Sports team

According to a Rubenstein spokesperson, this meeting was at the request of people seeking Mr. Rubenstein's participation in philanthropic endeavors, none of which were pursued by Mr. Rubenstein.

So what kind of people does Rubenstein spend time with? In his new book, he interviews more than a dozen other owners of pro sports teams.

The reviews are so far not very good.

Here's what The Wall Street Journal had to say.

That's a relatively recent phenomenon, yeah?

That's correct.

It used to be that businesspeople you never heard of were the owners of sports teams, and they were not the equivalent of the Forbes four hundred.

They just weren't.

So I, I wanna back up to, you obviously grew up as a sports fan, including a fan of the Orioles.

Um, but professionally, a- as you were building Carlyle into a private equity giant, I'm curious if there was a moment that you remember where you started looking at sports teams not just as the thing that fans root for, but as an asset class that, that was interesting from a financial perspective as well.

I, I didn't really look at it as an asset class that was gonna be financially rewarding.

Um, I did have a chance early on in the Carlyle career, obviously, to, to buy the Washington Wizards and the Washington Caps.

And the reason I didn't do it is because as I was building Carlyle, I thought my investors would say, "What are you doing?"

[laughs]

Uh, you know, "You're supposed to working on, on making my money more valuable, not going out and buying sports teams." But I was wrong in many respects.

Many people in the private equity world, Josh Harris being a good example, Mark Lazary another one, who went out and bought sports teams.

Would any of you buy your favorite sports team if you had the money? Absolutely, right? Manchester United fan, wouldn't you love to be the owner of Manchester United? Not only can you go into every game, you're the star of the show.

Everybody else kind of hangs out around you.

There's a reason why with sports teams, it's all about pricing.

I can't think of a single professional sports franchise where the people running it think of it as a business.

They're being pushed up.

If I valued MLB teams, I'm going to get abysmally low levels.

But they're going to be priced.

And if you know that this is, you know why it's always going to be a pricing game? As long as the number of professional sports teams is fewer than the number of billionaires, you have a scarcity problem, right? There's a category of assets that I call trophy assets.