First impressions of the Lightning’s new owners from Wall Street
TAMPA — Back in 2010, the Lightning were a franchise in disarray. The new owners had run out of money, fans had run out of patience and the organization was teetering on the edge of disaster. That is, until a low-key Wall Street investor from Boston saw something promising in this mess and decided to buy in.
All these years later, the Lightning are one of the premier franchises in the NHL. They’ve won more postseason games than anyone in the league the past 15 seasons and real estate is booming around Amalie Arena. And now, two more Wall Street investors are intrigued with the possibilities and have decided to buy in.
The difference is Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz will be able to ease their way into the world of professional hockey with Jeff Vinik remaining in control of the team for the next three years and staying on as a minority partner afterward.
So who are Ostrover and Lipschultz?
They are both self-made billionaires who got their start in finance at established firms (EF Hutton for Ostrover, Goldman Sachs for Lipschultz), went on to make a name for themselves investing in leveraged properties while at other institutions and then teamed up to start Owl Rock Capital Partners in 2016. Owl Rock, which essentially offered loans to businesses without a lot of the regulations of the banking industry, merged with Dyal Capital in 2020 to become Blue Owl Capital.
The firm is currently managing $165 billion in assets, according to Forbes.
That’s quite a leap forward for Ostrover, who grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood in Franklin Township, New Jersey, and Lipschultz, whose father owned a packaging company in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Ostrover, 62, graduated from NYU with what he described as “an OK GPA” and set about finding work on Wall Street by contacting every firm listed in a book called the Securities Dealers of North America. Of the 200 firms he applied at, only EF Hutton reached out.
“Just by luck at the bottom of my resume under interests I wrote ‘film,’ ” Ostrover told an interviewer at the Prime Quadrant financial conference in Toronto in 2022. “The guy who was interviewing me said ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ and I said, ‘The Godfather.’ He went on to tell me he worked as an usher in a theater and The Godfather had been in the theater for a year. We played Godfather trivia, and that’s how I got the job.”
Lipschultz, 55, left Minnesota after high school and earned an economics degree at Stanford in 1991 before getting his master’s from Harvard. After starting at Goldman Sachs, he spent more than 20 years at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. with an emphasis on the energy industry.
“When I first got to college, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the world of finance,” Lipschultz wrote on the social media platform X. “I had a physical copy of the Wall Street Journal delivered to my dorm room daily, so I could keep up on the latest news and trends. But as I read the paper each day, I realized that I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. When I started my career, I remembered that college kid who thought he had all the answers. I focused on keeping an open mind and welcomed opportunities to learn new things.”
The Lightning are not their first venture into professional sports. Both Ostrover and Lipschultz are minority investors in the Washington Commanders, and a division of Blue Owl has ownership stakes in the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, Atlanta Hawks and Sacramento Kings.
Ostrover lives in Connecticut, and Lipschultz is a longtime resident of New York.
John Romano can be reached at jromano@tampabay.com. Follow @romano_tbtimes.
• • •
Sign up for the Sports Today newsletter to get daily updates on the Bucs, Rays, Lightning and college football across Florida.
Never miss out on the latest with your favorite Tampa Bay sports teams. Follow our coverage on Instagram, X and Facebook.