The Wall Street Journal reports a pair of “venture capitalists have submitted a bid to buy the Phoenix Suns and Mercury professional basketball teams for $3 billion, an offer that could include financing from tech mogul Peter Thiel… The bid was submitted by Jack Selby, the managing director of West Hollywood, Calif.-based investment firm Thiel Capital, which was founded by Mr. Thiel, and Jason Pressman, the managing director of Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture firm Shasta Ventures.”
Based on the performance of Thiel’s previous investments J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, I would guess the Suns and Mercury would have winning percentages about .500 under Thiels’ ownership.
Semi-seriously, the National Basketball Association and WNBA are arguably the most woke of the professional sports leagues, and Thiel is not just a right-of-center billionaire, but a particularly outspoken, idiosyncratic one who more or less single-handedly enabled the Senate bids of Vance and Masters. We’ve seen the entire league rise up and rebuke the horrific Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. (New York Knicks fans wonder what spectacularly self-destructive owner James Dolan would have to do to get a new owner.) It is not hard to imagine a scenario where future Phoenix Suns and Mercury owner Thiel makes some statement that sets off another woke/anti-woke conflict that provides ESPN with hours upon hours of programming.
And the Suns organization might conclude that they’ve had enough controversial owners for one decade: “Team owner Robert Sarver said in September that he would begin the search for buyers for the Suns and the Mercury after an investigation into his workplace conduct prompted the NBA to suspend him for a year and fine him $10 million.”