The Seattle Seahawks’ new owners come with some serious Bay Area baggage that goes beyond their longtime 49ers fandom.
The organization announced Saturday that Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, led a group to purchase the Seahawks for $9.6 billion. However, his role with the franchise won’t mirror that of his role in buying it. That will go to his wife, Neeru Khosla, who will serve as Seattle’s controlling owner. Neal Khosla, Vinod’s son, will also reportedly hold “a significant leadership role in the ownership group,” according to a memo sent to NFL teams on the day the sale was announced.
The Khosla name might ring a few bells for heavily tuned-in Niners fans, as the family purchased a 3.1% stake in the team in May 2025, which they’ll have to give up because of this Seahawks purchase. However, the name is more widely known among Bay Area beachgoers, as the Khoslas have been in an ongoing legal battle to limit access to Martins Beach for nearly two decades.
In 2008, Khosla purchased an 89-acre beachfront property in San Mateo County and closed a road to the public beach with a gate. This seemed to break the California Coastal Act of 1976, which makes California beaches public land and requires them to be publicly accessible. Khosla’s campaign to keep his road closed seemed to end in 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to let him keep the road closed — and ostensibly his portion of the beach private. But that changed in 2019, when a San Francisco appeals court ruled in Khosla’s favor and cited how past owners charged beachgoers a parking fee, which showed that the road wasn’t always totally public.
The following year, the California State Lands Commission and California Coastal Commission hit Khosla with another lawsuit, arguing that he can’t restrict access to a beach the public has used for generations, using photos and witness testimony to prove the public usage went back decades. After nearly five years, it appeared that this case would finally go to trial in April 2025. However, on the same day the trail was set to begin, a San Mateo County judge stayed the case so that the parties could engage in settlement talks.
How those talks are going is still unclear, and the two sides have agreed to push back a court date to discuss their negotiations four times over the past 15 months. SFGATE reached out to lawyers for the limited liability companies representing Khosla’s side for an update to the case and did not hear back by publication.
According to court documents, the next conference about the case’s status is scheduled for Oct. 12, 2026, just one day after the first Niners-Seahawks rivalry matchup of this new era of ownership.