There was a time not too long ago when sports teams were considered a
billionaire's ultimate luxury purchase. Sports was the one area where
the super wealthy could still be super fans. But in recent years, the
business side of owning a sports franchise has started to overshadow
that fun. Money has been flowing into sports, notably from corporate
sponsorships, brand new stadiums, and massive television contracts --
and billionaires are taking notice.
10. Micky Arison
Team: Miami Heat
Net worth: $5.7 billion
Carnival Cruises, the company founded by the father of current boss
Micky Arison, had a shipwreck of year, at least in terms of public
relations. In February 2012 32 passengers were killed when a ship on its
Costa line, the Concordia, ran aground in Tuscany. A year later, 4,000
passengers were stranded for days in the Gulf of Mexico with little food
and few working bathrooms after an engine fire crippled its ship,
Triumph. The stock was immediately slammed but had run up nicely (20%)
in the prior 12 months on optimism about renewed consumer spending on
vacations. Another positive development on dry land: Arison's NBA team,
the Miami Heat, won the 2012 NBA championship, helping boost the
franchise's value by 37% to $625 million. 09 more after the break...
09. Charles Johnson
Team: San Francisco Giants
Net worth: $5.7 billion
Charles Johnson serves as chairman of Franklin Resources, parent of
mutual fund purveyor Franklin Templeton, with more than $781 billion in
assets under management as of December, 2012. His half-brother, Rupert,
Jr. serves as vice chairman. Their father, Rupert Sr., founded a mutual
fund shop in 1947, then called Franklin Distributors. Charles took over
as chief executive in 1957 and the two brother expanded into Franklin
Resources in 1969. Charles' son Gregory is the company's chief
executive, while his daughter Jennifer serves as chief operating
officer. A Yale alum, he worked as a waiter at a dining hall as an
undergrad. Charles is chairman of the San Francisco Giants baseball
team, and recently made a rare public appearance at the team's World
Series celebration parade in October. He and his wife own the
Hillsborough, Calif. Carolands mansion, which has 98 rooms and was the
site for a Mitt Romney presidential fundraiser in May 2012. Johnson and
his wife also oversee the Charles and Ann Johnson Foundation, which
gives regularly to local schools and causes such as Stanford University
and the California Academy of Sciences.
08. Margarita Louis-Dreyfus
Team: Olympique Marseille
Net worth: $6 billion
Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, who is new to the Forbes Billionaires list, has
held her own as chairman of the French commodities giant formerly run
by her late husband, Robert. Margarita took over when Robert died of
leukemia in 2009. In October 2012 she sold the company's energy trading
business. She has also raised capital on the public markets for the
first time in the firm's 160-year history, issuing $350 million in bonds
on the Singapore market. A Russian who is known as "the tsarina" by the
French press, she reportedly plans to spend $7 billion on acquisitions
over the next five years. She appears to be preparing her three children
to join the firm. She reportedly put her twins, Kyril and Mauric, in
boarding school in Singapore for a year to expose them to new schools of
thought. Her eldest son, Eric, had an internship at Glencore, a
competing firm. She married Robert in 1992 after meeting him on a plane
in 1988. It was the second marriage for both.
07. Silvio Berlusconi
Team: AC Milan
Net worth: $6.2 billion
Silvio Berlusconi sure acts like the Teflon politician. Despite an
October 2012 conviction by a Milan court for tax fraud and still pending
charges against him for having sex with a minor (he denies the
allegations), the billionaire announced in December that he plans to run
for prime minister of Italy again -- a post from which he resigned in
November 2011 amid plunging approval ratings and one he has held three
times. Berlusconi started his career as a singer on cruise ships and
built a fortune through holding company Fininvest that includes stakes
in Mediaset, Italy's largest media company; financial services company
Mediolanum (founded by Italian billionaire Ennio Doris); Mondadori, one
of the country's largest publishing houses; movie maker Medusa and
popular soccer team A.C. Milan. Berlusconi's eldest daughter Marina
chairs Fininvest. A rise in the price of Mediolanum stock lifted
Berlusconi's net worth by $300 million over the past year.
06. Phil Anschutz
Teams: Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Kings
Net worth: $10 billion
Phil Anschutz has made fortunes in oil, railroads and telecom, but his
biggest bets are in entertainment. In late 2012 he put his Anschutz
Entertainment Group up for sale, hoping to get more than $8 billion.
Through AEG, he operates dozens of the world's greatest concert venues
like the Staples Center and Nokia Theater in L.A., London's O2, and
Shanghai's Mercedes-Benz Arena. He fills his halls with his own in-house
entertainment, including the L.A. Lakers and NHL's L.A. Kings. His
music division manages rock stars like Justin Bieber, Enrique Iglesias
and Jennifer Lopez. His film division has produced the Chronicles of
Narnia series. New deal: AEG partnered with Ryan Seacrest and Mark Cuban
to rebrand HDNet as a new TV network called AXS. It will feature lots
of live entertainment from AEG's venues. AXS is also the name of AEG's
new no-fee ticketing venture to compete with Ticketmaster. Anschutz
hopes to bring NFL football back to L.A., with plans to build a $1
billion stadium adjacent to the Staples Center. If only he can find a
team to buy. He's got plenty of cash to make the deal, having sold oil
and gas fields for $1 billion in 2010. Other passions: the art of the
American West; his collection of Bierstadts, Remingtons and Russells
(now on display in a new Denver museum) could be the world's best.
Enjoys the western vistas too; his company Xanterra manages lodges in
many national parks, and this year he bought the famed Broadmoor resort
in Colorado Springs. On his own land in Wyoming, Anschutz is developing a
wind farm that could boast 1,000 turbines.
05. Roman Abramovich
Team: Chelsea
Net worth: $10.2 billion
In August 2012 Roman Abramovich won a suit in the High Court in London
brought by billionaire Boris Berezovsky. his former partner. Berezovsky
had been seeking $5.6 billion he claimed Abramovich failed to pay for
stakes in oil giant Sibneft and aluminum producer Rusal. Abramovich has
stakes in steel giant Evraz and mining firm Highland Gold. Together with
his Evraz partner, billionaire Alexander Abramov, he plans to buy a
large stake (about 10%) in Norilsk Nickel. Abramovich was orphaned as a
child and dropped out of college, then made his fortune in a series of
controversial oil export deals in the early 1990s. He teamed up with
Berezovsky to take over Sibneft at a fraction of its market value. He
sold his stake in Russian Aluminum to another billionaire, Oleg
Deripaska, and a 73% stake in Sibneft to gas titan Gazprom for $13
billion in 2005. He owns the U.K.'s Chelsea soccer team. He owns the
world's largest yacht, the 533-foot Eclipse, which cost him more than
$250 million in 2010. He also has a 377-foot ice boat, the Luna, a
Boeing 767 and homes in London, France, St. Barts, Colorado and Los
Angeles. He owns a large art collection. In January 2013 he bought a
collection of 40 paintings by Ilya Kabakov, the most expensive living
Russian artist, from U.S. collector John L. Stewart.
04. Mikhail Prokhorov
Team: Brooklyn Nets
Net worth: $13 billion
Mikhail Prokhorov has been, by turns, banker, athlete, metals mogul,
playboy, investor, media player, politician, NBA owner (the Brooklyn
Nets) and now, again, politician. He rocked Russia when he jumped into
its 2012 presidential race against strongman Vladimir Putin. No one
expected him to win but he managed to get 8% of the vote, even though he
ran an unexceptional campaign. (He did, however, rap on TV, perhaps
suggesting that some of his friendship with Jay-Z is rubbing off). While
the 6-foot-8-inch bachelor and martial arts enthusiast moved the Nets
to a new arena in Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, and often jets in to watch a
game, he has no plans to settle in the U.S. He insists that his serious
interest is Russian politics, and he has created a new party, the Civic
Platform, that he intends to expand until it's strong enough to go
head-to-head with Putin's United Russia. He has the money to see it
through. In late February 2013 he sold his 37.8% share of Polyus Gold
International Ltd. for $3.6 billion.
03. Paul Allen
Teams: Seattle Seahawks, Portland Trail Blazers
Net worth: $15 billion
Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Paul Allen continues to score big
in real estate, tech and energy. In late 2012 his Vulcan Real Estate
sold to Amazon the 12-building campus the online retailer had been
leasing in downtown Seattle. At $1.15 billion, it was the biggest U.S.
commercial real estate deal of the year. The proceeds will go to paying
off debt and developing even more space for Amazon. Allen has been
selling off shares of the software maker he started with Bill Gates and
investing in a more diversified basket of media, energy and tech stocks.
He's also put venture money into natural gas-to-fuels play Siluria, and
diagnostics firm Applied Proteomics. Allen is that rare billionaire who
combines passions for sports and science. He owns the Seattle Seahawks
(pro football), the Portland Trailblazers (pro basketball) and is a
part-owner in the Seattle Sounders FC (pro soccer). The cancer survivor
also has a keen interest in neuroscience, having recently lost his
mother to Alzheimer's disease. To date he has committed $500 million to
the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which makes public a detailed
"atlas" of genes that control the human brain.
02. Rinat Akhmetov
Team: FC Shakhtar Donesk
Net worth: $15.4 billion
Ukraine's wealthiest and son of a coal miner, Rinat Akhmetov has been
dealing with uprisings at his coal mines with miners at one mine seizing
offices in protest against their dismissal. But the value of his energy
company, DTEK, continues to increase with rising demand. Strength in
the energy sector has offset declines in his steel producer Metinvest
which is suffering from depressed steel prices. Akhmetov has reportedly
fallen out with Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he had a
strong alliance over the past decade; Akhmetov also stepped down from
Parliament. A soccer aficionado, he is riding high after the UEFA Euro
2012 games were played in his $400 million Donbass Arena.
01. Mukesh Ambani
Team: Mumbai Indians
Net worth: $21.5 billion
Mukesh Ambani's fortune dropped $1 billion though he remains India's
richest person and his Reliance Industries remains country's most
valuable company. Reliance, along with its partner BP, will be investing
$5 billion in KG-D6, the country's largest offshore gas field where
output has sharply declined and which has been the subject of scrutiny
by a federal auditor. Despite hectic lobbying with the federal oil
ministry, it has not yet secured a price increase for gas. Ambani is
also preparing to roll out 4G services for which he may reportedly lease
towers from Reliance Infratel, run by his once-estranged sibling Anil.
Mukesh and his wife Nita throw lavish parties, the latest being for
British prime minister David Cameron on his recent trip to Mumbai.
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