LeBron James, through one of his companies, borrowed nearly $300 million from Guggenheim-linked insurers months before he ever put on a Lakers jersey, according to insurance records reviewed by Bloomberg.
The lender network traces back to Mark Walter, the financier who later bought and then agreed to sell the Lakers just 14 months after buying them.
LeBron James’s $300 Million Bond Deal
GettyFormer Lakers and current Dodgers owner Mark Walter (L) with President Donald Trump.
The financing, Bloomberg reported, ran through King James Funding, an LLC James controls. Two Midwestern life insurers, North American Company for Life and Health Insurance and Midland National Life Insurance Co., both owned by Sammons Financial Group, bought nearly $300 million of previously unreported private bonds, according to Sports Business Journal‘s summary of the report. The sum outweighed the $154 million contract James signed with the Lakers in 2018, when he was still a Cleveland Cavalier.
Those original bonds carried a 4.8% interest rate and don’t mature until 2049. James paid some of it down over time, but by the end of last year the insurers still held roughly $245 million. In August 2022, around the time James signed a $97 million Lakers extension, the same insurers bought nearly $60 million more in 34-year bonds at 5.75%.
The structure gave James immediate cash, backed by future income streams that have nothing to do with the NBA, including his lifetime Nike sponsorship deal. It’s the same basic concept behind so-called Bowie Bonds, the securities famously backed by late rock star David Bowie’s music catalog decades ago, now a go-to move for athletes and entertainers looking to unlock cash without selling off assets outright.
Mark Walter’s Companies Drawing Federal Scrutiny
A James spokesperson described the arrangement as a securitization of his personal, non-basketball earnings, a common tool among high-net-worth individuals, adding that both transactions were independently credit-rated and that the 2022 deal received full NBA approval. James has no ownership stake in Guggenheim, Sammons or either insurer, the spokesperson said.
Guggenheim, the investment giant led by Walter, advised the insurers on which assets to buy. Walter later built a sprawling sports portfolio that includes the Dodgers, and Guggenheim separately invested in James’s SpringHill media company.
Walter bought controlling interest in the Lakers just over a year ago at a $10 billion valuation, then agreed this month to sell that stake to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and businessman Josh Kushner — brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — for a record $12.5 billion, a deal still awaiting approval from the NBA’s board.
James, for his part, left Los Angeles this summer and signed with the Philadelphia 76ers.
The bigger backdrop involves Walter’s insurance empire. Two Walter-controlled insurers, Delaware Life and Clear Spring, are the subject of a Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission review over roughly $20 billion in loans that regulators say should have been disclosed as related-party transactions, according to The Los Angeles Times‘s breakdown of the probe.
Walter has since moved to unwind billions in affiliated holdings, and the fallout helped push him toward selling the Lakers, according to a separate Bloomberg report on Walter’s finances.
Bloomberg’s reporting notes nothing ties the James bonds to that federal investigation. The insurers that financed James aren’t the ones under scrutiny, and the James loans predate Walter’s Lakers ownership entirely. Still, the overlap illustrates how deeply Guggenheim’s insurance capital has threaded itself through modern sports finance, from Dodgers ownership to a superstar’s personal balance sheet, all while its parent company fights to keep federal investigators at bay.
LeBron James Connected to $300 Million Loan From Mark Walter-Linked Firms: Report