Shaq, the Dealmaker

Shaquille O’Neal is best known for his spectacular basketball career, but his foray into investing has led him to other high-profile places. The dealmaker is ready to pounce on an NBA team of his own: “Whatever team is available,” he told me this week at the iConnections Global Alts event in Miami. He’d consider buying into the Formula One world, too—“even though I can’t fit in one of those damn cars,” the 7-foot-1 O’Neal said.

He spoke alongside billionaire Jamie Salter, who runs Authentic Brands Group. The firm last year raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, including General Atlantic, in a deal that valued it at more than $20 billion.

Authentic Brands agreed to buy the Shaquille O’Neal brand in 2015, and, ever the negotiator, the basketball icon took two-thirds of that money and reinvested it into the firm. “He’s made 20x on his investment in our company,” Salter said.

I asked Shaq whether there were lessons from the NBA he could translate into his business career. “I realized you can never do anything by yourself. You have to trust your teammates,” he said.

“I read a quote one day that said: The greatest leaders are the ones smart enough to have people that are smarter than them,” he said. “So I just surrounded myself with smart people.”

Some more business tricks from O’Neal include sticking to your strategy and finding life-changing moments to invest in. “When I invest, I never want to hear anything monetary. Is it going to change someone’s life, forever? And I’ve made those investments, and I’ve been doing very, very well.”

O’Neal wasn’t the only athlete at the iConnections Miami event—and Salter wasn’t the only person looking to invest heavily in licensing rights. If I had to choose a couple of hot topics in alternative investing this year, that’s one of them. Another group of investors, including HarbourView Equity Partners’ Sherrese Clarke Soares, explained the promise of buying music rights, too. (Clarke Soares’ firm is backed by investing giant Apollo Global Management and has bought catalogs tied to Brad Paisley, Incubus and Luis Fonsi among many others.)

And, of course, there are also direct investments in sports. A group led by John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group inked a major deal this week to invest as much as $3 billion in the PGA Tour. The golf organization’s possible merger with Saudi-backed LIV Golf has tied up bankers and billionaires for several months.

Meanwhile, billionaire Carlyle founder David Rubenstein said he’s buying baseball’s Baltimore Orioles. He paired up with colleagues and friends, including billionaire Michael Arougheti, who runs investment firm Ares, and Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

Sports are rising to be among the most active deal markets in the world—and valuations are soaring. Add in the interest in licensing and music rights and you could say the future of investing could be “entertaining.” Shaq could be a big man in that world, too.

More on Wall Street

• Banks are facing a wall of $560 billion of maturities tied to commercial real estate by the end of 2025 -- and its spurring worries among bank investors.
• Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, is among investors sounding alarms about the US deficit. He says the country faces a "debt spiral" of swelling debt -- and it would take a miracle to reverse the damage.
• Inside JPMorgan's private credit push, titans of the industry are getting very nervous as they watch from the sidelines. “If you believe private credit will continue to grow and compete side-by-side with public debt markets, it can’t continue forever as-is. Transparency will increase over time," a key JPMorgan executive tells Bloomberg.
• Behind Blackstone's big bet on AI, a $25 billion empire of data centers. Bloomberg's Dawn Lim takes us behind the firm's classic playbook for real estate.

More to come. Next week, I have an exclusive interview with Ares CEO Michael Arougheti on Thursday, at a time when private credit is booming. Carlyle, Apollo and KKR are also set to report results next week. In the meantime, have a great weekend. And to read this newsletter online, you can do that here. Tips and opinions are very welcome at [email protected].