You might be surprised that a Jacksonville businessman is interested in buying a major league sports franchise in the Tampa area, but you shouldn’t be. It’s happened before.
The Tampa Bay Rays said June 18 that Dream Finders Homes Inc. CEO Patrick Zalupski is leading a group negotiating to buy the baseball team.
This news comes more than 50 years after Jacksonville tax attorney Hugh Culverhouse became the first owner of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The NFL did things differently in 1974 than in 1993 when they awarded the Jacksonville Jaguars expansion franchise to Wayne Weaver.
Instead of choosing an owner, the NFL chose a city and then went looking for the owner.
In April 1974 the NFL awarded the expansion team to Tampa and in October 1974, Philadelphia construction magnate Tom McCloskey was named its owner.
However, McCloskey backed out of the deal and the NFL turned to Culverhouse.
Culverhouse had used his tax knowledge to build a fortune investing in real estate. He was already connected to the NFL because of an attempt to buy the Los Angeles Rams in 1972.
So, Culverhouse paid $16 million in December 1974 to acquire the Tampa franchise.
And no, he never gave any thought to moving the team to Jacksonville, and it’s unlikely that Zalupski would do it if his group is successful in buying the Rays. The Tampa metro area is nearly twice the size of Jacksonville.
Culverhouse became one of the most influential owners in the league and while he had moved from Jacksonville to Tampa after getting the team, he was credited with helping convince other owners to give a franchise to Jacksonville in 1993.
At least one other group is interested in buying the Rays, according to several news reports, but the team said the group led by Zalupski is in exclusive negotiations.
His investment group includes Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp owner Ken Babby.
The Rays issued the statement after sports business news site Sportico reported the group had a letter of intent to buy the team for $1.7 billion.
The Rays did not say anything about the price.
Zalupski founded Jacksonville-based Dream Finders in 2008 and built it into a Fortune 1000 company with $4.4 billion in revenue last year.
Forbes magazine estimated Zalupski’s wealth at $1.3 billion as of June 23, but it’s a moving target based on the price of Dream Finders’ stock.
According to a May Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Zalupski owns the equivalent of 59.76 million shares of Dream Finders stock, or 63.9% of all shares.
Those shares are worth about $1.3 billion based on the recent trading price of the stock. But when the stock peaked at $44.38 in March 2024, about double the current price, Zalupski’s stake was worth about $2.6 billion.
Dream Finders has two classes of common stock. Its Class A shares are the ones traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company had 35.8 million Class A shares outstanding as of April 30.
The company has 57.7 million shares of Class B stock that are entirely owned by Zalupski. The Class B shares are convertible into Class A shares but the Class B shares have increased voting rights with three votes per share on company matters, compared with one vote for each Class A share. That gives Zalupski voting control over the company.
The Class B shares represent Zalupski’s majority ownership of the company before its 2021 initial public offering.
Zalupski’s latest SEC filing indicates he has about 2 million Class A shares.
The Rays are seeking potential buyers after current owner Stu Sternberg’s unsuccessful attempts to reach a deal with local officials to build a new ballpark.
The Rays are playing the 2025 season in the New York Yankees’ spring training ballpark in Tampa because of heavy damage to its regular home, Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, from Hurricane Milton in 2024.
The Tampa Bay Times reported June 20 that Memphis hedge fund founder Trip Miller is interested in buying the team and is willing to pay more than Zalupski’s $1.7 billion bid.
The Rays statement said the team and the investment group would have no further comment during their negotiations.
Two years after PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan announced an agreement with the competing LIV Golf tour that has yet to be finalized, the Ponte Vedra Beach-based organization announced his successor.
Brian Rolapp, who has spent more than two decades as a business executive with the NFL, was named CEO of PGA Tour Inc. and PGA Tour Enterprises on June 17 and will become commissioner when Monahan retires at the end of 2026.
PGA Tour Enterprises is a for-profit organization formed in early 2024 with money from private equity investors, and is separate from the nonprofit PGA Tour.
The PGA Tour is a significant enterprise in St. Johns County. It opened a 187,000-square-foot headquarters building in 2021 off of Palm Valley Road west of Florida A1A, and added an adjacent 165,000-square-foot PGA Tour Studios building in January 2025.
The division of business operations between the for-profit and nonprofit organizations remains murky and would be further complicated by a potential merger with LIV.
In his first public comments after joining the PGA Tour, Rolapp told reporters at the Travelers Championship tournament in Connecticut that he’s not ready to talk about negotiations with LIV.
“I think that’s a complex situation that’s probably something I should learn more about before I speak,” he said, according to a PGA Tour transcript of the news conference.
Rolapp also said a $1.5 billion investment into PGA Tour Enterprises by the private equity investors has strengthened the organization.
“Where we deploy that capital, I have ideas. I don’t think I want to share them now, but that’s going to be part of the job to get in there and talk about it,” he said.
Bill Foley, another former Jacksonville businessman who acquired an expansion franchise in a different city, continues to expand his interests in European soccer teams.
Foley, chairman of Jacksonville-based Fidelity National Financial Inc., was awarded a National Hockey League expansion team, the Vegas Golden Knights in 2016.
He formed a company called Black Knight Football Club in 2022 to invest in the soccer teams, starting with its acquisition of British Premier League team AFC Bournemouth.
Cannae Holdings Inc., the investment company spun off from Fidelity, owns a 44% stake in Black Knight.
Since then, Black Knight acquired minority stakes in teams in France and Scotland and June 18, Cannae announced Black Knight acquired a majority interest in Portuguese team Moreirense Futebol Clube.
Foley moved from Jacksonville to Las Vegas as he pursued the NHL franchise.
Five days after completing its $925 million acquisition of Edge Autonomy, Jacksonville-based space technology company Redwire Corp. sold additional stock June 18 to help pay for it.
Redwire sold 15.525 million shares at $16.75 each, resulting in net proceeds after expenses of about $244.9 million, according to an SEC filing.
The purchase price for uncrewed aerial vehicle company Edge Autonomy consisted of $160 million in cash and the rest in Redwire stock.
The cash portion included a $100 million promissory note, and the filing said some of the proceeds from the stock sale will be used to repay at least part of the note.
Edge Autonomy was owned by an affiliate of AE Industrial Partners, the company that formed Redwire by merging space technology companies starting in 2020.
AE Industrial still owned 43% of Redwire’s stock before the Edge Autonomy deal and with the additional Redwire stock it received from the acquisition, AE Industrial again became majority owner with 60.2% of the stock, according to the SEC filing.
The sale of the additional shares reduced AE Industrial’s stake to about 55%, it said.
Redwire’s stock closed at $20.57 on June 16 before the announcement of the secondary stock sale.
The stock fell after the announcement and finished the week at $15.86 on June 20.
PureCycle Technologies Inc., a company briefly headquartered in Jacksonville last year, jumped to a 52-week high June 17 after announcing a $300 million capital raise from a group of new and existing investors.
PureCycle is developing a process to purify recycled plastic products.
The company’s SEC filings listed a Jacksonville office as its headquarters starting in June 2024 but in October, it began listing its principal office in Orlando, where it was previously based.
Most of the company’s operations are conducted at a plant in Ironton, Ohio, where it has been working to commercialize its technology.
PureCycle announced its first reported revenue, about $1.6 million, in the first quarter as it ramps up its operations.
“Following significant production progress at the Ironton Facility, momentum in our commercialization efforts and confidence in financing efforts, the time for growth is now,” CEO Dustin Olson said in a news release about the $300 million investment.
“Over the last several years, we have continued to invest time and resources in progressing our global growth plans and this capital will allow us to execute on those plans.”
PureCycle’s stock rose as much as $3.60 to a 52-week high of $15.47 on June 17 after the announcement.