With a rumored purchase of the Mets, J. Lo and A-Rod are redefining relationship goals
Jennifer Lopez is becoming a once-in-a-generation mogul right before our eyes.
Hustlers helped propel her back to the forefront of cultural consciousness late last summer. Before that, she’d been selling out arenas on her “It’s My Party” tour. Everyone made a fuss over how incredible she looks at 50. She and Shakira murdered the Super Bowl halftime show just a couple months ago, in February. She’s engaged to retired baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez. The general perception is that JLo is living her best life.
What’s been flying under-the-radar is how much wealth, power and influence she’s been amassing right alongside renewed cultural clout. Forbes noted Lopez banked a whopping $47 million of her estimated $400 million net worth in 2018 alone, drawing earnings from music sales, licensing, acting credits and her Las Vegas residency. Last year, JLo performed 38 tour dates between June and August, raking in an estimated $54.7 million. And that just represents a sliver of her revenue in 2019 — the same year she acted and invested in Hustlers, which has earned back its $20 million production budget more than five times over.
Now, I don’t know much about being wealthy or powerful, but evidently when you’re either or both of these things, the fashionable thing to do is buy stuff. Or rather, “invest” in “opportunities.” And here’s a curveball (please excuse the pun): Variety discovered that A-Rod, longtime Yankee player, and JLo, Bronx native, are looking to buy the Mets, New York's underdog pro baseball team.
The Wilpon family, which owns the Queens team, announced they were thinking of selling last year. They were in talks to offload a majority stake in the Mets to hedge fund titan Steve Cohen, but the deal fell through in December. It valued the team at $2.6 billion.
Rodriguez and Lopez together are worth around $700 million, so they’d likely be looking to purchase a limited stake in the team. Fellow Yankees alum Derek Jeter struck a similar deal to become a part-owner of the Miami Marlins. He bought into the franchise for around $25 million and owns a 4% stake. Plus, he’s now in charge of the club’s business and baseball operations.
JLo and A-Rod would probably be looking to broker a similar deal. According to Variety, the power couple has tasked JPMorgan Chase with raising capital for the potential bid to buy the Mets. The trade-off for investors would be fairly simple: if they foot the bill to buy the team, then JLo and A-Rod’s influence help turn the Mets’ fortunes around, everyone involved could eventually be looking at a windfall. (According to Variety, whoever buys the team will assume annual losses of at least $50 million, so there’s lots of room for financial improvement.)
The celebrity couple’s interest in buying the Mets is a little reminiscent of Jay-Z’s stake in the Brooklyn Nets and Barclay’s Center. But that endeavor just underscores what high-rollers Lopez and Rodriguez really are. For all the noise generated by the rapper’s involvement in the Brooklyn venue and NBA team, he owned a fraction of one percent of those endeavors and got a couple million back when he sold his stake in 2013.
JLo and A-Rod may not be able to foot the entire $2.6 billion to buy the Mets, but they’d likely end up owning a decent percentage of the club. And while it’d be a bit screwy to have Bronx icons owning a baseball team in Queens, the potential purchase is telling of Lopez and Rodriguez’s surprising business acumen.
