LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers at a game against the LA Clippers at ESPN Wide World Of Sports Complex on July 30, 2020 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
Mike Ehrmann | Getty Images
As Disney considers a strategic partner for ESPN, Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger and ESPN head Jimmy Pitaro have held early talks about bringing professional sports leagues on as minority investors, including the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, according to people familiar with the matter.
ESPN has held preliminary discussions with both the NFL and NBA about a variety of new partnerships and investment structures, the people said. In a statement, an NBA spokesperson said, “We have a longstanding relationship with Disney and look forward to continuing the discussions around the future of our partnership.”
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Spokespeople for ESPN and the NFL declined to comment.
Talks with the NFL have occurred in conjunction with the league’s own desire for a company to take a stake in its media assets, including the NFL Network, NFL.com and RedZone, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks have been private.
The NBA and Disney have broached many potential structures around a renewal of media rights, the people said. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have exclusive negotiating rights with the NBA until next year.
Iger said last week in an interview with CNBC’s David Faber that Disney is looking for a strategic partner for ESPN as it prepares to transition the sports network to streaming. He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that meant beyond saying a partner could bring additional value with distribution or content. He acknowledged selling a stake in the business was possible.
Disney owns 80% of ESPN. Hearst owns the other 20%.
“Our position in sports is very unique and we want to stay in that business,” Iger said to Faber. “We’re going to be open minded about looking for strategic partners that could either help us with distribution or content. I’m not going to get too detailed about it, but we’re bullish about sports as a media property.”
Theoretically, a jointly owned subscription streaming service among multiple leagues could eventually give consumers new packages of games and other innovative ways to take in content.
The move would be a logical one for Disney as it tries to move past the traditional cable subscriber model and underscores how badly the company wants to find a solution for the sports network as its audience declines.There’s no better partner for sports content than the leagues, themselves.
Superficially, it may make less sense for the NBA and NFL, which sign lucrative media rights deals with many media partners that fuel team revenue and player salaries with a range of media companies.
Professional sports leagues could face conflicts of interest if they take a minority stake in ESPN. Owning a stake in ESPN may irritate Disney’s competitors, such as Comcast‘s NBCUniversal, Fox, Amazon,Paramount Global and Apple, who help make the leagues billions of dollars by participating in bidding wars for sports rights. Taking an ownership stake in ESPN could give leagues the incentive to boost the value of that entity rather than striking deals with competitors.
Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League may also want to get involved in any deal that involves the NBA and NFL, one of the people said. Involving multiple leagues in a strategic investment would be complicated and unprecedented. The MLB and NHL did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There would also be hurdles for Disney. ESPN also employs hundreds of journalists that cover the major sports leagues. Selling an ownership stake to the leagues could cloud the perception of objectivity for ESPN’s reporting apparatus.
Still, the leagues are already business partners with ESPN. It’s possible ESPN could put measures in place to ensure reporters can continue to cover the leagues while minimizing conflicts, but it adds another layer of complexity to any deal.
A streaming-first ESPN
ESPN is trying to forge a new path as a digital-first, streaming entity. Disney realizes ESPN won’t be able to make money like it previously has in a traditional TV model.
Selling a minority stake in ESPN to the leagues could mitigate future rights payments, allowing Disney to better compete with the big balance sheets of Apple, Google and Amazon. It would also guarantee ESPN a steady flow of premium content from the leagues.
Until last quarter, Disney’s bundle of linear TV networks still had revenue growth because affiliate fee increases to pay-TV providers — largely driven by ESPN — made up for the millions of Americans who cancel cable each year. That trend finally ended last quarter, according to people familiar with the matter. Accelerating cancellations have now overwhelmed fee increases, and linear TV revenue outside of advertising has begun to decline.
“A lot has been said about renting [sports right] versus owning,” Iger said last week in his CNBC interview. “If you can rent it and continue to be profitable from renting, which we have been and we believe we will continue to be, then there’s value in staying in it. We have great relationships with Major League Baseball, and the National Hockey League, and various college conferences, and of course the NFL and the NBA. It’s not just about the live sports coverage of those leagues, those teams, it’s also about all of the shoulder programming it throws off on ESPN and what you can do with it in a streaming world.”
ESPN would like to morph itself into a streaming hub for all live sports. Management would like to launch a feature allowing ESPN.com or the ESPN app to funnel users to games no matter where they stream, CNBC reported earlier this year.
While striking a deal with professional sports leagues wouldn’t be easy, Disney appears to be pushing the envelope on its thinking to prepare for a streaming-dominated world that includes its full portfolio of sports rights.
“If [a partner] comes to the table with value, whether it’s content value, distribution value, whether it’s capital, whether it just helps derisk the business — that wouldn’t be the primary driver — but if they come to the table with value that enables ESPN to make a transition to a direct-to-consumer offering, we’re going to be very open minded about that,” Iger said.
WATCH: Disney CEO Bob Iger talks to CNBC’s David Faber about ESPN and its future
U.S. President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook shake hands on the day they present Apple’s announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 6, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Apple shares rose 13% this week, its largest weekly gain in more than five years, after CEO Tim Cook appeared with President Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday.
Shares of the iPhone maker rose 4% to close at $229.35 per share on Friday for the company’s largest weekly gain since July 2020. The week’s move added over $400 billion to Apple’s market cap, which now sits at $3.4 trillion.
At the White House on Wednesday, Cook appeared with Trump to announce Apple’s plans to spend $100 billion on American companies and American parts over the next four years.
Apple’s plans to buy more American chips pleased Trump, who said during the public meeting that because the company was building in the U.S., it would be exempt from future tariffs that could double the price of imported chips.
Investors had worried that some of Trump’s tariffs could substantially hurt Apple’s profitability. Apple warned in July that it expected over $1 billion in tariff costs in the current quarter, assuming no changes.
“Apple and Tim Cook delivered a masterclass in managing uncertainty after months and months of overhang relative to the potential challenges the company could face from tariffs,” JP Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee wrote on Wednesday. He has an overweight rating on Apple’s stock.
Cook’s successful White House meeting also comes two weeks after Apple reported June quarter earnings in which overall revenue jumped 10% and iPhone sales grew by 13%.
In an aerial view, the Tesla headquarters is seen in Austin, Texas, on July 24, 2025.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Tesla has been granted a permit to run a ride-hailing business in Texas, allowing the electric vehicle maker to compete against companies including Uber and Lyft.
Tesla Robotaxi LLC is licensed to operate a “transportation network company” until August 6, 2026, according to a listing on the website of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, or TDLR. The permit was issued this week.
Elon Musk’s EV company has been running a limited ride-hailing service for invited riders in Austin since late June. The select few passengers have mostly been social media influencers and analysts, including many who generate income by posting Tesla fan content on platforms like X and YouTube.
The Austin fleet consists of Model Y vehicles equipped with Tesla’s latest partially automated driving systems. The company has been operating the cars with a valet, or human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat tasked with intervening if there are issues with the ride. The vehicles are also remotely supervised by employees in an operations center.
Musk, who has characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” said on Tesla’s earnings call last month that he believes Tesla could serve half of the U.S. population by the end of 2025 with autonomous ride-hailing services.
The Texas permit is the first to enable Tesla to run a “transportation network company.” TDLR said Friday that this kind of permit lets Tesla operate a ride-hailing business anywhere in the state, including with “automated motor vehicles,” and doesn’t require Tesla to keep a human safety driver or valet on board.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
As CNBC previously reported, Tesla robotaxis were captured on camera disobeying traffic rules in and around Austin after the company started its pilot program. None of the known incidents have been reported as causing injury or serious property damage, though they have drawn federal scrutiny.
In one incident, Tesla content creator Joe Tegtmeyer reported that his robotaxi failed to stop for a train crossing signal and lowering gate-arm, requiring a Tesla employee on board to intervene. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has discussed this incident with Tesla, a spokesperson for the regulator told CNBC by email.
Texas has historically been more permissive of autonomous vehicle testing and operations on public roads than have other states.
A new law signed by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott goes into effect this year that will require AV makers to get approval from the state before starting driverless operations. The new law also gives the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles the authority to revoke permits if AV companies and their cars aren’t complying with safety standards.
Tesla’s AV efforts have faced a number of challenges across the country, including federal probes, product liability lawsuits and recalls following injurious or damaging collisions that occurred while drivers were using the company’s Autopilot and FSD (Full Self-Driving) systems.
A jury in a federal court in Miami last week determined that Tesla should hold 33% of the liability for a fatal Autopilot-involved collision.
And the California DMV has sued Tesla, accusing it of false advertising around its driver assistance systems. Tesla owners manuals say the Autopilot and FSD features in their cars are “hands on” systems that require a driver ready to steer or brake at any time. But Tesla and Musk have shared statements through the years saying that a Tesla can “drive itself.”
Since 2016, Musk has been promising that Tesla would soon be able to turn all of its existing EVs into fully autonomous vehicles with a simple, over-the-air software update. In 2019, he said the company would put 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020, a claim that helped him raise $2 billion at the time from institutional investors.
Those promises never materialized and, in the robotaxi market, Tesla lags way behind competitors like Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China.
Tesla shares are down 18% this year, by far the worst performance among tech’s megacaps.
Shares of The Trade Desk plummeted almost 40% on Friday and headed for their worst day on record after the ad-tech company announced the departure of its CFO and analysts expressed concerns about rising competition from Amazon.
The Trade Desk, which went public in 2016, suffered its steepest prior drop in February, when the shares fell 33% on a revenue miss. In its second-quarter earnings report late Thursday, the company beat expectations on earnings and revenue, but the results failed to impress investors.
The Trade Desk, which specializes in providing technology to companies that want to target users across the web, said finance chief Laura Schenkein is leaving the job and being replaced by Alex Kayyal, who has been working as a partner at Lightspeed Ventures.
While some analysts were uneasy about the sudden change in the top finance role, the bigger concern is Amazon’s growing role in the online ad market, as well as the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on ad spending.
Amazon has emerged as a significant player in the digital advertising market in recent years, and is now third behind Google and Meta. Last week, Amazon reported a 23% increase in ad revenue for the second quarter to $15.7 billion, which beat estimates.
Read more CNBC Amazon coverage
Amazon’s ad business has largely been tied to its own platforms, with brands paying up so they can get discovered on the sprawling marketplace. However, Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP), which allows brands to programmatically place ads across a wider swath of internet properties, is gaining more resonance in the market.
“Amazon is now unlocking access to traditionally exclusive ‘premium’ ad inventory across the open internet, validating the strength of its DSP and suggesting The Trade Desk’s value proposition could erode over time,” Wedbush analysts wrote on Friday.
The Wedbush analysts lowered their rating on The Trade Desk to the equivalent of hold from buy, and cited Amazon’s recent ad integration with Disney as a sign of the company’s aggressiveness.
Executives at The Trade Desk were asked about Amazon on the call, and responded by suggesting that the companies don’t really compete, emphasizing that Amazon is conflicted because it will always prioritize its own properties.
“A scaled independent DSP like The Trade Desk becomes essential as we help advertisers buy across everything and that we have to do that without conflict or compromise,” CEO Jeff Green said on the call. “It is my understanding that Amazon nearly doubled the supply of Prime Video inventory in the recent months. That creates a number of conflicts.”
For the second quarter, The Trade Desk reported a 19% increase in year-over-year revenue to $694 million, topping the $685 million estimate, according to analysts polled by LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of 41 cents beat estimates by a penny.
Looking to the third quarter, the Trump administration’s tariffs were also a theme, as the company forecast revenue of at least $717 million, representing growth of 14% at minimum.
“From a macro standpoint, some of the world’s largest brands are absolutely facing pressure and some amount of uncertainty,” Green said. “Some have to respond more than others to tariffs. Many are managing inflation worries and the related pricing that comes with that.”
With Friday’s slump, The Trade Desk shares are now down 53% for the year, while the S&P 500 is up about 9%. The Trade Desk was added to the S&P 500 in June.