Jeanie Buss: The Woman Who Runs the Lakers, Explained

Who is Jeanie Buss?

If her name landed in your search bar this week, here is the short answer: Jeanie Buss is the woman who runs the Los Angeles Lakers. Not a name on a letterhead, not a ceremonial family seat. For more than a decade she has been the team's governor and president, the person whose signature sits under the biggest calls at one of the most watched sports franchises on the planet. The longer answer, which is the reason a page like this exists on fotobreak rather than a two line news brief, is a good deal more interesting than the job title suggests.

Her full name is Jeanie Marie Buss. She was born on 26 September 1961 in Santa Monica, California, which makes her 64 as this is written, with her 65th birthday arriving in late September. She has spent essentially her whole working life inside the family business, and the family business happens to be professional sport in Los Angeles.

Where is Jeanie Buss from, and how did she get here?

Her father was Jerry Buss, a chemist turned real estate investor who in 1979 bought the Lakers, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team and the Forum arena in one enormous transaction. That single purchase is the hinge of the whole story. Jeanie grew up around locker rooms and box offices at an age when most children are learning long division, and the family did not start out wealthy, which is a detail she has never hidden.

She took a business degree at the University of Southern California, and at 19 she was already running a professional team: the Los Angeles Strings of World TeamTennis, where she handled sponsorships, ticketing and the unglamorous plumbing of putting an event on. She later ran the Forum itself as general manager, which meant basketball nights, the ice being laid down for hockey a few hours later, and concerts in between. Anyone who has ever worked a venue knows that is a brutal apprenticeship, closer to the logistics of a multi stage music festival than to anything you see on television.

That grounding matters. Long before she was making basketball decisions she was the executive selling the building, negotiating the television and sponsorship money, and filling seats on a Tuesday in February. The Forum, in her era, was as much a room for a sold out night of live music in Los Angeles as it was a basketball arena, and she treated both as the same job.

What does Jeanie Buss actually do day to day?

When Jerry Buss died in February 2013, control of the Lakers passed to a family trust, and Jeanie became the team's governor, the person who represents the franchise on the NBA Board of Governors and answers for it to the league. In practice her days are meetings: with the front office, with sponsors, with broadcasters, with the league office, with the people who run the arena and the practice facility and the G League affiliate. She does not draw up plays. She decides who gets to.

The most consequential thing she has done in that seat was also the most awkward, and it is worth stating plainly and then moving on: in early 2017 she reorganised the basketball side of the operation, which meant her brother Jim Buss no longer led it. Magic Johnson came in as president of basketball operations, Rob Pelinka arrived as general manager, and a family disagreement over the trust was settled. Pelinka is still there, now running basketball operations, and the working relationship between the two of them is the engine room of the franchise.

Three years after that reshuffle, in the strange sealed bubble of the 2020 season in Florida, the Lakers won the championship, and Jeanie Buss became the first woman ever to be the controlling owner of an NBA title team. It is the line that will lead every profile written about her for the rest of her life, and she has earned it.

Why is Jeanie Buss trending right now?

Two currents keep pulling her name back into search, and they are related.

The first is ownership. In 2025 the Buss family agreed to sell its controlling interest in the Lakers to Mark Walter, the businessman who also controls the Los Angeles Dodgers and who had already held a minority piece of the team. The deal was reported as valuing the franchise at roughly ten billion dollars, a number so large it briefly turned a basketball story into a business story, chewed over by the sort of investor personalities who talk about valuations for a living. The arrangement as reported keeps Jeanie Buss in place as the team's governor through a transition, so the practical answer to does she still run the Lakers has been yes, with an asterisk that gets a little larger every year. That asterisk is precisely what people are searching for, and it is a question Google's automatic summaries handle badly, because the answer is a process rather than a fact.

The second current is the roster. The Lakers have spent the last stretch doing genuinely startling things, most famously the February 2025 trade that sent Anthony Davis to Dallas and brought Luka Doncic to Los Angeles, a move that arrived with no warning and reset every assumption about the team's next ten years. Any franchise that operates like that lives permanently inside the churn of NBA trade speculation, and every rumour cycle sends a fresh wave of people looking up who actually signs off on all this. The answer, for now, is her.

There is a third, softer reason. She is one of very few women at the top of a men's major league, and that alone makes her a recurring name in a wider conversation about who runs sport, alongside the coaches and executives who get judged in public every single week. Her decisions are argued about on the same message boards and live chats where everything else in American culture gets argued about, and the volume rarely drops for long.

The Buss family, and the people around her

Jerry Buss had six children, and most of them have worked for the team at some point. Johnny Buss has served as chairman of the board. Jim Buss led basketball operations until 2017. Joey Buss ran the club's G League side, the South Bay Lakers, where the kind of young player still trying to break through gets his first professional minutes. Jesse Buss works in scouting. Janie Drexel is also involved. It is a family firm in the oldest sense, with all the closeness and all the friction that implies, which is why searches for the parents and siblings behind a public name are so common: people instinctively want the family tree before they want the CV.

On the personal side, only what is public and long established. She was in a long relationship with the coach Phil Jackson, and the engagement ended some years ago. She later married the comedian and actor Jay Mohr. That is the whole of it, and it is worth noting that the volume of searches for who a well known person is dating or who their partner turns out to be is one of the most reliable patterns on the internet, whoever the subject is. The same instinct drives the endless queries about what a given public figure is actually worth, and in her case the honest answer is that family trust holdings are not public in a way anyone should be quoting with confidence.

Beyond basketball: wrestling, a book, and being played on screen

Away from the arena she has been an executive producer of Women of Wrestling, a promotion built entirely around female performers, which she has backed for years and pushed onto television and streaming. She also published a memoir, 'Laker Girl', which is about as candid a look at the business side of the family as you will find in print.

She has been portrayed on screen too, in the HBO series about the Showtime era Lakers and in Netflix's documentary series about the franchise, which means a whole cohort of viewers met her first as a character. Watching yourself be cast is a strange modern experience, one shared by anyone whose life becomes source material, and it feeds the sort of curiosity that sends people looking up which young actor was cast in which role or hunting down an explainer for the streaming series everyone is discussing.

Where to follow Jeanie Buss, and what happens next

She is active on social media, chiefly on X, where she posts about the team, the league and her wrestling projects, and she turns up regularly on podcasts and league broadcasts. There is no newsletter to buy and nothing being sold directly to fans; the product is the team.

What comes next is the interesting part. Under the reported terms of the Walter agreement she stays as governor while ownership transitions, which means the coming seasons are a slow handover conducted in full public view, with every roster move read as evidence about who is really deciding. Expect the questions about a public figure's exact official status to keep coming, because that is the genuine unknown here, and expect the celebrity news machine to cover the noise around it rather than the substance. If you want the substance, follow the front office moves, not the headlines, and keep an eye on the wider run of stories about the people the internet is currently talking about. Meanwhile the athletes she employs keep signing the contracts that make all of this possible, the same economics that shape the careers of star players in every other American league.

Forty odd years after she started selling tennis tickets at 19, Jeanie Buss is still doing the same job she has always done: making sure the building is full, the lights are on, and the people making basketball decisions have what they need. The scale changed. The work did not.