When the Los Angeles Dodgers square off against the Chicago Cubs for the Major League Baseball season opener in Japan’s Tokyo Dome this Tuesday, Dodgers co-owner Todd Boehly will watch with mixed emotions.

No doubt he’ll revel in the spectacle. Thanks to a pitching roster that includes three of Japan’s biggest stars—Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, and super-slugger Shohei Ohtani—Japanese fans practically think of the Dodgers as their national team. The Dodgers’ World Series victory over the New York Yankees last year drew an average of 12.9 million Japanese viewers; Game Two in that series had more Japanese viewers than Americans. Tickets for Tuesday’s game and a second on Wednesday sold out instantly, with premium seats on the re-sale market changing hands for as much as $20,000. The roar of the crowd inside the 50,000-seat “Big Egg” will be thunderous. Millions more Japanese will tune into the games on television. The Japanese media, which covers the Dodgers obsessively, is sure to whip itself into a frenzy.

But Boehly’s ability to appreciate all that excitement will be tempered by frustration that the Dodgers can’t cash in on it. The Dodgers, he argues, are the “obvious choice” to lead an effort to take MLB global—in a market where America’s national pastime has long been more popular than it is in the country where it was invented. Boehly sees that as a huge opportunity, not just to sell merchandise and broadcast rights, but to create high-tech, interactive experiences, where Japanese fans can virtually step up to the plate against Ohtani, or re-enact Freddie Freeman’s dramatic World Series grand slam. “We are confident we could do something in Tokyo and Osaka that would bring in a couple of million people every year,” Boehly says.

It won’t happen, he laments, because long-standing MLB rules stipulate that revenue collected from markets outside the U.S. must be shared equally among all 30 teams in the league. “If we’re told that we get only 3% of the business, that makes it hard to justify the investment. For us to plant Dodger-branded flags in Tokyo—which we’d love to do—Major League Baseball needs to figure that out.”

Figuring that out, as Boehly sees it, will require the MLB to recognize that it has an archaic governance structure that prevents the league from adapting to change and capitalizing on new opportunities. “When the constitution of baseball was written and all these agreements were made, the idea of global sports in a world where information and news moved around at the speed of light was just unfathomable,” he argues. Under MLB’s legacy rules, many of which were designed to reduce the advantages of better financed, free-spending teams like the Dodgers and Yankees, even minor changes in the way the league operates require the approval of 22 out of the league’s 30 teams. Boehly thinks that is too high a bar.

Boehly, a champion wrestler in high school and college, began his career in finance. But his knack for spotting and exploiting governance failure has helped him build a multi-billion-dollar sports and entertainment empire that includes some of the world’s most lucrative franchises. In addition to his 20% personal stake in the Dodgers, Boehly is co-owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, and co-controlling owner and chairman of the Chelsea Football Club. Through his holding company, Eldridge Industries, his investments in the entertainment industry include Penske Media (owner of The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Rolling Stone, and Billboard); Dick Clark Productions (the world’s largest producer and proprietor of live television programming); Fullwell Productions (producer of “The Big Bang Theory”); as well as licensing rights to the songs of Bruce Springsteen. In 2023, Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions acquired the assets of the Golden Globe Awards, prizing them away in contested takeover from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the non-profit group that had run the awards for eight decades.

In growing that empire, Boehly has developed a consistent management playbook. He is impatient with outdated rules, willing to make huge and often heavily leveraged bets, and takes an unsentimental, asset managers’ approach to balancing risk.

When the Dodgers came ups for grabs in 2012, Boehly was a senior partner at Guggenheim Partners, a Connecticut-based private equity fund. The Dodgers then-owner, flamboyant billionaire Frank McCourt, had been forced to file for bankruptcy because of a costly divorce settlement and string of bitter legal battles with the MLB. Boehly quickly assembled a coalition of investors that included Mark Walter, Guggenheim’s controlling partner, as well as basketball legend Magic Johnson and Hollywood mogul Peter Guber. The group paid $2.15 billion—the most anyone had ever spent to acquire a sports team at the time—to close the deal.

The purchase was widely lampooned as overpriced and overleveraged. But Boehly had worked out that, because of the size and wealth of the Los Angeles market, broadcast rights for Dodgers games were worth far more than skeptics understood. Within a year Boehly’s consortium had secured a media rights deal with Time Warner Cable worth $8.35 billion over 25 years—revenue the Dodgers then used to sign an army of blue-chip players and turn the Dodgers into the MLB’s second-most valuable franchise with an estimated valuation today of $5.5 billion. In recent years, the Dodgers have consistently led the league in attendance, revenue and playoff appearances. In October the team capped its transformation with a stunning five-game World Series victory over the similarly deep-pocketed Yankees.

One key to the Dodgers’ success has been the team’s willingness to pay top-dollar for star players, many of them from Japan. The MLB doesn’t have a salary cap for players, but since 1997 it has imposed a punishing “luxury tax” on teams spending more than a certain predetermined amount on payroll (last season the threshold was $241 million). Boehly doesn’t balk at paying it. The Dodgers’ payroll, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, is about $389 million, the largest in the league. The team pays an estimated $110 million in penalties, bringing its total outlay for player compensation to $500 million.

In December 2023, the Dodgers signed Ohtani to a record-breaking 10-year, $700 million contract, the largest in sports history. A few weeks later, the Dodgers announced that they had also signed right-handed Japanese pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto to 12-year contract worth an additional $325 million. Ohtani not only helped to recruit Yamamoto, he made the deal possible by agreeing to receive only $2 million annually from 2024-2033, deferring the remaining $680 million of his payout until after 2034. Under terms of his contract, Ohtani, who is now 30, will get annual payments of $68 million starting at age 40 until he turns 50.

That bet has paid off handsomely. In 2024, Ohtani became the first MLB player to hit over 50 home runs and steal over 50 bases in a single season.

Boehly credits Ohtani for proposing such a large salary deferment. “He was so thoughtful,” says Boehly. “[Dodgers president] Andrew Friedman would have never had the courage to go to him and say, ‘How about we defer, you know, $680 million of your $700 million?’ But Ohtani recognized that the only way for to him to become a true legend would be to win the World Series. And the only way to win the World Series was to build winning a team. So what he really offered us was the financial flexibility to be able to field a team that will make him a legend. That’s just staggeringly wise.”

It’s also hugely controversial. Critics charge the Dodgers’ lucrative broadcast deal and their massive spending on players give them an unfair advantage over other MLB teams that is sucking the soul out of baseball. The Dodgers have fanned the flame of those complaints by using deferred contracts more extensively than any other team, committing more than $1 billion in deferred payments to seven players, including Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Blake Snell, and Freddie Freeman. Other teams have emulated the strategy leading some to complain that MLB is doomed to wind up like European soccer leagues, polarized into permanent classes of haves and have-nots. 

Boehly bristles at the suggestion that the Dodgers are just winning championships simply because they throw more money at stars than other teams. But he’s also skeptical of the idea implicit in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, that small teams with limited budgets like the old Oakland A’s can hold their own against rich clubs like the Dodgers and the Yankees by using data and statistics to identify undervalued players.

Boehly says Dodgers’ owners are just taking an asset managers’ approach to maximizing their investment. “There are there are two versions of [the moneyball] strategy,” he argues. “The first version is where you’re playing a game where you are picking up pennies and turning them into nickels. In our version, because of our market, we have the ability to pick up gold bars and turn them into diamonds of the same weight. The market allows for us to play what some people call a premium game but we would call a value game. We’re able to play in the luxury market versus the discount market. There is still value to be had in the luxury market but you have got to make a choice. Are you going to buy player X at $300 million, or are you going to buy player Y?”

Boehly is grappling with a different set of challenges at Chelsea Football Club—so far with mixed results. The Chelsea acquisition, like that of the Dodgers, was born of owner distress. In 2022, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United Kingdom froze the assets of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who had owned Chelsea for 19 years, because of his perceived ties to Russian president Vladmir Putin. Boehly, Walter, and a third partner, Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, teamed up with Santa Monica-based private equity giant Clearlake Capital to purchase Chelsea for $5.25 billion—setting a new record for the most expensive team transaction in sports history.

Chelsea has forked out nearly $1 billion in net transfer fees to players since the acquisition, more than any other club in the league. Notably, though, instead of spending astronomical sums to lure individual superstars as have the Dodgers, Chelsea has built a roster of up-and-coming younger players and is trying to hang on to them with longer contracts that spread out amortization expenses. League rules allow for 11 starters per match, with only five substitutions. But Chelsea has built up a roster of nearly 40 players with an average age of under 25, by far the largest and youngest squad in the league.

That squad has yet to find its footing. Chelsea sank to No. 12 in the league table in 2022-2023 recovering to 6^th in 2023-2024. Despite the record transfers Chelsea posted a pre-tax loss in the three years to the end of the 2023-24 season and appears to have managed to remain in compliance with the League’s sustainability and profitability requirements only by selling the women’s football team and two hotels to its parent company. Revenue at the club declined 7% in 2024, according to Deloitte, even as revenue at rivals for four of the league’s other Big Six Clubs—Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool—improved.

Another difference between Boehly’s role at Chelsea versus the Dodgers is that, at the former, Boehly and his allies don’t have majority control. Although Boehly was the public face of Chelsea ownership in the first two years after the acquisition, he and fellow investors Walter and Hansjorg collectively hold only 38.5% of the consortium that owns the club while Clearlake holds 61.5%. It has been widely reported that Boehly has fallen out with Clearlake’s co-founder, Behdad Eghbali. The two men have sparred over, among other things, the decision to mutually part ways with head coach Mauricio Pochettino and plans to build a new stadium whether at the club’s traditional site, Stamford Bridge, or at nearby Earl’s Court. Boehly, Eghbali, and another Clearlake co-founder Jose E. Feliciano, each have veto power over all major Chelsea decisions. The Athletic and Bloomberg have reported that both private equity firms have explored the possibility of bringing in new partners to buy the other out.

Boehly has a firmer hand over the Golden Globes, although obtaining that was controversial and, as Boehly puts it, required a “knock-down, drag-out battle.” The Hollywood Foreign Press Association had long been mired in allegations of mismanagement, corruption, and sexual harassment. In 2021, when a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that the HFPA had no Black journalists, NBC dropped the show and no other television network would screen it. Boehly stepped in as interim CEO, and worked with HFPA leadership to expand and diversify the voting membership and establish clears standards and processes about how the awards should be run. But he eventually lost patience with the fractious group. In 2023, a for-profit partnership between Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions purchased intellectual property and broadcast rights to the Golden Globes. As part of that deal, the HFPA was dissolved and a non-profit entity was created to manage the HFPA’s philanthropic endeavors.

Several former members of the HFPA are suing Boehly for fraud. Critics have decried the deal for betraying the values cinematic excellence. “Once corrupt, the Golden Globes is now nothing but money in a billionaire’s bank,” fumed Evening Standard editor Alexandra Jones.  

Boehly is unapologetic. And in its new, private incarnation, the Golden Globes appears to be thriving. The awards ceremony was picked up by NBC in 2023, and last year signed a five-year broadcast deal with CBS. Boehly says comedian Nikki Glaser, who won plaudits for her performance as host this year, has agreed to reprise that role for the next three years. Where the old HFPA was a coterie of about 80-90 southern California-based some full-time, some part-time, and some with no clear professional roles at all, the reconstituted Golden Globes voting body is a racially and ethnically diversity group of 334 journalists based in 85 countries. The new Golden Globes has leaned in to diversity and inclusion even as many US political leaders leaned the other way. The awards now highlight a much broader range of international films and shows. As The Wrap’s executive editor Steve Pond put it: “The old body of Globes voters had the word foreign in their title…but their successors are apparently doing more to put the foreign influence into the show itself.”

The fundamental problem, Boehly argues, was that the HFPA leadership failed to recognize how technology had transformed the entertainment industry, enabling stars and studios bypass journalists to communicate directly with fans. It didn’t help that the board had to get 75% agreement from members to make any changes.

“Their inability to adapt was the root of their demise. They weren’t bad people. But there are market forces in every industry and if you don’t have the governance to respond..?”

As his empire expands, Boehly is looking to make bigger, bolder bets. He has many plans in motion. In Japan, he’ll meet with Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike and a mix of media companies and fin-tech investors. Then it’s off to Korea, followed by Hong Kong to attend a conference hosted by friend and mentor Michael Milken. In the U.S., meanwhile, Boehly is looking to build a nationwide network of elite sporting academies modeled on the St. James Performance Academy in Springfield, Virginia in which Eldridge is an investor.

“Now I am thinking about building platforms, not just making investments,” he says. “If I put an investment of $50 million into something and make $100 million on it, that’s great. But now I am getting to the point where $100 million doesn’t move the needle. What I need to be doing is figure out how to build platforms that create multi-billion-dollar value.”

When Yamamoto throws the first pitch for the Dodgers in Tokyo Dome tomorrow, Boehly will be there, looking down from his skybox, and swinging for the fences.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

China will take steps to revive consumption by boosting people’s incomes, according to the official Xinhua News Agency, as part of a plan that adds to recent pledges by the government to support demand in an economy threatened by Donald Trump’s tariffs. 

The guidelines that came from a State Council report set out other measures such stabilizing the stock and real estate markets, and offering incentives to raise the country’s birth rate. Investors await further clues from top officials during a press conference set to be held 3 p.m. Monday on steps to boost consumption.

Policymakers in China increasingly recognize that a broad recovery in incomes is necessary to encourage people to boost spending. At parliamentary meetings this month, the country’s leadership made boosting consumption the top priority of the annual work report for the first time since President Xi Jinping came to power over a decade ago. 

“Households can’t spend what they don’t have,” said Lynn Song, chief economist for Greater China at ING Bank. “While there are few new details on how the government will increase spending, the details of the plan show a greater determination to tackle China’s consumption problem this year.”

The latest effort, which covers eight areas, outlines plans to improve childcare and includes a pledge to enforce China’s paid leave system. Local governments have already started to increase support for social wellbeing, with Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, announcing new childcare subsidies. 

Ambitious goal

The program made public on Sunday elaborates on some of the measures announced by Premier Li Qiang earlier this month when he delivered the government’s annual work report to the national parliament in Beijing. China has set an ambitious economic growth goal at about 5% for 2025 and brought its fiscal deficit target to the highest in over three decades.

Lifting consumer spending is key to countering US policies that are upending global trade and causing a slowdown of Chinese exports, which contributed to nearly a third of the country’s economic expansion in 2024. At the same time, China is still grappling with a prolonged property slump that has suppressed demand and kept prices low throughout the economy while wages stagnate. 

Reviving consumption has been a challenge for the government since the end of the pandemic. Retail sales have been anemic while consumer prices fell into deflation in February for the first time in over a year.

Beijing will promote “reasonable growth” in wages and establish a sound mechanism for adjusting the minimum wage, Xinhua reported. It will also look at setting up a childcare subsidy system, as well as strengthening how investment can support consumption. 

“Compared to previous plans focused solely on supply-side improvements or old-for-new policies, the plan also touches on the need to improve income,” Jefferies analysts including Anne Ling wrote in a note. “We believe the government is placing more focus on securing the welfare of lower-income groups.”

Chinese stocks rallied the most in two months on Friday after the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced that officials from the finance ministry, the central bank and other government departments plan to discuss measures to boost consumption on Monday.

“With a few measures taking place such as trade-in extensions and maternity support by some cities, the guidelines could be read positively by the market amid the current rally,” Morgan Stanley analysts including Lillian Lou wrote in a note.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday blocking the deportations, but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.

In a court filing Sunday, the Department of Justice, which has appealed Boasberg’s decision, said the immigrants “had already been removed from U.S. territory” when the written order was issued at 7:26 pm.

Trump’s allies were gleeful over the results.

“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who agreed to house about 300 immigrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house immigrants, posted on the site: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”

Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it.

“This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Vladeck said.

The immigrants were deported after Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in U.S. history.

The law, invoked during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.

A Justice Department spokesperson on Sunday referred to an earlier statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi blasting Boasberg’s ruling and didn’t immediately answer questions about whether the administration ignored the court’s order.

Venezuela’s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of Trump’s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”

Tren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation’s economy came undone during the past decade. Trump seized on the gang during his campaign to paint misleading pictures of communities that he contended were “taken over” by what were actually a handful of lawbreakers.

The Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States. It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.

Video released by El Salvador’s government Sunday showed men exiting airplanes onto an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down to have them bend down at the waist.

The video also showed the men being transported to prison in a large convoy of buses guarded by police and military vehicles and at least one helicopter. The men were shown kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.

The immigrants were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centerpiece of Bukele’s push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights

The Trump administration said the president actually signed the proclamation contending Tren de Aragua was invading the United States on Friday night but didn’t announce it until Saturday afternoon. Immigration lawyers said that, late Friday, they noticed Venezuelans who otherwise couldn’t be deported under immigration law being moved to Texas for deportation flights. They began to file lawsuits to halt the transfers.

“Basically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense,” Adam Isacson of the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group, warned on X.

The litigation that led to the hold on deportations was filed on behalf of five Venezuelans held in Texas who lawyers said were concerned they’d be falsely accused of being members of the gang. Once the act is invoked, they warned, Trump could simply declare anyone a Tren de Aragua member and remove them from the country.

Boasberg barred those Venezuelans’ deportations Saturday morning when the suit was filed, but only broadened it to all people in federal custody who could be targeted by the act after his afternoon hearing. He noted that the law has never before been used outside of a congressionally declared war and that plaintiffs may successfully argue Trump exceeded his legal authority in invoking it.

The bar on deportations stands for up to 14 days and the immigrants will remain in federal custody during that time. Boasberg has scheduled a hearing Friday to hear additional arguments in the case.

He said he had to act because the immigrants whose deportations may actually violate the U.S. Constitution deserved a chance to have their pleas heard in court.

“Once they’re out of the country,” Boasberg said, “there’s little I could do.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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