The Khosla family agreed to buy the Seattle Seahawks for $9.612 billion. That's billion with a b. Paul Allen's estate sold the team after it won its second Super Bowl. The estate waited until February 18 to announce the sale. Perfect timing. Nothing says "we need liquidity" like waiting years after the guy died to unload his football team.
Nine point six billion dollars. For a business that plays sixteen games a year. Seventeen if you're lucky. Maybe twenty if you win it all. The revenue model is selling beer to guys named Derek who think they could've gone pro if it weren't for their knee. The Khoslas looked at that and said yes, this is worth more than the GDP of Montenegro.
The Seahawks just won the Super Bowl. Which means the team is worth exactly as much as it will ever be worth. Buy high, sell never. The Khoslas studied every principle of value investing and then did the opposite. They saw a championship team with nowhere to go but down and thought, "What if we paid a 40% premium?"
Paul Allen bought the team in 1997 for $194 million. His estate just flipped it for nearly fifty times that. Meanwhile your portfolio is down 8% because you bought Palantir after watching a YouTube video titled "Why PLTR Will Hit $100." You can't time the market, but apparently you can time dying right before your football team peaks.
The Khoslas will lose money on this. Not this year. Not next year. But over a long enough timeline, every billionaire who buys a sports team realizes he could've just burned the money and gotten the same tax write-off with less paperwork.
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