Short Squeez
Posts
🍋 The $12.5B Mona Lisa

🍋 The $12.5B Mona Lisa

Plus: Africa is having a record funding year, Goldman buys ETF provider for $2.3B and Alex Cooper raises at a $500M valuation.

Short Squeez
August 13, 2026

Together With

“The art of competing, I'd learn from the track, was the art of forgetting ... You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.” — Phil Knight

Good Morning! Goldman Sachs is paying $2.25 billion to acquire Neos Investments, expanding its reach in the actively managed ETF market. Manhattan rents hit an all-time high of $6,655 a month as Mamdani pushes a rent freeze and pied-à-terre tax. And Alex Cooper's Unwell Network hit a $500 million valuation after raising from Hollywood super agent Patrick Whitesell.

Roger Federer lost billionaire status as his On Holding stake fell 20%. Some NYC brokers are charging renters $4,000 just to view hidden listings. And July's inflation came in line with consensus.

Plus: Africa is having a record funding year, Blackstone may pull the plug on a $3 billion stakes-for-cash deal, and how to handle a micromanaging boss.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

The $12.5B Mona Lisa

The Los Angeles Lakers have apparently become the hottest flip in private markets.

Yesterday, Joshua Kushner of VC firm Thrive Capital and Bob Iger of Disney agreed to buy control of the Lakers from Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter in a deal valuing the franchise at roughly $12.5 billion.

It’s the highest price ever paid for a professional sports team, and it seemingly came out of nowhere. Iger and Kushner had been linked to an NBA expansion franchise in Las Vegas but apparently moved absurdly fast in a matter of days when they found out the Lakers were available.

It’s unique for an owner to flip a sports team so fast. Walter bought control from the Buss family just over a year ago at a $10 billion valuation, meaning one of the most famous franchises in sports picked up another $2.5 billion of value in a little over a year.

Kushner reportedly compared buying the Lakers to purchasing the Mona Lisa, while Iger called it “beachfront property on one of the best beaches in the world.” And it makes sense why billionaires love professional sports teams; there are only so many of them, and price discovery gets weird when one actually hits the market.

For Kushner, this looks like part of a bigger investing strategy. His new holding company, Thrive Eternal, is targeting cultural institutions and sports franchises instead of the venture bets that made Thrive Capital famous, and it already bought a stake in the San Francisco Giants earlier this year.

Iger is what makes this more than a financial play, though. He spent decades running Disney, which owns ESPN, and has watched NBA economics from the negotiating table for years; Disney, Comcast and Amazon just signed an 11-year, $76 billion media-rights deal with the league. Now he owns one of the properties generating those rights instead of just paying for them.

The seller isn’t a random name either. Walter runs one of the largest sports portfolios in finance through TWG Global, with stakes in the Dodgers, Chelsea and the Sparks, and his business holdings are currently under federal scrutiny over potential improprieties involving two insurance companies and Guggenheim, though there’s no indication that prompted this sale.

Whatever the motivation, buying at $10 billion and selling at $12.5 billion less than a year later is a very successful mark, and it fits a broader pattern. The Lakers deal tops the $9.6 billion recently paid for the Seattle Seahawks, and it’s the latest sign that a fixed supply of 30 NBA franchises, growing media rights, and a global fan base are pushing traditional valuation models to lose the argument to scarcity.

Takeaway: Josh Kushner built Thrive by backing OpenAI, Stripe, and SpaceX. His next big position is the Los Angeles Lakers, and pairing with Iger tells you exactly what kind of asset he thinks he’s buying: not a basketball team, but a scarce global media property with a built-in pipeline to the next media-rights renegotiation. Venture capital used to chase the next great company, but now the smartest money in the room wants to own the institutions everyone already knows.

PRESENTED BY STELRIX

Portfolio-backed Credit

Average credit card rates sit above 20%.

High-net-worth individuals approach it differently. They borrow against their portfolios through securities-backed lines of credit, funding real estate, art, and other purchases while their positions stay invested.

Stelrix applies that structure at the card level.

The card links to your investment accounts, extending a credit line collateralized by your portfolio. You can fund a purchase without selling positions, realizing capital gains, or moving to cash.

The distinction is between financing consumption at retail rates and managing liquidity the way institutions do.

Join the Stelrix waitlist.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Nasdaq rose 0.5% and the Russell 2000 gained about 0.7% as July CPI matched expectations at 3.4% headline and 2.5% core.
The 10-year Treasury yield closed near 4.69%; oil prices were little changed.
Core CPI's three-month annualized rate fell to 1.6%, the first reading below the Fed's 2% target since December 2025.

Earnings Season

Shelter inflation rose a modest 0.1% for the second straight month, while core goods prices posted their largest monthly gain since last September.
Apple's recent price increases may be filtering into consumer electronics costs.
July retail sales are due Friday, with control-group sales expected up 0.4% after growing at an 8.0% annualized rate through June.

Movers & Shakers

(+) CoreWeave ($CRWV) +19% after the AI infrastructure company’s Q2 revenue more than doubled to $2.58 billion, beating estimates.
(+) Cava ($CAVA) +14% because the Mediterranean fast-casual chain’s Q2 results beat expectations, with strong same-store sales growth.
(–) Home Depot ($HD) -3% after the home improvement retailer announced its CEO will take a temporary medical leave of absence.

Prediction Markets

Crude oil prices are down nearly 10% from the beginning of the month.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Goldman Sachs to acquire ETF provider Neos in a $2.3 billion deal
Thrive Holdings raised over $2 billion
Air Canada is selling a 25% stake in its Aeroplan loyalty program to Blackstone for around $1.7 billion
River AI, an open-source AI startup, raised $1.1 billion
Form Energy, a developer of multi-day grid batteries, raised $750 million
Joby Aviation agreed to buy Resonant Sciences, a defense contractor, for $500 million
Lovable, a Swedish vibe coding startup, raised $400 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Art of Pacing

Description:
Elizabeth Svoboda makes the case that sustainable success isn't about constantly pushing harder or slowing down completely—it's about learning to adjust your pace. Drawing on research, interviews with Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs, and her own experiences, Svoboda explores how to balance ambition with recovery, protect attention, and work with your natural energy rhythms. The book offers a compelling alternative to hustle culture: building a life where meaningful progress and restoration reinforce rather than compete with each other.

Book Length: 240 pages
Release Date: June 16, 2026

Ideal For:
Entrepreneurs, executives, high achievers, and anyone trying to maintain ambitious goals without sacrificing long-term energy, focus, and well-being.

Success isn't about moving as fast as possible, it's about finding the pace that allows you to keep going.

DAILY VISUAL

Software Multiples Are Back to 2013

Source: Apollo

PRESENTED BY BLUEFLAME AI

12 AI Use Cases for Junior Investment Bankers

Coverage and relationship management
Pitch book development
Deal kick-off and workspace setup
Financial Modeling
Equity story and CIM development
Buyer identification and process preparation
Buyer outreach and process management
Due diligence and VDRs
Bid evaluation and negotiation
Quality control and document review
Legal and regulatory workstreams
Closing and deal administration

For more knowledge into how private markets use AI, follow Blueflame’s Instagram. And to try it out yourself, schedule a demo with their team.

DAILY ACUMEN

Narrative Fallacy

The human mind cannot tolerate a pile of disconnected facts. It compulsively builds a story linking them together, with clear causes and clean motives, because a story is easier to remember and feels more true than a list of things that happened to occur near each other. The problem is that the story is almost always simpler than the reality it claims to explain.

This shows up constantly in how markets get explained after the fact. The stock fell because of the earnings miss, the fund succeeded because of the manager's discipline, the crash happened because of one clean trigger everyone can now name. Each explanation sounds airtight and each one quietly erases the dozens of other factors that were equally present but never made it into the story.

Notice when an explanation feels too clean to be true, because it probably is. Reality rarely moves for one clear reason. It moves for many reasons tangled together, and the tidy sentence you settle on says more about your need for a story than about what actually happened.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

How to deal with a micromanaging boss
The importance of understanding regret
Employees are scheduling fake meetings to make time for their real work
5 lazy habits to become your most productive self
7 bad leadership patterns that drive employees away

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

What'd you think of today's edition?

Reply

or to participate.