Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore, who became fast friends during the pandemic, are about to become majority owners of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx in a $1.5 billion deal.
Rodriguez was trying to buy the New York Mets in 2020 when a friend told him: “You have to meet this Walmart guy,” Lore.
“We kind of hit it off right away,” Rodriguez said last year on his podcast, The Deal. “We’re both New Yorkers, we both have two daughters, we both come from humble beginnings, and I was like: I don’t know what this meeting is about, but I want to do something with Marc.”
Five years later, Rodriguez and Lore are close friends and business partners and co-founded the private equity firm VCP Ventures.
The pair quickly found common ground when they first met over Zoom during the pandemic, but they followed vastly different paths on their way to buying Minnesota’s NBA and WNBA franchises.
Lore is a self-described “serial entrepreneur” and onetime Walmart executive who founded and sold several online retail businesses on his way to becoming a billionaire. Gwyneth Paltrow once called him “an e-commerce wizard.”
Lore, pronounced Lor-ee, walked away from a $500,000 salary as a bank vice president when he was 27 in the late 1990s to become an entrepreneur. His first company was an online marketplace for sports collectibles, the Pit, which sold for $6 million in 2001.
He made the bulk of his fortune selling Jet.com to Walmart in 2016 and has become an exemplar for startup founders.