Jeanie Buss does not want her siblings to sell the Lakers stake. Her siblings want to sell the Lakers stake. This teaches wealthy families absolutely nothing about trusts because wealthy families do not read financial advice columns written for people who think three hundred dollars is a lot of money.
The lesson here is that if you give multiple rich kids partial ownership of a valuable asset, they will eventually disagree about what to do with it. Groundbreaking stuff. Really changes how I view the S&P 500.
Trusts exist so dead people can control living people. Jerry Buss set up a trust. Jerry Buss died. His children are now fighting about basketball instead of mourning him properly. The trust worked exactly as designed.
Retail traders will read this headline and think it applies to them. It does not apply to them. They do not own NBA teams. They own seven shares of a semiconductor ETF they bought because a podcast told them to. The Buss family is not splitting up $84 in Robinhood equity. They are splitting up a franchise worth billions of dollars that people actually want.
The wealthy do not learn lessons from other wealthy people's trust disputes. They learn lessons from their estate attorneys who bill $900 an hour to explain that siblings hate each other. The Buss kids could have avoided this by simply not being siblings. Poor planning on their part.
Every article about trust planning assumes the reader has assets worth protecting in a trust. Bold assumption. The median American has $5,300 in savings and a Discover card they are afraid to check the balance on.
The real lesson is that no amount of legal structure prevents your kids from fighting over your money the second you are cold. Jerry Buss could have written a perfect trust. He could have hired ten attorneys. Jeanie and her siblings would still end up in dispute because that is what happens when you die rich. Your children forget you were a person and remember you were a bank.
Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash
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