271. David Rubenstein, Co-Founder of The Carlyle Group, on the Business of Sports, Investing and Leadership271. David Rubenstein, Co-Founder of The Carlyle Group, on the Business of Sports, Investing and Leadership
Web title: David Rubenstein on Ownership, Leadership and the Business of Teams
Full episode description:
Sports investing has evolved as franchise values have risen, live sports have retained a powerful hold on audiences, and ownership has become an increasingly sophisticated business. Yet sports teams remain unusual assets, combining economics with competition, community identity and deeply emotional fan relationships.
Host Oscar Pulido speaks with David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group and control partner of the Baltimore Orioles ownership group, about his move from private equity into sports investing. They discuss his decision to invest in his hometown team, the role franchises can play in their cities, and how leadership differs when success is measured by more than financial returns.
The conversation also explores the forces influencing sports investing, from rising franchise values and broader ownership participation to live media demand, AI-powered analytics and longer-term developments across capital markets.
Key insights:
Why sports ownership can combine financial discipline with civic responsibility.
How owners balance winning, community impact and business performance.
Why live sports continue to command unusually strong audience attention.
How AI and analytics are influencing decision-making across professional sports.
Where broader investor participation could change the ownership landscape.
What private equity leadership can teach sports organizations about long-term decision-making.
Keywords: sports investing, David Rubenstein, Baltimore Orioles, sports ownership, business of sports, sports franchises, private equity, Carlyle Group, private markets, AI investing, artificial intelligence, baseball analytics, sports analytics, live sports, media rights, franchise valuations, leadership, sports business, institutional investing, professional sports ownership
Sources: Inside The Owners Box, David Rubenstein, September 2026
Written Disclosures In Episode Description:
This content is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or a solicitation. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the listener. Reference to any company or investment strategy mentioned is for illustrative purposes only and not investment advice. For full disclosures, visit blackrock.com/corporate/compliance/bid-disclosures.
<<TRANSCRIPT>>
Oscar Pulido: Sports teams have become some of the world's most valuable assets. Over the past two decades, franchise values have soared, institutional investors have entered the market, and ownership has evolved from a passion project into a sophisticated business. But owning a team isn't like owning any other company. The product is emotional. Success isn't measured just in profits, but in championships, civic pride, and the connection between a city and its fans.
Welcome to The Bid, where we break down what's happening in the markets and explore the forces changing the economy and finance. I'm Oscar Pulido. Today's guest has spent decades thinking about long-term investing and value creation.
David Rubenstein is the co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest private equity investment firms. Over the course of his career, he's helped shape the modern private equity industry, interviewed presidents, CEOs, and global leaders, and become one of the most recognized voices on leadership and investing.
More recently, he took on a very different role, leading the ownership group that purchased his hometown Baltimore Orioles. His latest book, Inside the Owner's Box, draws on that experience, as well as conversations with some of the most successful owners in sports to explore what sports ownership can teach us about leadership, investing, and building institutions that last. David, thank you so much for joining us on The Bid.
David Rubenstein: My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
Oscar Pulido: Well, David, when people hear your name, I think it's fair to say they think of The Carlyle Group, they think about the private equity industry that you have helped create. Most people don't realize that you're also an owner of a sports franchise, and that's really the topic of conversation that we want to have here today, which is about investing in the sports industry. So, I want to ask you, when you went about buying a sports team, how did you consider this as an investment opportunity? Were you looking at it as an entertainment business, a media business, or something entirely different?
David Rubenstein: Well, I did it for a reason that's unrelated to investment. I'm from Baltimore. I've felt over the years I've been financially successful. I've given away a great deal of money. I was an original signer of the Giving Pledge, and I've tried to give away enormous amounts of my net worth, but most of that has probably been to universities my family's been associated with or to the Washington, DC area, where I've lived for the last 40-some years.
I really didn't do as much for Baltimore as I thought I should. I grew up there, and my parents grew up there. My parents were married there. They raised me there, they're buried there, I’m going to be buried there. And I thought, What have I really done for Baltimore? And I'd been involved in Johns Hopkins and been on their boards, but I hadn't given staggering sums there.
So, I viewed it more or less a philanthropic gesture. I didn't want to lose money, but I viewed it as a way to give back to Baltimore for the good fortune I've had from coming from Baltimore.
Oscar Pulido: And you mentioned Baltimore, and in fact, the sports team that you are the owner of are the Baltimore Orioles, which is a Major League Baseball team. You made that investment back in 2024, and as mentioned, most people know you from the private equity industry, so they know that you know how to evaluate an investment.
But what made this opportunity different from every other investment you've ever considered?
David Rubenstein: Well, in the private equity world, you're trying to make money, and you're always looking at certain rates of return.
You know your investors, are looking for double-digit rates of return and so forth. In this particular case, I didn't really focus on that quite the same way. I didn't want to lose money, as I mentioned, but I really viewed it as a civic gesture, and therefore, I wanted people to come along with me who were involved in helping Baltimore be grow to be a more significant city, helping Baltimore to be revitalized, and they might like baseball too, and so a combination of factors.
Now, the world has changed, and it was the case many years ago that people made sports investments because they really loved the sports. there's no doubt today that a lot of people are attracted to it because the profitability seems to be pretty high if you get lucky and you get in at the right time.
Oscar Pulido: And when you talk about, the civic gesture, maybe say a little bit more about that. I'm familiar with the Baltimore Orioles, and I know Camden Yards sits right in Baltimore Harbor. It's central to the community of Baltimore. But talk a little bit more about the importance that sports teams have to their local cities.
David Rubenstein: When I grew up in Baltimore, it was the ninth biggest city in the United States in the 1950s and '60s. Now it's not even top 20 in terms of population. It's lost enormous population, had a lot of crime issues, a lot of drug-related issues, a lot of problems in the city, and they've lost their corporate headquarters more or less, or very few large corporate headquarters. So, the city's tax base has gone way down, and therefore the city doesn't have the kind of resources that other cities might have.
I should point out that in, in the entire United States, there are only two cities in the country that are not in a county. One is Baltimore and one is St. Louis, which means when you move out of Baltimore City or St. Louis, none of the tax revenues that you might, give to a surrounding county go back to the city.
In this particular case, I thought that Baltimore, could be revitalized a bit if I bought the team and put more money into it and helped the city in that way. We try to revitalize the downtown area where the stadium is built. the stadium is called Camden Yards, and when it opened in the early '90s, it was revolutionary for baseball because it was a downtown stadium arena which hadn't been built that way recent years.
Recent years, you buy them and you build things in the suburbs, and this one was designed to look like an old park, Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, and it captured the imagination of fans. Enormous numbers of people came out to the games, but also people who began building stadiums from 1991 on all wanted to have a model like Camden Yards.
Oscar Pulido: And even if people don't follow baseball or are not familiar with it, globally, sports are very relevant. And I think people can relate to the fact of going to an arena or a stadium, a, a site that is the home of their sports team. And as you mentioned, Camden Yards has been around since the early '90s. I must profess to having been there recently. We were talking about that a little bit beforehand, and it looks like what I remember when I went for the first time 20 or 25 years ago. So, it seems like you've already been making some investments there.
David Rubenstein: The state of Maryland actually owns Camden Yards, the Maryland Stadium Authority, and they gave us money to refurbish it, and we've done a bigger scoreboard, better sound system, better dugouts and play-- and, clubhouses, more restaurant-related facilities, better food facilities, many different things, and we made it a better experience. Remember, in baseball, what you're doing, in all sports, you're trying to get people to come to the stadium. And you want them to have a pleasurable experience. So, you want to have a good winning team, which will always bring fans to the stadium, but you want to have the food be good, the amenities be good, the whole experience be something that they think is worth the price that they pay.
Oscar Pulido: And David, you're giving us a little bit of a peek into what it means to be the owner of a sports franchise, and I want to ask you a little bit more about that. I think when people picture a sports owner, they picture somebody sitting in the box watching the game or maybe close to the field watching the game. What surprised you the most about what the job actually entails, and how is this similar or different from running another business?
David Rubenstein: Well, Carlyle owns lots of, companies, and virtually nobody ever comes up to me on the street and says, Hey, how's your company doing in the chemistry industry? or How many people are really employed by you in the aerospace industry? Or How's your aerospace company doing? Nobody cares about that. This is a business where people come up to you all the time and talk about it. They want to know how the team is going, what are you going to do, how are you going to improve it, and so forth and so on.
And the level of interest is just staggering. When you think about it, baseball teams, for example, are relatively modest revenue organizations, $200 million, $300 million or something like that in revenue annually. And that's modest compared to the kind of companies that Carlyle or other, large firms like ours own.
So, it is something that people have a real, pride in, and it's a very interesting phenomenon. Why do people care about their local team? Why? They don't own it. if I do extremely well financially, they're not going to get any money out of it. why do they care? Because people want to feel that they have some attachment to success.
People want to be successful, and if their local team is successful, they feel like they're successful. Why do people root for their college team so much? Because they feel if the team does well, it makes them feel like their college is better and then they're better. So, people root for their local teams because they really want to, say, I'm somebody important. My team is important. I'm successful, and I really am happy.
Oscar Pulido: Well, and I can, attest to that here in New York City this summer. I know you spend a fair amount of time in New York, but when the New York Knicks won the NBA championship, I think you could definitely feel that in New York City, that feeling of success was shared by many millions of people across the five boroughs.
David Rubenstein: There's no doubt. This weekend I interviewed, James Dolan in a panel and I asked him, What does it feel like to win a championship after 50 years compared to, some of the criticism you've had before? And he obviously is very happy. So, there's no doubt that fans really take enormous pride in their local, team doing well, even though, as I mentioned, they don't own the team, and if the team does well, they're not going to be, putting money in their pocket necessarily.
Oscar Pulido: So, you mentioned James Dolan, who's another owner of a sports franchise, and I should have mentioned at the outset that part of the reason we're having this discussion is your new book, which is called Inside the Owner's Box, where you take us through what it means to own a professional sports franchise.
And in there, you talk to other owners of other sports teams, and you really talk about owning a sports franchise is really an exercise in leadership. So, I'm just curious, when you talk to some of these other sports owners, what were some of the common threads or common things that you heard from them when you interviewed them?
David Rubenstein: They care more about winning than making money. winning is everything. Making money, it's nice. You want to make money. You don't want to lose money. But they take much greater pride in the success on the field. Of all the owners I've talked to, and I interviewed a number of them from different sports, nobody ever told-- said to me, You know how much money I made out of this?
Or You know how we're doing so well financially? They all talked about what they had to do on the team to make the team better. And that's owners take enormous pride. Also, this weekend, I interviewed Bob Kraft, who's won six Super Bowls, and he never mentioned how much money he-- the team has, h- has become worth as a result of it. He paid, I think, $172 million years ago. Now it's worth about eight or nine billion.
He never mentioned that. It's something that owners, they know that the teams go up in value, but that's not their main focus. It's winning. Winning and being good to the community. Everybody wants to be, good to the community that they represent, and al- people want to win.
Oscar Pulido: Has that taken a little bit of an adjustment for you with the long history in finance of obviously focusing on making money, return on capital, and when you own a sports franchise, you still have that goal over the long term, but is it an adjustment to think about the timeframe a little bit different over which that return on investment pays off?
David Rubenstein: Sure. It's much different. in a typical private equity investment, in five to seven years, you're going to exit, and you know that in advance, and everybody knows that in advance. In baseball or other professional sports, you have people owning these things sometimes for 10, 20, 30 years or more. The Steinbrenners have owned it since 1972, the Yankees.
So, you don't really look at it in quite that way. You also look at it as an investment, and you want to have some kind of discipline. You don't want to lose staggering sums of money, but you really want to make the team better. As we talk today, the Orioles have just signed a player from the New York Mets who was put on waivers, which means he's available to be purchased, but doing so would cost a fair amount of money, and we only have about 30 games left in the season. But we thought it was worth it to spend that fair amount of money because we really want to win and get to the World Series and get to the championships and get to the playoffs if possible.
Oscar Pulido: And these are things that you have to consider, not just the stadium and what's around the stadium, what's in the stadium, but also some of the day-to-day details around the players and the contracts and things like that.
David Rubenstein: In sports, you have two parts to it. You have the people that run the team, and that's generally overseen by somebody who might be called a, a head of, baseball operations or a general manager. And they have somebody that oversees the business side: selling tickets, selling corporate suites, selling sponsorships, advertising, all that kind of thing.
And so, they're kind of separate- very rarely do you see somebody in charge of both areas, though there are some people that do that. So generally, they both, you know, report to me, and I have a, a co-owner, Mike Arougheti, who, is the CEO of Ares, we did this together. I'm the control partner because I am a little bit older, and I have more time to maybe do this, but he eventually will probably be the control owner, I hope so. And so together, we kind of make these decisions and approve what goes on. But if you're overturning your baseball person or you're overturning your businessperson all the time, you probably should get somebody else. So, generally, we know what they're doing. We consent to it unless we, have some violent objection, which rarely happens. So today they were letting me know about this player they wanted to get, and I thought made sense, so we went ahead with it.
Oscar Pulido: It sounds like you're setting strategic direction as an owner, but you hire a good team to help you in many facets of the business.
David Rubenstein: That's the theory. but yeah, obviously there are owners like George Steinbrenner who, you know, like to get in the middle of these things himself, recruit the, the players, sign the players, fire the players, do all the things he wanted.
He was a, a different character. We don't have owners quite like that today. But he made an incredible investment. He paid, $8.8 million in 1972. He put in 250,000 of his own money. That's all he had to put in. And he syndicated the rest, and the team is now worth about $10 billion.
Oscar Pulido: You make the point in the book, David, that investing in sports franchises has become more popular. There are more teams, but also if you think about just media and television and the- ... ability to watch sports globally. you talk about also sports gambling and the growth of that industry. So, this has certainly become an asset class, and passion investing is also becoming more common in today's markets. But what are some of the potential risks that you think investors underestimate when they enter this space?
David Rubenstein: Well, everything doesn't always go up to the sky forever. There's sometimes you have hiccups like we do in the business investing world. And so, sports right now are-- I won't say it's a bubble, but clearly, prices are going up at, at rates nobody anticipated.
Most recently, we saw the Los Angeles, Lakers were sold for $12.5 billion, one year after they sold for $10 billion. And that was just a few years after they were worth about $6 billion. The Boston Celtics just sold for $6.1 billion. They previously had been purchased for about $330 million.
The Orioles came to Baltimore in 1954 for a purchase price of $2.2 million. My partners and I paid $1.7 billion. So, the prices have gone up, and a lot of people have made a lot of money, and some people have sold these teams after they own them for a few years.
Nothing goes up forever, and therefore, it's likely at some point there'll be a plateauing. But right now, people like it. And the reason they like it, and the reason the values are going up, the TV contracts are fairly lucrative for the leagues. People are watching more sports than ever before, and there are more people. when I was growing up in Baltimore, the entire population of the United States might've been 170 million people. Now we're almost double that. Secondly, think about how many more teams there are. for example, when I was growing up in 1960, the number of NBA teams was eight. The number of NHL teams was six. That's it. The entire NHL was six teams. The entire NBA was eight teams. Now they have, I think, 30 or 32 teams.
So, it's much different. You have more teams that you can support and root for, and there are more opportunities to invest as well.
Oscar Pulido: I think you had a fun statistic in the book about the number of minutes that Americans spend a year watching, televised sport. I think it was something like a trillion. It was a big number.
David Rubenstein: staggering. And think about this: of the 100 most popular TV shows in any given year in the United States, 95 are live sports. Ninety-five of the 100 most popular shows in any given year, at least certainly the last couple of years, have been live sports. That's because people don't seem to be watching sit- sitcoms anymore.
They don't want to watch variety shows. They want live sports for whatever reason. And because people can now watch these live sports, sporting events almost anywhere or through streaming devices, it's extremely popular, way to entertain yourself.
Oscar Pulido: And you were making the point before that nothing is linear, so there is volatility even in an asset class like investing in a sports franchise. on The Bid, we've spent a lot of time talking about the disruptive power of artificial intelligence, AI, and that's creating a lot of volatility in the markets, in some cases in favor of some companies, in some cases, in not so much in favor of certain companies.
When you bought the Orioles back in March of 2024, this was the relatively early stages of AI, and I'm just curious, has AI changed your thinking about investing in sports at all?
David Rubenstein: Hasn't changed my thinking about investing in sports, but AI is going to permeate our society, and it will permeate sports. As you probably know, there was a discussion of, of how analytics were helping baseball many years ago. A book was written, called Moneyball, and people all of a sudden realized you can use analytics to analyze baseball in ways that people didn't realize.
It wasn't just relying on your gut or your experience. Now every team has detailed analytical staffs, and now increasingly these staffs are using AI. So increasingly AI will be used, and some will use it better than others. But AI is going to be important for every part of society, and certainly in sports.
Oscar Pulido: Certainly, not only baseball, but sports in general, a very data-driven business and helps you make better decisions. as you're saying, AI could be just the supercharge, to that decision-making.
David Rubenstein: AI could be just the supercharge, to that decision-making. Correct. it's clearly going to change, the way some analytics are done. But again, AI has not yet permeated baseball completely, and it's going to take a while before it does, but it's obviously here now.
Oscar Pulido: David, if the last 20 years were about sports becoming an institutional asset class, what do you think defines the next 20 years, and w- where do you see some of the biggest opportunities?
David Rubenstein: in the sports world, let me just say that, there are a lot of wealthy people buying sports teams, but there are a lot of people who are smaller investors who say, I want to be in there too, but I don't have a billion dollars. they're investing in partnerships that, that will aggregate a lot of investors that might be at a, I don't know, hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, five hundred thousand dollars level.
They can buy into a sports partnership. That sports partnership will buy a team, and that person can say, I'm a part owner of that team, or so forth. clearly that, is going forward. In terms of non-sports related things, nothing is going to rival artificial intelligence for some time. but overall, if I were to say the next five or ten years, areas that I think will be very important are things like quantum computing.
fusion will no doubt be a big thing in the future as well. And, and probably things related to biotech, CRISPR, and other kinds of, vaccines will no doubt be a, important part of, the investing world.
Oscar Pulido: And actually, that's a good, follow-up question because... Or this helps me with the follow-up question because when you think about passion investing and you think about diversifying your portfolio, not everybody can buy a sports team.
That, that is certainly, reserved for, a select few. But there are other sectors and themes that maybe people can be considering for some of their longer-term investments, and I think you started to touch on those. But maybe talk a little bit more about what you mean there.
David Rubenstein: the world is always looking for new opportunities. in the investment world, people always want to be in the ground floor of something.
What is going to be on the ground floor? If I take, an example of something I just mentioned, which is, quantum computing. Quantum computing has always been said to be five years from now. In other words, every, every year people say it's another five years. But now I think we are really getting close to having quantum computing.
There are good opportunities there to invest. There are publicly traded companies that are quantum companies, and that will revolutionize the computer industry because it, it can go make, decisions much more rapidly than current computers. So that will be an, a gigantic, area in the future, and I think people can invest in that and will be able to.
Take a biotech revolution. I'm on the board of Moderna. Moderna is a company that had a, technology that didn't get a lot of raves for a while, but then when it developed the COVID vaccine, people began to see-- realize that this RNA technology can really do something wonderful, and it's just been announced that they have, trials coming through that, have been very successful in melanoma cancer for a vaccine.
And there's also been news recently that a vaccine in effect for pancreatic cancer has proven to be successful and has been approved by the FDA. So, all kinds of medical revolutions will be, in front of us. And then I should mention space. the biggest IPO ever in the United States, is SpaceX.
it has a staggering valuation, but that has made other people say that their space company should be taken public, and there are going to be a lot of space-related companies that are going to be going public or being created in the next couple years. Another area that is really attractive, is one that people shied away from before, but it's called aerospace defense.
as we've seen, technology is changing. Drone technology is changing the way we fight wars, for better or worse, and as a result, more and more people are going to invest in aerospace defense, particularly countries and companies in countries that are not yet now, possessing a major aerospace defense complex, and that's a lot of countries.
Oscar Pulido: David, I think you've been listening to some of our episodes of The Bid because some of these are topics that, that we've touched on with some of the investors here at BlackRock. So, it's good to hear that you also, share some of the positive views on some of these longer-term themes. I do. David, you said you grew up in Baltimore. Do you remember the first time you went to an Orioles game?
David Rubenstein: Sure. My father took me to an Orioles game when I was probably seven or eight, and I didn't really know what I was doing. I rooted for the team. I remember the foo-food was good. The hot dogs tasted great. It's amazing how hot dogs taste better in a baseball stadium than it tastes at home. And just everybody cheering for the team and idolizing players. I used to go try to get the autographs of the players when I was eight or nine years old, and I don't know what I did with those autographs. I wish I had them because they're probably worth a lot more now. But people come to me for autographs from the players, but I keep saying, I'm an owner. You don't want my autograph. But rather than explain to somebody why have an autograph that's not worth anything, I just sign it. But I'm not really good at signing a baseball because it's curved, and so I have to just print it out.
Oscar Pulido: I'm guessing when you were at those games, you probably had aspirations of being a player for the team, but maybe not the owner of the team.
David Rubenstein: As a little boy, I was a good Little Leaguer at the age of seven, and then around eight or nine I peaked. And I was an All-Star, but it was a Jewish Little League, and everybody's not going to be Sandy Koufax. So no, I probably realized my athletic potential was probably over at, 10 or 11.
Oscar Pulido: You've done well for yourself, not only a private equity investor, but also following that sports passion that you have. David, people who know you know that you also have an affinity for American history, and there's nothing more central to American history than the sport of baseball. Thanks for giving us a behind-the-scenes peek of what it means to own a baseball team, a sports franchise, the lessons in leadership that we can take from that, and thank you for doing it here on The Bid
David Rubenstein: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Oscar Pulido: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Bid. If you enjoy the show and want to support the podcast, consider telling your friends about us or sharing an episode that really resonated with you. Next up, I'm speaking with Reid Menghi about space, the final investing frontier. Make sure to subscribe to The Bid so you won't miss the episode.
<<SPOKEN DISCLOSURES>>
This content is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or a solicitation. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the listener. Reference to the names of each company mentioned is merely for explaining the investment strategy and should not be construed as investment advice or recommendation. For full disclosures, visit blackrock.com/corporate/compliance/bid-disclosures
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