NEW YORK _ The Mets announced Wednesday that hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen will "increase his investment" in the Mets, and that Fred and Jeff Wilpon will run the team through the next five years.
Left unsaid is how much Cohen is increasing his investment. Bloomberg reports that the Wilpons are "in talks to sell up to 80%" of the team to Cohen, a deal that values the Mets at $2.6 billion. Newsday also reported that Cohen will become the Mets' majority owner by 2025.
The sale price is the highest ever for a baseball team, and Cohen would be the richest owner in baseball.
"The Sterling Partners and Steve Cohen are negotiating an agreement in which Steve Cohen would increase his investment in the New York Mets," the Mets said. "As part of that agreement, Fred Wilpon will remain in the role of the Control Person and CEO for five years and Jeff Wilpon will remain in his role of Chief Operating Officer for the 5 year period as well."
The notoriously tight-fisted Wilpons first turned to Cohen in 2012, when they began seeking cash from minority investors after losing money in Bernie Madoff's infamous Ponzi scheme.
The Mets have been down this road before. They nearly sold a third of the team to hedge fund manager David Einhorn in 2011 for $200 million before talks collapsed. Cohen first bought his stake when the Wilpons decided to sell off a group of smaller shares after the Einhorn deal fell apart.
The Wilpon-era Mets, particularly since the Madoff scandal, have been hamstrung by the Wilpons' apparently limited budget. Just Wednesday, they lost starting pitcher Zack Wheeler to the Phillies in free agency. At the beginning of the decade, the Mets' payroll shrunk by nearly half as Fred Wilpon himself admitted "We were still getting revenues, lots of revenues, but those revenues were going to pay off debt."
While Fred Wilpon said in 2013 that those debts were gone, as recently as 2015, the team was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Cohen's original investment in the Mets was the 4% stake he bought in 2012. His stake cost $20 million, implying a value of $500 million for the Mets just seven years ago. Cohen and the Mets had discussed a 49% stake of the team back in 2011, but talks fell through. Not long after that, he had also tried to buy the Padres and Dodgers.
Cohen, a 63-year-old Long Island native, is extremely rich. His net worth has been estimated between nine and 12 billion dollars. The hedge fund where he made his money, SAC Capital, pleaded guilty to insider trading in 2013 and paid a $1.8 billion fine. Cohen himself was not indicted, though he owned 100% of SAC. Until its conviction, SAC Capital was one of the biggest and most powerful firms on Wall Street.
In the insider trading case, the SEC aimed to get Cohen banned for life from the money-managing business. He eventually settled with the government in 2016.
Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday bought the Mets in 1980, with Doubleday's family publishing company buying most of the team. Wilpon and Doubleday became equal partners in the Mets in 1986. The Wilpon family, including Fred's brother-in-law Saul Katz, bought out Doubleday's half of the team in 2002 for $135 million.
