LeBron James’ retirement timeline remains unclear, but his business partner is already mapping out what comes next.
Maverick Carter appeared at last week’s Semafor World Economy gathering and laid out how he and James are thinking about life after basketball, notably that it does not involve a desk at ESPN, NBC, or Amazon. Carter told Semafor that 15 or 20 years ago, the obvious path for someone of James’ profile would have been a career in sports broadcasting. The media landscape has changed enough that it is no longer the only option, or even the most attractive one.
“We have a team of people that can produce and create at a high caliber,” Carter said. “So he is actually going to come to us with what his vision is. How does he want to keep creating content and telling stories that connect with his fans? And how do we build a suite of shows around that? And then the beauty of it is, today, distribution is everywhere. So someone like LeBron’s caliber is a big draw. You can get distribution anywhere and really connect with people and build a show, just us, without anybody else.”
The infrastructure Carter is describing is Fulwell, the media and entertainment company with which he and James merged their production company SpringHill in 2024. Carter told Semafor that SpringHill was well ahead of Fulwell on the digital side — he pointed to the Mind the Game podcast as an example — but that Fulwell’s live production capabilities gave the combined company something SpringHill didn’t have on its own. The merged entity has several high-profile live projects in development, including the broadcast of the Grammys and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2028 Olympics.
Which is to say: the business is ready. The question is whether James is.
James has been publicly noncommittal about his retirement for months, and nothing about this season has forced the issue. His relationship with Jeanie Buss has reportedly frayed, and on multiple occasions, Charles Barkley made clear that he thought James should hang it up sooner rather than later. The questions about what comes next have followed him all year. The one thing that kept him tethered to the court was playing alongside Bronny, a goal James pursued so single-mindedly that it drew criticism from nearly every corner of the media, weathered it, and got what he wanted.
That chapter is written. The Lakers are facing the Houston Rockets in the first round of the playoffs, and depending on how that series goes, James could walk away from the game as soon as this month. Carter’s message at Semafor was essentially that the timeline doesn’t change the plan. The business he and James have spent two decades building was never contingent on how long he kept playing. It was contingent on him still being LeBron James, which — retired or not — he will be.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.