The Seattle Seahawks are on the verge of changing hands in what would be the most expensive ownership transfer in the history of American professional football. The estate of the late Paul Allen has agreed to sell the franchise to the technology investor Vinod Khosla and his family for a reported 9.6 billion dollars, a figure that stands as the largest sum ever to change hands for a National Football League team.
The agreement would close one chapter and open another for a club that has been under the stewardship of Jody Allen, Paul Allen's sister, since his death in 2018. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, had bought the Seahawks back in 1997 and was widely credited with keeping the team from leaving Seattle, and his estate's decision to sell now hands the franchise to a new ownership group for the first time in nearly three decades.
One of the most striking details of the arrangement is who the league has designated as the person in charge. The National Football League has identified Niru Khosla, the wife of Vinod Khosla, as the controlling owner of the group, meaning she would hold the largest single share of the team. As the controlling owner she would carry at least a 30 percent interest, the threshold the league sets for that role, and she would do so having never before owned a professional sports franchise.
Niru Khosla is better known for her work in education than in sports. She founded the CK-12 Foundation, a nonprofit based in the Palo Alto area that aims to make textbooks and learning affordable and accessible. The organization has translated its material into dozens of languages and says it has helped hundreds of millions of people learn, spanning everyone from young children through adults studying English as a second language.
Her husband brings the deep pockets and the technology pedigree. Vinod Khosla is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and, according to Forbes, holds a net worth of around 14 billion dollars. He has spent years as a prominent investor in emerging technology, including artificial intelligence, and the family's fortune from that world underpins the record bid for the Seahawks.
The path to Seattle ran, somewhat unusually, through a rival franchise. The Khosla family bought a roughly three percent stake in the San Francisco 49ers in the spring of 2025, a modest holding that nonetheless required approval from NFL owners and the commissioner and gave them a foothold inside the league's ownership process. To complete the purchase of the Seahawks, the family would have to sell that share in the 49ers.
For now the transaction is not yet final, as it remains subject to approval by the NFL's owners, a step that could come as soon as late next month. Until then, attention in Seattle is focused on what a new era of ownership might mean for a Super Bowl winning franchise, even as the family, whose son is also involved as a long term figure in the group, remains largely unknown to the sports world it is preparing to enter.