Meet The Billionaire Owners Facing Off In The 2026 World Series

Amid the celebration of last week’s National League Championship Series-clinching win over the Los Angeles Dodgers, Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio couldn’t help but think back to a comment from a news conference when he was preparing to take over the team. On that day in 2004, Attanasio recalled, a reporter sitting in the front row had told him, “You won’t be so cheery when you lose for another 26 years.”

“So here we are, 22 years later,” the 69-year-old billionaire said from the field at Dodger Stadium, chuckling after his Brewers had clinched the franchise’s first World Series berth since 1982. “We beat the standard.”

The victory was especially sweet coming against Los Angeles, which had swept Milwaukee in the same round of the playoffs just last year. While the Brewers won an MLB-best 103 games in the regular season, they had the air of an underdog facing off with the Dodgers, who spent more than $300 million on their roster this year and are valued at $7.8 billion in part because they are based in the nation’s second-largest market.

In the World Series, which begins Friday night, Milwaukee will be more evenly matched—at least from a financial standpoint—with the Tampa Bay Rays. The Brewers ranked 21st on Forbes’ 2026 list of MLB’s most valuable teams, at $1.9 billion, while playing in the United States’ 41st-largest metropolitan area with baseball’s 19th-highest payroll, at $146 million, according to Spotrac. The Rays, meanwhile, make their home in the country’s 17th-largest metro area and are 24th in baseball with their valuation ($1.7 billion) and 28th with their payroll ($96 million).

The comparison is particularly appropriate this year as Major League Baseball heads into a labor battle that could challenge the economic foundations of the sport. With the league’s collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union set to expire in December, owners are pushing for a salary cap, arguing that it would help level the playing field between big- and small-market teams while also driving up team values.

But as the World Series’ opposing owners demonstrate, even the current system is working out pretty well, both for their squads and for their wallets. Attanasio bought the Brewers in 2005 for $223 million ($394 million adjusted for inflation), which translates to an annual return of 10.7%—beating the S&P 500’s 9.4% gain in the same timeframe. Forbes now estimates his net worth at $1.9 billion. And Rays owner Patrick Zalupski, who is worth an estimated $1 billion, purchased the team in September 2025 at a valuation of roughly $1.7 billion—$450 million beyond Forbes’ estimate months earlier.

As both teams seek their first World Series title ever, here is how each owner first made his fortune.

Milwaukee Brewers: Mark Attanasio

Born in the Bronx, where he grew up rooting for the New York Yankees, Attanasio graduated from Columbia Law School in 1982 and worked at the prestigious firm Debevoise & Plimpton. By his third year, he was having second thoughts about spending the rest of his career climbing the ranks toward partnership. “I didn’t want my whole life planned out at 26,” he later recalled.

After moving to California to join Drexel Burnham Lambert, the Wall Street investment bank that helped popularize junk bonds, Attanasio initially worked in mergers and acquisitions but became more interested in trading. He left the firm in 1991 and cofounded Crescent Capital Group, a Los Angeles-based investment firm specializing in corporate debt that now has $53 billion in assets under management.

In 2005, Attanasio took control of the Brewers by purchasing a 45% stake from the family of Bud Selig, who had stepped away from the team to become MLB’s commissioner in 1998. During Attanasio’s tenure, Milwaukee has ranked no higher than 13th with its payroll, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, and has relied on developing young players rather than pursuing expensive free agents. For example, in December 2023, the Brewers signed outfielder Jackson Chourio to an eight-year, $82 million contract extension before he had played a single major league game, at the time a record guarantee for a player with no MLB experience. Chourio has since become the youngest player in league history to record multiple seasons with at least 20 home runs and 20 stolen bases.

Attanasio is also currently leading a major renovation of the Brewers’ American Family Field, financed by $500 million in public money alongside a contribution of more than $100 million by the team. The agreement will keep the franchise in Milwaukee until at least 2050, with the stadium’s next upgrade set to be unveiled in 2027 in the form of a premium club behind home plate called the Truss Club.

Attanasio has expanded his sports portfolio beyond baseball to include a majority stake in second-division English soccer club Norwich City and minority stakes in the American Hockey League’s Milwaukee Admirals and Strategic Sports Group, which agreed in 2024 to invest up to $3 billion in the PGA Tour’s commercial arm, PGA Tour Enterprises. He also serves on MLB’s executive council and chairs the league’s investment committee.

Tampa Bay Rays: Patrick Zalupski

While Attanasio spent more than two decades building the Brewers into a championship contender, the 45-year-old Zalupski has reached the World Series barely a year after buying the Rays, having led the group that took control of the team from Stuart Sternberg.

Born in the suburbs of Detroit, Zalupski moved frequently as a child before earning a finance degree from Stetson University in Florida. He then worked in auditing at FedEx and began helping his mother with her real estate business in Jacksonville, flipping his first property in 2004.

Four years later, as the housing market downturn reduced construction costs, Zalupski teamed up with construction partner Mark McGuigan and his wife, Tobi, to launch Dream Finders Homes. The company built just 27 homes in 2009, but its business took off as the market recovered. By 2013, Dream Finders had sold more than 1,000 homes.

Zalupski eventually bought out the McGuigans for an undisclosed sum and expanded the company beyond Florida into Georgia, Colorado and Texas, taking the company public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 and building his net worth to an estimated $2.3 billion by 2024. He still owns more than half of Dream Finders’ shares and controls about 85% of its voting rights, although he is now worth closer to $1 billion, according to Forbes estimates, amid a 56% decline in the company’s stock price over the past year.

With the Rays, making their third World Series appearance after falling short in 2008 and 2020, the billionaire homebuilder has another real estate problem to solve. Under Sternberg—who has reportedly retained a roughly 10% stake in the franchise alongside his partners, although they are expected to sell their remaining shares in the coming years—the club spent years searching for a replacement for Tropicana Field, the 36-year-old stadium in St. Petersburg that is widely considered MLB’s worst current ballpark. The situation was made worse when Hurricane Milton shredded the Trop’s domed roof in October 2024, forcing the Rays to spend the 2025 season at the New York Yankees’ spring training facility in nearby Tampa.

Rays CEO Ken Babby “wouldn’t even let me visit [the Trop] before we purchased the team because he thought if I saw it, I wouldn’t go through with the deal,” Zalupski recently told Sports Business Journal.

Meanwhile, Sternberg withdrew from a $1.3 billion plan to build a new stadium next to Tropicana Field, blaming cost increases tied to damage and financing delays resulting from the storm.

The Rays ultimately returned to a repaired Tropicana Field in April, but Zalupski has quickly moved to secure the team a new home. In August, Tampa’s City Council and the Hillsborough County Commission approved a combined $876 million in funding toward a $2.3 billion ballpark and mixed-use entertainment district on the campus of Hillsborough College. The Rays are reportedly committing more than $1.3 billion, plus cost overruns, toward the stadium, which is expected to open in 2029 as the anchor of a larger development that will feature housing, entertainment and retail outlets.

As Zalupski fine-tunes the design of the stadium, he could soon find himself with a pretty desirable piece of decor: a championship banner.

More From Forbes

This article was originally published on Forbes.com