children inherited 66% of the Lakers in equal shares (11% per child). In June 2025, the Buss siblings agreed to sell all but 18% of the Lakers to Mark Walter for a little over $6 billion. The sale, the most expensive in sports history, valued the Lakers at $10 billion, leaving each sibling with a 3% stake worth $300 million.
What Happened to Jack Kent Cooke
Although Jack Kent Cooke walked away from Los Angeles sports in 1979, he wasn’t done. He still owned the Washington Redskins, and over the next two decades, the team became his pride and joy.
Under Cooke’s ownership, the Redskins won three Super Bowl championships (1983, 1988, and 1992) and became one of the NFL’s most valuable and respected franchises. In the mid-1990s, Cooke privately financed and oversaw the construction of a new 78,600-seat stadium in Landover, Maryland. The stadium, which opened in 1997, a few months after his death, cost $160 million and was initially called Jack Kent Cooke Stadium.
Beyond football, Cooke remained a larger-than-life figure—opinionated, theatrical, and famously exacting. He obsessed over grammar, often corrected people mid-sentence, and even narrated his own punctuation aloud during conversations.
His personal life, meanwhile, remained as turbulent as ever. Cooke was married a total of five times, but he married the same woman twice:
- His first marriage to Barbara Jean Carnegie, which produced two sons, ended in the historic $42 million divorce settlement.
- In 1980, he married sculptor Jeanne Maxwell Williams, but the marriage ended in divorce within a year. He paid her a $1 million settlement.
- In 1987, he married Suzanne Martin, who was 44 years his junior. That marriage lasted just 73 days. They had one daughter, Jacqueline.
- In 1990, Jack married Marlene Ramallo Chalmers, a Bolivian woman and former friend of his third wife. She was 40 years his junior and had previously served prison time for conspiracy to import cocaine. They divorced in 1993 after she was arrested for drunk driving through the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., while a man clung to the hood, pounding on the windshield of her car. Jack forgave and forgot, so they REMARRIED in 1995 and remained together until his death.
Despite his volatile private life, Cooke never slowed down professionally. He continued making deals well into his 80s, including a $656 million cable merger with Westinghouse, and a $1.6 billion sale of his cable interests in the 1980s.
When Jack Kent Cooke died in 1997 at the age of 84, he was worth an estimated $825 million. At the time of his death, he still owned the Redskins, the stadium, and various real estate and media assets.
Rather than passing his fortune to family, Cooke left the bulk of his estate – which was predominently made up of the value of the Redskins and the stadium – to a newly established Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. His decision to bypass his surviving son, John Cooke, and other family members led to some legal disputes and later settlements, but the foundation has since provided over $300 million in scholarships to thousands of students. As of late 2024, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation still controls $900 million in assets under management.
Following the terms of his will, the Redskins and the stadium that bore his name were both put up for sale. In 1999, Daniel Snyder bought both for $800 million, in what was then the most expensive transaction in NFL history.
Snyder immediately put the naming rights up for auction. FedEx agreed to pay $7.6 million per year for 27 years for the stadium to be called FedExField. Dan Synder sold the Redskins in 2023 for $6.5 billion to Josh Harris, in what was then the most expensive sports team sale. FedEx declined to renew its deal, so the rights were scooped up by Northwest Federal Credit Union in 2024, rebranding as Northwest Stadium.
Though he never returned to NBA ownership, and his name has largely faded from the spotlight, Jack Kent Cooke’s divorce-fueled 1979 sale of the Lakers directly set the stage for the rise of one of the most iconic franchises in all of sports.
And now, more than four decades later, the franchise he sold to settle a divorce has just changed hands again—this time at a $10 billion valuation. The Lakers may belong to Mark Walter today, but their dynasty was born the moment Jack Kent Cooke let go.
Oh, and in case you were curious, the current record for the most expensive divorce of all time belongs to Jeff Bezos. When he divorced MacKenzie Bezos (now known as Mackenzie Scott), he gave her $38 billion in Amazon stock. The $42 million Jeff Kent Cooke paid in 1979 probably wouldn’t cover Jeff’s legal fees in 2019 🙂
Content shared from www.celebritynetworth.com.