The Permanent Overclass
This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.
Football taught me rich people could be stupid.
Even as a kid, I’d seen plenty of movies and TV shows where rich people were greedy, cruel, vain, and unlikable. But stupid? Obviously, rich people are smart! Otherwise, how did they become rich?
But as any NFL fan knows, some franchises are just always bad. Superstars wilt when traded to these teams; top draft picks fail to live up to their billing. No coach can fix their problems. And when you look under the microscope at these teams, to understand why they never win or get their act together, there’s often a common answer: a billionaire, convinced of his own brilliance, swerving the team into a ditch over and over again.
Trust me. I am a fan of the New York Jets.
The Jets are owned by Woody Johnson, the fourth-generation heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, and Donald Trump’s appointee as ambassador to the United Kingdom in his first term due to his staunch financial support of Trump’s 2016 candidacy. (Johnson’s ambassadorship went about as well as the average Jets season.) Fourteen of the 32 NFL teams make the playoffs every year—43 percent of the league—but the Jets have not made it since 2010, even after changing coaches, general managers, and quarterbacks constantly.
NFL owners are the closest thing we have in America to medieval kings and queens.
In a survey of players conducted by the NFL Players Association, the Jets received an “F” grade for ownership; Johnson responded by calling the surveys “bogus” and hinted they violated the league’s collective-bargaining agreement. Despite having no football background, Johnson has repeatedly inserted himself into team affairs. In 2024, The Athletic reported that Johnson tried to influence team personnel decisions based on what his college-aged son, Brick, told him about various players’ ratings in the Madden video game series. (Yes, his son is named “Brick.”)
NFL owners are the closest thing we have in America to medieval kings and queens. This is true on a superficial level—they sit on thrones up in the luxury boxes and watch the armies they fund march against each other on a field of battle, wearing coats of arms on their chests and helmets—but also on a functional one.
As with kings and queens, NFL owners commission massive public works projects as monuments to themselves. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones—also the team’s general manager, who controversially decided to trade away the team’s best player the week before the season started—considers his crowning achievement to be the monumental stadium popularly known as Jerry World. Besides its size and looming scoreboard, the building’s most famous feature is the way the sun shines through its massive west-facing windows in the afternoon during the months when the Cowboys play games, causing Cowboys players to drop passes in the glare despite playing indoors. It remains unclear whether this was intentional or a billion-dollar oversight; Jones claims it is not a problem because “the world knows where the sun is—you get to know that almost a year in advance.”
As with kings and queens, you just kinda have to sit there while a rambling 83-year-old makes questionable decisions and says things like the world knows where the sun is going to be almost a year in advance.
As with kings and queens, NFL owners can force local governments to pay them tribute. Just ask taxpayers in Kansas, who are going to fork over billions to build a new stadium for the Chiefs in what’s being called the most lopsided deal in the history of public stadium funding. The previous most lopsided deal in the history of public stadium funding was just a few months earlier, when the Washington Commanders also got billions of dollars for a new stadium in the nation’s capital. Both the Chiefs’ and Commanders’ fantastically rich owners have enough wealth to build their own palaces, but that hardly matters; only three stadiums in the entire 32-team league were fully funded by private sources, without some kind of government subsidy.
And while our modern political leaders can be removed by elections—gulp, fingers crossed!—NFL ownership is hereditary, as with kings and queens, often leading to Shakespearean squabbles over inheritance. In the last decade, we’ve seen ugly, public family feuds after the death of Broncos owner Pat Bowlen (who failed to indicate which of his seven children would get controlling ownership) and during the final years of Saints owner Tom Benson, who cut out his daughter and grandchildren in favor of his third wife, Gayle, leading to his daughter alleging he was mentally incapacitated at the time. There were also sibling disputes among the Chargers and Titans.
Perhaps the most interesting season of NFL Succession came out of Buffalo. Many thought that Bills ownership would pass from Terry Pegula to his daughter Jessica—one of the top ten women’s tennis players in the world, not only a rare independently successful child of an NFL owner, but surely one who can understand what it takes to be an elite athlete, and therefore a strong candidate to run a team—but after Jessica wrote an article publicly revealing that her mother Kim had suffered brain damage after a 2022 heart attack, she was seemingly cut out of the succession plan. Terry fired Jessica’s husband from an executive position within the Bills organization, and handed equity to her half-sister, Laura, a daughter from Terry’s previous marriage.
This October, after the Jets got off to an 0-7 start, Johnson admitted that he was “obviously not a good owner in terms of winning.” But while “winning” feels somewhat essential in football, it doesn’t always make a huge difference for NFL owners. After all, they’ve already won.
IMAGINE THAT A LOCAL, BELOVED, award-winning restaurant in your neighborhood has just been sold to a new owner. Almost instantly, the quality of the food craters dramatically. It’s far worse than it was under the old owners, but also worse than the food at all the local restaurants nearby, even the sketchy place up the street that’s never open and that you think is a Mafia front. The price of the food skyrockets, and the owner starts charging for stuff that should be free, like tap water and condiments. The owner stops maintaining the restaurant—there’s paint falling from every wall, one time a booth collapses and sends customers tumbling through a wall into the kitchen, there’s an incident where an unknown liquid shoots out of a burst pipe and the restaurant stays open and keeps serving customers. The guy seems to be a straight-up fraudster, and he gets accused of holding onto tips that he was supposed to distribute to his employees. And he’s just an unpleasant guy to be around, as he constantly whines about his restaurant’s bad reviews. And worst of all, the restaurant’s waitresses say they get sexually harassed regularly by the owner and other employees.
Now imagine that when the guy finally sells the place, despite years of mismanagement, he’s actually able to find a buyer. And for some reason, the buyer pays the highest price anybody has ever paid for any restaurant in the history of the world.
The story you just read is the story of the Washington Commanders. When Dan Snyder bought the team for $800 million in 1999, they were one of the most successful franchises in the league, with three Super Bowl wins in the 1980s and early 1990s. Under Snyder, the team had the fifth-worst record in the league, and he was famously cheap and crass. During his tenure, he was investigated by Congress for deceptive business practices and for fostering a culture of sexual harassment. (And I wasn’t just making up random examples—there was an incident where a railing collapsed and sent fans tumbling onto players, and another where possibly sewage squirted onto fans.)
And yet Snyder still was able to sell the team for a $6 billion fee in 2023. (Yes, six billion dollars.)
Compare that to the franchise fee the NFL charged Tim Mara, a New York bookie and boxing promoter, for the right to found the New York Giants in 1925: $500. (Yes, five hundred dollars. If you adjust for inflation, it’s about nine grand, which despite appearances, is less than six billion.)
Early NFL owners were not the wealthiest Americans of their day, but hustlers. The founder of the Steelers, Art Rooney, was not one of Pittsburgh’s many coal or steel barons, but the son of a saloon owner who credited most of his early wealth to a big weekend at the racetrack fueled by a hot tip from Mara—although a 2022 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report suggests Rooney’s luck at the track may have been a cover-up for money he made off various less-than-legal rackets. They needed their teams to win to survive, and were often deeply involved in the actual football product. Bears owner George Halas was also a player and the team’s longtime coach, in part because he didn’t want to pay someone else to do the job.
Most importantly: A hundred years ago, there was actual risk to owning an NFL team. The fledgling league was a regional enterprise scattered in midsized factory towns across the Midwest, like Muncie, Dayton, and Akron. You may notice the NFL does not currently have teams in Muncie, Dayton, and Akron. (The only team like this that held on through the decades: the ownerless Green Bay Packers.) Fourteen franchises played in the first NFL season in 1920; by 1930, ten of them had folded. Many of the franchises that replaced those folded franchises also folded.
Those risks no longer exist. No NFL franchise has folded since 1952. It’s virtually impossible to imagine any team going bankrupt, or even losing money for a single season. (The Packers, the lone team required to report their annual finances due to their nonprofit status, did post a pandemic-related operating loss in 2020, but it was the first time that had happened in decades; they reported a record $80 million operating gain in 2024.)
And the descendants of the hardscrabble hustlers whose teams survived the NFL’s early years are now billionaires. Almost exactly 100 years after Mara bought the team for $500, in October 2025, his grandchildren sold a minority stake in the team at a valuation of $10 billion. That’s a 2,000,000,000 percent return on investment. Did I leave out a zero? Check my math.
THE NFL IN 2026 is an unstoppable cultural juggernaut. Football is not just the most popular sport in America—that competition essentially ended when Michael Jordan retired—it’s the nation’s most popular entertainment product, bar none. NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcast overtook American Idol as the most popular weekly TV series in 2011 and hasn’t looked back. In 2023, NFL games accounted for 93 of the top 100 most-watched telecasts in America. Last year, that number went down to 84 of the top 100, but only because the expanded playoffs for college football, the NFL’s de facto minor leagues, accounted for another eight.
As a result, the NFL has become an unstoppable financial juggernaut. Under the new broadcast deal that started in 2023, the league makes $10 billion every year in TV deals alone, before any fan buys a ticket, jersey, or hot dog. All in all, the league makes about $23 billion a year, almost triple what the league was making just 15 years ago, and as much as the revenue of the two next-highest-grossing American pro sports leagues, MLB and the NBA, combined.
Thus the value of NFL ownership has skyrocketed. The Carolina Panthers were the most expensive franchise of all time when David Tepper, the founder of a global hedge fund that made its fortune buying distressed stocks during the financial crisis, purchased it for $2.28 billion in 2018. That record was broken when the Walton family—yes, that Walton family, the Walmart Walton family—purchased the Broncos for $4.65 billion in 2022. That record was broken when Josh Harris, co-founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which a 2024 lawsuit accused of literally betting on whether senior citizens would die by acquiring life insurance policies on strangers, purchased the Commanders from Snyder for $6 billion in 2023. CNBC now lists the average value of an NFL franchise at $7.65 billion, which means that the next sale will probably rebreak the record.
This has fundamentally changed who NFL owners are. The great-grandchildren of the original NFL owners may be billionaires, but most of their wealth is tied up in their teams. And their mere billions are pocket change compared to the newer class of NFL owners, who have bought into a behemoth. The people who can afford to buy teams in the 21st century are not just rich, but the richest people in America.
The Walton family purchased the Broncos in 2022; the team’s principal owner, Rob Walton, has a net worth approximately five times larger than the second-richest owner’s net worth. (Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who purchased his franchise in 2010, is also related to the Waltons by marriage; he’s believed to be the fourth-richest NFL owner.)
There’s a cliquish clash of old money vs. new money in the league. Ken Belson of The New York Times reports that you can literally ID these divides by who sits next to who at league ownership meetings: Almost 100 years on from that fateful horse-racing tip, the Rooneys and the Maras still like to sit together. (Yes, the actress Rooney Mara is a member of both of these families, the great-granddaughter of the two team founders. No, she doesn’t show up to ownership meetings, yet.) While the newer, richer group of owners “are often focused more on maximizing their investments,” Belson writes, the older guard “view their job as that of a trustee.”
You’d think this would represent an existential threat for the mere billionaires, their relatively modest yachts staring down a looming tidal wave of wealth. But the NFL is built to make it hard to convert cash into wins. The league has a strict salary cap, and while owners are free to invest as much as they want on other accessories—the most expensive coaches, nicer practice facilities, etc.—the richest owners can’t simply outspend their opponents, as they can in baseball or European soccer. (In the NBA, the league’s richest owner, Microsoft founder Steve Ballmer, was recently caught in an embarrassing salary cap circumvention scheme to try to funnel money to his team’s superstars through bogus endorsement deals.)
The league-mandated fairness of the NFL is its secret sauce. The league is not skyrocketing in value and maintaining a chokehold on TV ratings by sheer chance. It is a phenomenally entertaining product, in large part because of rules that prioritize parity and exciting, competitive play. I just spent 18 hours in three days watching the six games in the first round of the NFL’s playoffs; approximately 17 of those hours were wildly entertaining, with five games decided in the closing minutes. (It is at this point, 2,500 words into this article bashing the NFL’s owners, that I must admit: The NFL is, overall, an extremely well-run league, in part because many of its owners are doing a good job.)
This can be a real shocker to billionaires used to an uneven playing field.
IN 2018, HEDGE FUND MANAGER David Tepper bought the Carolina Panthers, becoming the richest owner in the league at the time. (He’s been passed, majorly, by the Waltons.) Tepper is, by all accounts, an investing genius. A quote in a glowing 2010 New York magazine profile described Tepper as a “golden god” of investing; he is routinely ranked by Institutional Investor on their annual “Rich List” of the highest-earning hedge fund managers. Tepper has gotten used to using his billions to satisfy his whims; he reportedly once bought his former boss’s mansion just to tear it down, and told New York that “sometimes, if someone is an asshole, like a waiter at a restaurant, I think, I could just buy this place and fire that guy.”
But building a successful NFL team is harder than getting vengeance on a waiter. Tepper has been very hands-on in Panthers management, with exclusively poor results. The team hasn’t had a winning season since he bought the team in 2018, and has the third-worst record in the league since his purchase. (Last place, of course: Woody Johnson’s Jets.) Twice, Tepper has hired a coach only to fire them within two seasons. Tepper is believed to be the driving force behind a disastrous trade to take quarterback Bryce Young with the first pick in the 2023 draft.
Tepper’s temper keeps getting the better of him. In 2023, he was fined for throwing a drink at a fan from his luxury box; in 2024, he stopped into a local restaurant to confront employees about a sign on a marquee making fun of his meddling. It’s “really nice we have an owner who wants to win,” the bar’s owner told The Charlotte Observer. “This is me expressing frustration because, believe it or not, I actually lose more of my income when the Panthers lose than he does.”
An astute observation. Tepper literally doesn’t lose money when the Panthers lose. The runaway financial success of the NFL makes it virtually impossible for ownership to lose money. No matter how poorly an owner behaves, or how poorly their team performs, they can’t come close to derailing the machine that gets all the owners paid.
But even if Tepper did lose money when the Panthers lose, it would be a drop in the bucket to the new, mega-rich owners like Tepper. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Tepper compared the tens of millions in profit he makes every year from the Panthers to “a T-bill type investment, like Treasuries.” That’s billionaire-speak for “boring chump change.” Tepper and other billionaires like him get into NFL ownership not for the money, but because it offers them an opportunity to prove their brilliance at a larger scale, achieving a level of fame and notoriety you simply can’t get from being a CEO or hedge fund manager.
They don’t always get what they want. Our society inoculates the wealthy from failure. Their wealth can sway elections and bend the justice system in their favor. But they can’t guarantee their quarterback will pan out or their offensive line will dominate the line of scrimmage.
It’s got to be jarring. The billionaires who own NFL teams have gone through life winning in any number of “serious endeavors”—finance, technology, energy—only to find themselves flummoxed by something as trivial as football. A game! Guys throwing a ball and hitting each other! But when they have to go head-to-head in a fair competition against others like them, they don’t always win.
It’s a little depressing that our beloved teams are but the playthings of unqualified billionaires. But then again, what in our American lives is not dependent on the whims of unqualified billionaires? At least with football, we can boo them.
The post The Permanent Overclass appeared first on The American Prospect.