Somewhere in Los Angeles this week, a family fight broke out over something worth more than the GDP of a small country, and the funniest part is that nobody can actually agree on whether it happened.

That’s the state of the Lakers right now. (Not the roster, well, also the roster, we’ll get there, but the actual ownership of the franchise.) The Buss family, which has run this operation since 1979, is either selling its final 17.8% stake to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, or it isn’t, depending entirely on which sibling you ask and which lawyer that sibling has on retainer.

Here’s what we know for sure: five of the six Buss children, Jim, Johnny, Janie, Joey, Jesse, voted to sell their remaining piece of the team to the new majority ownership group, the one led by a media mogul and a venture capitalist who agreed last week to buy the Lakers for $12.5 billion. That number is not a typo. I need you to sit with it for a second, because I had to.

Twelve. Point five. Billion. Dollars. For a basketball team. That figure makes the Lakers the second most valuable franchise in the NBA, behind only the Warriors, and puts them ahead (not “in the conversation with,” ahead) of Real Madrid, Manchester United, and Ferrari’s Formula 1 team, each of them, individually. You could buy the winningest club in European soccer history and still have a couple billion left in the couch cushions for a Formula 1 team. This is what sports ownership has become: line the world’s most storied franchises up side by side, and an 82-game basketball team with a bench that needs work somehow eats all of them.

So, naturally, the family that’s owned this thing for 47 years is fracturing on its way out the door.

Jeanie Buss, team president since 2013 and the person who has actually been running the show, says none of this is done. Her lawyer sent a letter arguing that a 2017 court order makes her the controlling shareholder, that her siblings’ vote means nothing without her signature as co-trustee, and that anyone reporting she’s “out” got it wrong. Her five siblings, meanwhile, put out their own statement that amounted to: we’ve decided, we’re doing this, hope you’re well. Sold. Not sold. Sold again, depending on who’s talking to reporters that week. Somewhere between those two versions is either a finished deal or a lawsuit. Possibly both! We’ll see.

And look, I understand the instinct to connect this to something larger. The outgoing owner here, Mark Walter, bought the Lakers himself just fourteen months ago and is now flipping them at a $2.5 billion markup while federal investigators have his phone and his insurance companies are fielding subpoenas. Is that a coincidence? Is a guy under FBI scrutiny cashing out a franchise before things get worse for him elsewhere? And is that the shape of things to come, forensic accountants and AI-assisted number crunching making it a lot harder for a modern owner to keep the books quiet? I genuinely don’t know yet. Nobody does. But it’s the kind of question you start asking once you watch a $10 billion asset change hands twice in fourteen months.

To be clear, though: it’s Walter who’s under the federal microscope, not the Buss family. The Busses don’t need anyone’s permission to want out. The number on the table is one Jerry Buss’s kids will never see offered again, and their statement, boiled down, was basically: this is a great time to leave gracefully, so we’re leaving gracefully. Whether Jeanie agrees is an entirely separate, much messier question. That’s the one still actually unresolved.

Meanwhile, small reminder, the Lakers also play basketball. On the court, this season is shaping up to be genuinely interesting, in the nervous way as much as the exciting one. Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves are as good a backcourt as anyone not wearing Oklahoma City blue can trot out, full stop. The problem is what’s standing behind them. The Lakers did address the frontcourt this offseason, trading for Walker Kessler, signing Sandro Mamukelashvili, and on paper, that’s real size, more than this roster has had in years. But adding pieces isn’t the same as fixing a problem. Kessler has played five total games over the last two seasons because his body keeps saying no, there’s still no dominant power forward on this roster, and the Lakers are doing all of this with almost no draft capital in reserve if the plan doesn’t work. Oh, and LeBron James, the single largest scoring option this franchise has had for over a decade, is gone. That’s not a footnote. That’s a hole shaped exactly like a future Hall of Famer.

So here’s where it all lands: a franchise now worth more than Real Madrid, more than Ferrari, more than several small nations’ GDP, changing hands in a family dispute nobody can quite confirm is over, heading into a season where the two best players are terrific and everything behind them is a question mark wearing a $12.5 billion price tag. Nobody can agree the Lakers were sold this week. Everybody agrees they’re worth more than they’ve ever been. Funny how that works.