The Los Angeles Lakers was sold on Aug. 12 for $12.5 billion. That price tag is the cost of decades of Black culture that Black communities built but rarely got to own.
The sale echoes a recurring pattern. Whenever Black culture generates value, someone else ends up cashing the check. Nowhere is it more explicit than in venture capital, where recognizing cultural value before the market prices it is the entire business model.
Venture capital is a form of equity financing where investors, called venture capitalists, give money to seed and Series A companies with high growth potential in exchange for partial ownership. Recently, Black culture has been profited off of in venture, with no promise of returns.
Former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner agreed to buy the storied franchise at a record-breaking valuation for any North American sports team. They’re acquiring it from Mark Walter, who bought his majority stake just 10 months ago for a then-record $10 billion. In less than a year, the team gained more value than most franchises are worth outright — without a single game, trade or championship run driving the price.
How can a franchise’s price tag climb by billions in less than a year? Or, better yet, who actually gets to decide what a dynasty is worth?
Increasingly, that decision is being made before the market ever puts a price on it.
Venture capital is built to identify value before the market prices it in — and increasingly, that value is Black culture. The aesthetics, athletes, sounds, and platforms that Black communities create and popularize first are getting recognized, funded, and monetized by an industry that is overwhelmingly white and male.
And white interest, backed by capital that Black communities have rarely had equal access to in the first place, converts into white profit. Basketball has always sat close to this pattern, and the Lakers sale is really just the most expensive version of it playing out in real time.
The NBA’s cultural gravity was built disproportionately by Black players and Black audiences. At one point, we exclusively curated its style, wrote its music, repped its athletes and grew its fandom.
Meanwhile, the capital gains from a $12.5 billion sale flowed directly into the pockets of Kushner, President Donald Trump’s nephew-in-law. This is how the pipeline from culture to capital has operated for decades, in sports and far beyond it.
Since 2024, Black-founded tech startups have raised $730 million, the lowest annual share in years, landing at 0.4% of all U.S. venture capital raised. The wealth and digital divides in Black communities are fundamentally a market opportunity that the broader industry has been slow to fund at the source.
Healthcare startups also profit from Black cultural capital, as issues Black patients disproportionately face are a source for innovative solutions. Black patients face disparities in diagnosis, treatment and outcomes across nearly every major health condition. Those disparities created the case for a different kind of clinical care, one built around Black patients’ actual experience of the health rather than treating them as an afterthought.
The culture may be changing, though. Venture capital funds including Jumpstart Nova, are working to address the lack of investment in Black-founded healthcare companies. Launched in 2022, the fund raised $55 million from major healthcare companies and uses that capital to invest in early-stage, Black-founded and Black-led healthcare startups.
Still, this represents only a sliver of the tens of billions invested in the health tech industry each year. The need for better, more culturally competent care among Black patients has become an opportunity for investment. Yet the firms funding that innovation are often the same institutions whose profits depend on the healthcare system as it already exists.
All of this points to Black consumer interest as a reliable predictor of what becomes valuable next. But the people generating that cultural value are rarely the ones who capture the greatest financial returns from it. The Lakers are worth $12.5 billion in part because of decades of cultural weight that Black players and fans helped build into the franchise, long before Iger, Kushner or Walter had any stake in it.
Copy edited by Jori Johnson