Where Timberwolves owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez made their money

Marc Lore was, by one measure, the highest-paid CEO in America a decade ago.

Alex Rodriguez, long known by his nickname A-Rod, has still earned more money playing baseball than any other player to date.

Yet even those big-money bona-fides aren’t enough on their own to buy a major sports franchise in 2025, as record valuations close the gates to all but the elite of the elite.

For Lore and Rodriguez to even consider leading this week’s $1.5 billion purchase of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, it took mega-deals and partnerships.

Lore would say it took VCP.

“I have a framework I call VCP: vision, capital, people,” Lore said in an interview this week. “It’s a framework to get everyone aligned on a shared vision, a shared strategy on how to get there, and building the right organizational structure to support it, making sure you’re well-capitalized and have a capital plan.”

Today, Rodriguez has an estimated net worth of $350 million. Lore is worth about $2.9 billion, per Forbes.

And as they became richer, part of their wealth strategy was to invest in other businesses. All that allowed the two to find the partners needed to buy the pro basketball franchises.

Lore, 59, walked away from a $500,000 salary as a banking executive when he was 27 to become an entrepreneur — even though he didn’t have a clear business idea the day he quit.

He settled on the Pit, an online sports collectible marketplace. He sold it to trading card giant Topps for about $6 million in 2001.

His next big idea — with co-founder Vinit Bharara, another serial entrepreneur who currently runs the sports betting company Mojo — was much more lucrative: Diapers.com.

The idea was to sell cheap diapers, the way he saw Target and Walmart selling them at a loss. A “loss leader” is a common retail strategy to get customers in the door to buy a necessity at a discount with the hopes they’ll load up their carts with other profitable products.

That wasn’t the case for online retailers back then.

“If you went on Amazon, they were $10 more,” Lore said last year on Rodriguez’s podcast, the Deal. “In the early days of e-commerce they marked up a box of diapers because they were heavy and expensive to ship.”

By offering bargain prices and overnight shipping, Diapers.com lost money on diapers but made money by “selling everything else,” including clothes, toys and strollers.

“The loss, albeit, was a lot larger, because you had to pay for shipping,” Lore said. “But you also had a lot more products online than in the store.”

Amazon bought the Diapers.com parent company, Quidsi, for roughly $550 million in 2010, and Lore joined Amazon for two years. (Amazon later shut down Diapers.com and similar sites like Soap.com for lack of profitability.)

But Lore was again looking to capture his own slice of Amazon’s online retail pie. With co-founders Mike Hanrahan and Nate Faust, Lore launched Jet.com in 2015. The focus was on lower prices, with discounts adding up for larger shopping carts, as opposed to faster shipping.

Walmart bought the business for $3.3 billion in 2016 and made Lore Walmart’s CEO for U.S. e-commerce, a role he held until 2021.

As the largest Jet stockholder, Lore received $477 million in cash from Walmart, the bulk of which was contingent on him staying at the company for five years, according to a company filing. Walmart also awarded him stock options worth at the time $235 million, which is what gave Lore a 2016 compensation package of nearly $237 million.

Walmart shut down Jet.com in 2020.

In 2018, while still at Walmart, Lore founded Wonder, a food delivery startup he says will one day be a “super app for mealtime.”

Already that company is another unicorn, with an estimated valuation of $7 billion following a $600 million fundraising round last month, according to Bloomberg. Wonder acquired Blue Apron and GrubHub for a combined $750 million over the past year.

Retail analyst Chris Walton scoffed at Wonder’s ambitions and said on his Omni Talk podcast last year, “I already have a super app; it’s called DoorDash.”

“But who am I to question them, especially Marc Lore; he sold two businesses that never made any money and don’t exist anymore,” Walton said.

Rodriguez, 49, became a millionaire not long after the Seattle Mariners drafted him first overall in 1993 when he was 17. Then in 2000, Rodriguez set a baseball contract record when the Texas Rangers signed him to a 10-year, $252 million deal. He broke his own record in 2007 with a $275 million 10-year contract with the New York Yankees.

Those deals have since been eclipsed by the likes of Juan Soto, Shohei Ohtani and several others. But in terms of money in the bank, Rodriguez has to date earned the most money from baseball, a figure Forbes pegged at $475 million when including an estimated $35 million in endorsements across his 22 seasons.

Rodriguez set up A-Rod Corp. in 1995 “on the theory that investing his MLB earnings wisely would protect him from the kinds of financial struggles that afflict too many professional athletes,” according to the firm’s official history. A-Rod’s first investment was a duplex apartment in 2003.

Real estate investment and development was the main focus of A-Rod Corp. for about a decade before investing in companies like Vita Coco, Snapchat, Hims & Hers and investing app Acorns.

Today, A-Rod Corp. reports investments in 30 companies and partnerships valued at more than $1 billion.

Rodriguez and Lore met in 2020 through a mutual friend. The pair co-founded VCP Ventures in 2021, named for Lore’s “vision, capital, people” framework.

“It’s proven to work out pretty well,” Lore said of his strategy this week.

The pair recruited several other investors to help finance their Timberwolves acquisition, including, reportedly, billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“We can’t talk about specifics, but just know Alex and I have over 50% and the rest is split across like a dozen different [limited partners],” Lore said.

Said Rodriguez: “I would just say that by far we’re kind of one and two, and then whoever comes after that is far below that.”

The duo’s latest investment, which the National Basketball Association Board of Governors approved on Tuesday, has already paid dividends.

The Wolves and Lynx are worth more than twice the $1.5 billion price tag agreed to in 2021.

Ownership comes with another lucrative benefit: a write-off that sports team owners can use to reduce their taxes owed by millions. Even if a measure reducing that benefit passes Congress, Rodriguez and Lore are grandfathered into the full write-off with the timing of the ownership change.

Star Tribune writer Chris Hine contributed to this report.