A Stake in the Miami Dolphins Is Back on the Block

A second effort to sell a stake in the Dolphins

Months after the Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross failed to sell a stake in the team to fellow billionaire Ken Griffin, he’s trying once again — this time with some potential help from private equity.

Ross is in talks with private equity firms, including Arctos Partners, and individuals to sell a stake in the Dolphins at a valuation above $7 billion, two people with knowledge of the negotiations told DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch and The Times’s Ken Belson.

A spokeswoman for the Dolphins did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ross is looking to strike a unique deal within the N.F.L. universe. Besides a stake in the Dolphins, a transaction would also include partial ownership of the Miami Grand Prix, the Formula One race, and Hard Rock Stadium, the team’s home arena. (Ross is looking to sell as much as a 15 percent stake in the team and other assets.)

All that could lead to a higher price tag, potentially lifting the valuations of other N.F.L. franchises as well.

A transaction could be approved as soon as December, at a N.F.L. owners meeting in Dallas, one of the people with knowledge of the talks said.

Talks with Griffin ended in April. The hedge fund mogul had sought a path to eventually control the Dolphins, while Ross wanted to keep majority ownership within his family.

Ross could be one of the first owners to take advantage of new N.F.L. rules. Last month, the league adopted regulations that allowed certain private equity firms to buy up to 10 percent of teams. (In the potential Ross deal, wealthy individual partners would help private equity buyers exceed that cap.)

The rules are meant to increase the universe of potential investors in N.F.L. franchises as team valuations skyrocket. The league anticipates approving more private equity buyers, Joe Siclare, its executive vice president in charge of finance, said last month. The next firm to be approved could be Apollo Global Management, two people with knowledge of the matter said, cautioning that nothing had been finalized.

The N.F.L. declined to comment.

Ross wants to use the proceeds to invest in Palm Beach County, which he, an octogenarian real estate developer, has sought to turn into a growing financial and business hub. He is also looking to expand his sports holdings, which include Relevent Sports Group, a media company that has been bringing European soccer clubs to play in America.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Markets see the Fed making a big rate cut. Traders on Friday drastically raised the odds that the Fed would lower its prime lending rate by a half-point at next week’s meeting after The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times reported that some central bankers consider a 0.25 percentage point cut insufficient.

China fines PwC $62 million and bans it for six months over Evergrande. The authorities in Beijing issued the record penalty against the accounting firm for its audits of the property developer. Evergrande’s default in 2021 helped trigger a housing crisis that has weighed on the Chinese economy. Separately, the Biden administration said on Friday that it would limit the “de minimis” trade rule that allows billions of goods from China to enter the U.S. without being subject to tariffs.

OpenAI introduces a new ChatGPT model that it says can reason. The start-up said the chatbot could solve a word puzzle and diagnose a patient based on her medical records. Also, an Emirati state-backed company is reportedly in talks to join a funding round that could value OpenAI at roughly $150 billion. And Sam Altman, the company’s chief, told Oprah Winfrey in a prime time TV special that he speaks with U.S. government officials several times a week.

Boeing’s latest headache

A few hours ago, thousands of workers at Boeing’s manufacturing hub in Seattle put down their tools and walked out.

The strike, the first for the plane maker in 16 years, is yet another challenge for the manufacturing giant and its C.E.O. of just one month, Kelly Ortberg.

The shutdown could be costly. The company’s factories in the Seattle area are responsible for a vast majority of the 5,490 planes it has on order, including the best-selling 737 Max model. If the strike goes on for 50 days, the length of the previous work stoppage, it could cost Boeing about $3 billion, according to an analyst at TD Cowen.

Boeing and union leaders had reached a deal on a proposed contract on Sunday, but workers felt that the agreement fell short on pay raises. They may have been emboldened by the success of other strikes, including at automakers and in Hollywood.

It’s an early blow to Ortberg.In a statement on Wednesday, he said that a strike “would put our shared recovery in jeopardy, further eroding trust with our customers.”

Another tax in jeopardy?

Voters could probably use a scorecard for all the tax-break promises coming off the campaign trail. The latest from Donald Trump: waiving the tax on overtime pay.

Trump made the pledge last night at a rally in Arizona, shortly after rejecting a call for a second debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. She pulled in $47 million in the 24 hours after the debate and has expanded her lead in a Morning Consult poll.

Trump offered few details for the overtime tax repeal. “For too long, no one in Washington has been looking out for them,” he said at the swing-state event. It’s worth noting that the Biden administration’s new overtime eligibility rules went into effect in July, expanding the extra-pay benefit to more salaried workers.

Trump’s pitch is the latest populist appeal to middle-class and blue-collar workers. Both Trump and Harris have promised to abolish (or mostly abolish) the tax on tips if elected. And Trump has said he would like to eliminate a federal tax on Social Security benefits.

The big gap between the two is with Harris’s promise to raise corporate taxes and the capital gains tax. The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a new plan to get corporations to pay at least 15 percent in tax, saying it could raise roughly $250 billion in revenue over the next decade.

Would rescinding the overtime tax worsen the national deficit? Little impact analysis has been done on that, but economists and academics have been scoring the candidates’ other tax plans.

Citi this week said that Trump’s plan to cut taxes on tips and Social Security benefits, and to lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 21 percent would add about $2.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. An overtime tax break (and extending the Trump-era income tax cuts beyond next year) would probably push that number even higher.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that Trump’s economic proposals would be more costly, increasing primary deficits by up to $5.8 trillion during the same period. Harris’s plans would raise them by up to $2 trillion.

“When legal issues include family dynamics, there’s always the opportunity for more hurt, more venom — and more legal action.”

— Molly LeGoy, a probate lawyer in Reno, Nev., on why Rupert Murdoch’s legal fight in the state to change the terms of a family trust that will control his media empire after his death could take years to resolve. The media mogul wants to put his elder son, Lachlan, in charge of the trust, rather than giving his four oldest children an equal say over it.

Musk’s Secret Service

As Elon Musk’s business empire and political clout grows, so too is the unwelcome attention. It has forced the Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink boss to ramp up his personal security and change his behavior, The Times’s Kristen Grind and Jack Ewing write.

Musk has drastically beefed up his personal security that costs millions. He travels with a sort of mini-Secret Service that’s more typical of heads of state than executives. Tesla and SpaceX have paid millions to Gavin de Becker & Associates, a private security firm, and Musk has also created Foundation Security, which is run by a former special forces weapons expert.

Tesla this year disclosed that the company paid $2.4 million in 2023 and $500,000 in the first two months of 2024. By comparison, from 2015 to 2018, Musk spent an average $145,000 a month on security.

The threats are growing. Since Tesla opened its Austin, Texas, factory in 2022, local officials have responded to eight “terroristic threat” incidents. After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Musk wrote on X: “Two people (separate occasions) have already tried to kill me in the past 8 months.”

Musk’s security detail isn’t typical. Apple spent $820,000 last year on security for Tim Cook, its C.E.O.; Amazon spends $1.6 million annually for Jeff Bezos’s. Meta is one company that spent more, allocating $23.4 million last year to guard Mark Zuckerberg, filings show.

“The probability that a homicidal maniac will try to kill you is proportionate to how many homicidal maniacs hear your name,” Musk said at Tesla’s annual meeting this summer. “So they hear my name a lot — I’m like, ‘OK, I’m on the list,’ you know.”

THE SPEED READ

Deals

Blackstone is reportedly weighing the sale of some or all of its majority stake in VFS Global, a provider of administrative services for processing visas, at a $7 billion valuation. (Bloomberg)
Pink Floyd is said to be in talks to sell the rights to its music to Sony for about $500 million. (FT)

Elections, politics and policy

Allies of Donald Trump, including Larry Kudlow, his former director of the National Economic Council, are reportedly discussing ways to privatize the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (WSJ)
Senator JD Vance of Ohio is helping to lead a lawsuit intended to get the Supreme Court to further erode federal limits on campaign finance spending by wealthy individuals and corporations. (The Lever)

Best of the rest

Warner Bros. Discovery renewed an agreement with Charter Communications to keep carrying its channels — with the cable giant’s subscribers getting access to the Max streaming service, including HBO content, as part of their service. (THR)
“The disaster our cities are not prepared for” (WaPo)

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