The world's richest man may -- key word: may -- be interested in becoming a minority NFL owner.
The story is long and kind of convoluted, so follow me here. Front Office Sportsfound court documents uncovering Bezos's lawyer in communication with the Baltimore-based investment banking firm tasked by the Washington Football Team's minority owners with finding a buyer for their stake in the team.
The documents were uncovered in a New Delhi, India, court room because the WFT's majority owner, the infamous Dan Snyder, has sued an Indian media company for allegedly leading a smear campaign to force him to sell.
That alleged smear campaign started with the Washington Post's expose uncovering 15 women detailing a culture of sexual harassment and verbal abuse inside the club. Though there's no evidence Bezos had any involvement in the publication of the story, it assuredly did not go unnoticed by Snyder that Bezos owns the Post.
(Of course, one could say Snyder's entire 20-plus year stewardship of the team is its own smear campaign. The club has won all of two playoff games under his ownership and been a dysfunctional, toxic mess, on and off the field, far more than not.)
Snyder and his minority owners are in court over selling a minority stake in the team, and Snyder has thus far given no indication he has any plans to sell his majority stake, no matter how much everyone would like him to. And if he does ever sell, it would likely be over his dead body that Snyder would sell to Bezos in particular, given Bezos owns the Post and the Post has been a constant source of angst for Snyder ever since he bought the team in 1999.
So there's what we know: a minority stake in the WFT is for sale, and Bezos may or may not be interested.
Let's now transition to talking about just how rich the world's richest man happens to be. In the words of NPR, there's rich, and then there's Jeff Bezos rich.
-- The Bloomberg Billionaires Index lists Bezos' net worth, as of Feb. 22, 2021, at $186 billion. The Forbes valuations of all 32 NFL teams combined stands at $97.43 billion. That means Bezos could buy the entire league, dissolve it just because he can, and he'd still be the world's ninth-richest person at $88.57 billion.
-- As for the Washington Football Team, Forbes list its value at $3.5 billion, in the top quarter of the NFL. That's roughly 1.9 percent of Bezos's net worth. The median net worth of a U.S. household is $97,300; 1.9 percent of $97,300 is $1,850. Bezos could buy an NFL team like you or I buy a couch. The analogy doesn't work on a financial value -- NFL teams are assets that appreciate, couches do not -- but it does fit on a personal one. A couch is just something we own, an NFL team would be just another asset in Bezos's portfolio.
-- The richest owner of a Big Four North American franchise is the LA Clippers' Steve Ballmer, at $84.6 billion. Only five NFL owners are listed among the world's 500 wealthiest individuals, Snyder not among them: David Tepper, Panthers ($12.9B, 177th); Stan Kroenke, Rams ($8.35B, 317th); Shahid Khan, Jaguars ($8.06B, 328th); Jerry Jones, Cowboys ($6.6B, 403rd); Terry Pegula, Bills ($6.43B, 417th).
-- Add the five richest NFL owners together, multiply their collective net worth by four, and the $16.6 billion gap between them is still more than the richest NFL owner's net worth.