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How Marc Stad, new majority owner of Timberwolves, made his money

Carson Hartzog and Victor Stefanescu, Star Tribune on

Published in Basketball

MINNEAPOLIS — Billionaire investor Marc Lore is selling his controlling stake in the Timberwolves and Lynx to a tech investor with the same first name.

Marc Stad, 47, is the founder and managing partner of Dragoneer Investment Group, a San Francisco investment firm that manages more than $35 billion in assets, according to the company’s LinkedIn page.

The firm has invested in prominent technology companies, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Spotify and Uber.

Stad is already a minority owner of the Timberwolves and WNBA’s Lynx.

Stad’s wife, Elisa, who worked in corporate marketing and sales, will represent the Timberwolves at the NBA’s Board of Governors, which generally oversees the league’s affairs.

Stad grew up in Montebello, Calif., a city of about 60,000 people, 8 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. He came from a family of five of “modest means,” according to an interview published by the Harvard Alumni Association, and was the first in his family to graduate from college.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University, Stad began his career as a business analyst at McKinsey & Co. He had short stints at Parthenon Capital and TPG, then spent five years as a portfolio manager at an investment group in Santa Barbara before founding Dragoneer in 2012.

He also received a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford in 2008.

At a November 2023 panel with Vista Equity Partners, Stad said he had “no vision whatsoever” that he would go into finance and once wanted to “go to Washington and save the world.”

He said he helped Robert Rubin, then a senior adviser at Citigroup, write Rubin’s endorsement speech for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.

When Rubin asked Stad about his plan, Stad said, Rubin told him to “go learn something about finance and business.”

Stad has consistently donated to Democratic candidates over the years, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics. In 2024, he gave $5 million to Future Forward, the leading super PAC supporting Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

 

Stad now describes investing as a “jigsaw puzzle.” He said at the 2023 panel that Dragoneer looks for promising public and private companies that are cheap because investors have “misunderstood” them or because they are young companies, like mobile payment platform Square.

After discussing Dragoneer’s 2016 investment in Spotify, Stad said, “You got to know what a great company looks like. And if you know what a great company looks like, and you know what too expensive looks like, and you avoid the things you should avoid, and you make concentrated investments, then you can make a lot of money — in most markets.”

Dragoneer’s reported holdings include stock worth about $1.37 billion in SpaceX, $548 million in semiconductor company AMD and $303 million in Amazon shares. The three holdings represented nearly 80% of the $2.83 billion portfolio disclosed in an August federal filing.

The new controlling owner met his wife, Elisa, at a University of Southern California football game, according to the Harvard interview.

Elisa Stad grew up in Boise, Idaho, in an immigrant household. Her Vietnamese-Chinese mother came to the U.S. in 1976 following the Vietnam War, the article said.

She graduated from USC in 2003 before working in corporate sales and marketing at corporations such as the Clorox Co.

Elisa Stad has spent the past few years as a children’s book author, penning a book about a girl who grew up in a multicultural family.

She has served on the board of a San Francisco children’s hospital and volunteered for a Buddhist organization promoting peace and education, the Harvard article said.

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This includes reporting from Patrick Kennedy of the Star Tribune.


©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

 

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