Billionaire Avenue Capital founder Marc Lasry says the decision to pay hundreds of millions to buy the Milwaukee Bucks 6 years ago was ‘the best investment I’ve ever made’
Billionaire Marc Lasry said he thought he was going to be a professional basketball player when he was a kid.
While he played in college for one season at Clark University in Massachusetts, the founder of Avenue Capital ended up going to law school and then making billions of dollars as an investor.
But he found his way back to the game when he and fellow billionaire Wes Edens bought the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks in 2014 for $550 million (fellow hedge-fund billionaire Jamie Dinan is now a co-owner as well).
His love for basketball didn’t stop him from evaluating the company like any other asset though, he told attendees at an event in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday night.
“When I bought it, I thought we were buying a media company,” he said, because the league’s agreements with its broadcast partners were set to renegotiated. Now, the basketball team is estimated to be worth more than $1.3 billion, and recent purchases by Steve Ballmer and Tilman Fertitta of the Los Angeles Clippers and Houston Rockets, respectively, were over $2 billion.
