We’ve all run this math ourselves, standing at a stadium gate doing quiet arithmetic on the parking, the tickets, and the beer that costs more than the tickets used to. Bernie Sanders ran the same math out loud this week: 31 of the NFL’s 32 owners, 26 of the NBA’s 30 and 26 of MLB’s 30 are billionaires, by his count, and taxpayers helped build the stadiums those owners now charge full price to enter. The post has cleared 22,000 likes. It’s also, by Sanders’ own account, homework he’s been doing since at least last October.
Those numbers deserve a caveat up front: they’re Sanders’ own tally, posted from his own account, not a figure independently audited by anyone who counts billionaires for a living. Treat every reference to them here the same way, as his math, not a verified stat. Here’s the post itself:
https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/2090459930738171933
The reaction underneath it tells you more than the exact figure does anyway.
What Did Sanders Actually Say This Time?
Sanders posted a tally putting 31 of 32 NFL owners, 26 of 30 NBA owners and 26 of 30 MLB owners in the billionaire class, and connected that concentration of wealth to rising ticket prices and taxpayer-funded stadiums. It’s a figure from his own count rather than an independent audit, but consistent with arguments he’s been making publicly since last fall.
The specifics track a line Sanders started drawing when the Los Angeles Dodgers reached the World Series last October. Asked about it on Axios’ “The Axios Show,” he told Alex Thompson he’s “not crazy about corporate and billionaire ownership of not only the LA Dodgers, but of virtually every major team,” and that his office is “going to get involved.” It wasn’t a throwaway answer to a softball question. The Dodgers, under ownership led by billionaire Mark Walter, carried the highest median ticket price in MLB for the 2025 season at $181, the exact kind of number that turns a grievance into a talking point people actually repeat.
Why Is This Sanders’ Third Swing at Sports Owners?
Count the receipts and this stops looking like a politician wading into sports for engagement: the Dodgers comments in October 2025, actual legislation in March 2026, and now a tweet putting a shareable number on the same underlying argument, three moves in under a year.
In March, Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced the Home Team Act, which would require franchise owners to give local communities a year’s notice and a fair-market chance to buy the team before relocating, and would end league bans on public ownership modeled on the Green Bay Packers. (I grew up a Packers fan in Milwaukee, so I’m biased here: it’s the one franchise already living proof the community-ownership model works. Two Super Bowls since the merger. No owner to blame when it goes sideways.) Sanders said the bill answers a public “sick and tired of billionaires threatening to move the sports teams they own to different states unless they get hundreds of millions in corporate welfare,” and that teams “should be owned and controlled by the fans who love them, not by the multibillionaire oligarchs” charging what he calls outrageous prices while taxpayers cover the stadium bills.
Go back further and the pattern gets older. During the 2022 MLB lockout, Sanders said the league’s owners were collectively worth more than $100 billion and pushed commissioner Rob Manfred to negotiate in good faith. Four years, one World Series and one bill later, he’s still running a version of the same play. (Three swings at the same target in under a year is either conviction or a formula that’s working. I’m not convinced Sanders’ office would mind if it’s both.)
Is Sanders Right About the Billionaire Math?
Broadly, yes, even if his exact tally doesn’t hold up number-for-number. Per CBS Sports, roughly two-thirds of NBA and NFL franchises and about half of MLB franchises are billionaire-owned, with 19 of the NFL’s 32 owners individually qualifying, well short of Sanders’ 31. That gap is worth sitting with for a second: it’s probably a methodology difference, Sanders likely counting ownership groups and limited partners where CBS counted only the controlling owner, not evidence he made the number up. Either count supports the shape of his argument. Neither confirms the specific figure sitting in his tweet.
Jerry Jones has run the Dallas Cowboys as a hands-on billionaire owner for decades, and Robert Kraft has done the same with the New England Patriots. Fans don’t need Sanders to introduce them to either name. They already argue about both at the bar. (Even the more conservative count, 19 of 32 individually billionaire owners, is a lot for a league that still asks cities to help pay for stadiums.)
Owners and their defenders would tell this part differently. Franchise values have climbed because ownership groups took on real financial risk, stadiums cost real money to build and staff, and ticket prices in cities where demand outstrips capacity track scarcity as much as anything else. That’s a legitimate argument, and Sanders’ tweet doesn’t engage with it at all. It’s just not an argument that explains why a small ownership class keeps capturing the upside while prices climb regardless of how the team performs that season, which is the actual thing fans are annoyed about.
I think the honest read here is that Sanders is handing sports fans a citable version of a grievance they already had, not a brand-new one. MLB’s ownership class is already fighting its own union over a cap, a reminder that the money fight between owners and everyone else, players included, isn’t limited to what fans pay at the gate. NFL owners have had their own credibility problems lately too, getting caught cutting corners on stadium turf among them, a different complaint but the same basic question about who’s cutting costs and who’s absorbing them. What’s actually new here is less the argument than the fact that a sitting senator keeps returning to it with receipts, and that a bill with his name on it is sitting in Congress right now instead of just living in his replies.
Whether the Home Team Act goes anywhere in Congress is the real thing worth watching, more than whatever exact number Sanders’ tweet eventually gets fact-checked into. Bills about team relocation and ownership structure move slowly when they move at all, and Sanders has been doing this long enough to know it. But three swings in under a year is hard to read as anything but a deliberate campaign, and the fans replying to his tweet aren’t waiting on a floor vote to already agree with him. Our NFL coverage will keep tracking wherever the owners land next, because Sanders clearly isn’t done watching either.
