Baseball · Caribbean
A Caribbean-Born Billionaire Just Bought Baseball’s Most Expensive Team
José E. Feliciano, raised in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and his wife Kwanza Jones now control the San Diego Padres after a record US$3.9 billion purchase. Jones is reported to be the first Black woman to hold majority ownership of a Major League Baseball club.
For decades the Caribbean has supplied Major League Baseball with many of its brightest stars. This week it supplied an owner. José E. Feliciano, born and raised in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and his wife Kwanza Jones have taken control of the San Diego Padres in a record US$3.9 billion deal, the largest sale of an MLB club on record.
Major League Baseball’s 30 owners approved the purchase unanimously, and the deal closed on Friday. The couple were introduced at Petco Park on Monday. The price tops the previous record of US$2.42 billion, set when Steve Cohen bought the New York Mets in 2020, and ranks among the most expensive franchise sales in North American sport.
Feliciano is no stranger to the winning side of a deal. He studied engineering at Princeton and earned an MBA at Stanford before co-founding the investment firm Clearlake Capital in 2006, which today manages well over US$90 billion and helped fund the purchase of the English football club Chelsea in 2022. Jones, a Princeton graduate, artist and investor, won Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater as a student and later joined its board.
A boy from Bayamón now owns the most expensive team in the history of American baseball.
The history runs deeper than the price. The couple jointly lead the ownership group, and Feliciano was named the club’s official control person, the individual the league recognises as running the franchise. Reporting places the group’s stake at more than 40 percent. Within that arrangement, Jones is reported to be the first Black woman to hold majority ownership of an MLB team, a milestone in a sport whose ownership ranks have almost never included a Black woman.
The Caribbean connection does not end with a birthplace. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Feliciano and Jones pledged through their Supercharged Initiative to match donations for relief. The Padres, for their part, field a roster shaped by the same Latino and Caribbean talent pipeline that runs through the whole of the sport.
None of this draws a direct line to Kingstown. Feliciano’s roots are in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and baseball has never been St. Vincent’s game. But for a diaspora long used to watching the ownership box filled by others, a Caribbean-born billionaire and the first Black woman to hold a majority stake in a baseball club is a milestone worth marking. The people who usually fill the stands are, this time, at the head of the table.
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