Part IThe Story
In August of 1988, in ninety-eight-degree heat, a sixteen-year-old in suburban Philadelphia built a ski run out of ice. It was 142 feet long. It weighed 45,000 pounds. It existed so that customers of Mike's Ski Shop in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, could step into bindings they had not yet paid for and slide down something resembling a mountain in the dead middle of summer, a month when no rational person in the Delaware Valley was thinking about snow. The owner of the shop, who had turned sixteen on July 21, explained the idea to a reporter from Small Business Chronicle that September with the composure of a man three times his age and the logic of a boy who had just discovered he could talk his way into anything.
— Michael Rubin, age 16, to Small Business Chronicle, September 1988I believe there are two types of business people — risky and rational. And since I am the risky type, a ski run in 98 degree weather sounds great to me!
The record does not say how long the ice lasted. It says only that it was built, and that it was built in August, and that the person who built it thought this was obviously the correct thing to do.
The winter that followed is better documented. It did not snow. Rubin, who by then owned shops in Conshohocken and Bryn Mawr and had hired managers to run them while he attended high school on a co-op schedule that let him leave campus at 11 a.m., watched his sales evaporate. He owed creditors somewhere north of $100,000. He had, in the version he told the Philadelphia Inquirer decades later, spent "the first couple weeks" thinking: I'm done, I suck. I'm a failure. He was not yet old enough to vote. He was, a bankruptcy attorney informed him, not technically old enough to go bankrupt.
So there it is, the whole of it, compressed into a single year of a single adolescence: a boy who could manufacture winter in August and could not make it snow in January. Everything Michael Rubin has built since — the closeout empire, the e-commerce plumbing, the $2.4 billion sale to eBay, the buyback of what eBay didn't want, the jerseys and the trading cards and the sportsbook and the prediction market and a festival in the Javits Center that in July 2026 drew 200,000 people and cost, by his own estimate, $80 million to $90 million to put on — can be read as a long, expensive, increasingly sophisticated argument with that winter. Control the moment, or the moment controls you. Own the factory, or the weather owns the factory.
He is fifty-four now. He is, depending on the ledger, worth somewhere in the vicinity of $11.5 billion. He describes himself, in public, at retail conventions, as a scrappy entrepreneur, a man who doesn't read, and a degenerate gambler. All three are partly true. None of them is the whole thing.
By the Numbers
From a Basement in Lafayette Hill
$2,500Bar mitzvah gifts that seeded his first ski shop
$2.4BeBay's price for GSI Commerce in 2011
$31BFanatics valuation after its December 2022 round
~$13BRevenue Fanatics expects in 2026
22,000+Employees across 80+ locations worldwide
200,000Fans at Fanatics Fest NYC, July 2026
$1.1MPaul Skenes debut-patch card — the highest-selling relic card ever
The Lease the Other Parent Signed
The parents were Paulette and Ken. She was a psychiatrist; he was a veterinarian. One spent her working life listening to people explain themselves, the other treating creatures that could not, and between them in a house in Lafayette Hill they raised a son who at eight was already running a small labor operation — "shoveling driveways with 10 kids working for me," he would recall at twenty-seven — and selling vegetable seeds door to door, and printing stationery on an Apple II Plus to sell door to door as well. At nine he told his parents' friends that when he grew up he wanted to be a millionaire. At summer camp he tried to sell baseball cards to his friends' fathers. "I don't think I ever got my parents in trouble," he told Entrepreneur in 1999, "but I always created stories to be told and situations to be dealt with."
The interest in business worried his parents, which is the kind of detail that sounds like a joke until you remember who the parents were. A psychiatrist knows what fixation looks like.
He was, by his own repeated and unsentimental account, a bad student and a bad athlete. "If I'm being honest," he told the Inquirer in 2024, "the way it started was being a bad student, and bad athlete, but really loving business." The one sport he could actually do was skiing. On a school ski trip at twelve he learned to tune skis, and back home in the basement he set up shop: a vise, a sharpening blade, an iron, and wax, the whole kit purchased for $100. He put fliers on the windshields of cars in a local mall parking lot. At thirteen a competitor — "a guy who'd been in business for 50 years," as Rubin described him — complained, and the boy was banned from the mall. It is the first recorded instance of an incumbent trying to lock Michael Rubin out of a market. It would not be the last, and it is worth keeping the mall in mind; malls recur in this story with the persistence of a bad dream.
Somewhere in those years he met Brett Bauman, who owned a ski and sail shop up in Quakertown. Bauman is a minor figure in the record, a man glimpsed rather than profiled, but his contribution was precise and consequential: he gave a teenager access to out-of-season merchandise, the gear nobody wanted in April, and the teenager sold it on consignment out of his parents' basement. Rubin grossed $25,000 the first year. What Bauman handed him, though neither of them could have named it, was a theory of value — that the most interesting price in retail is the one attached to things that arrived at the wrong time.
At fourteen he had the $2,500 his bar mitzvah had yielded, in which he had, he said, "zero interest" spending on leisure. He found a storefront at $844 a month, available month-to-month. The way he got the lease signed has become one of the canonical Rubin anecdotes, and he has told it enough times that it has acquired the polish of a parable, which does not make it untrue. "I said, 'Hey, Mom, I want to open a ski shop,'" he recalled. She said, in his 2010 New York Times telling, "No, absolutely not." So he went to his father — "without mentioning that I had asked my mom." His father co-signed. The son had promised a report card full of A's. "I'm just saying," he explained in 1999, "I was fast enough to get to my father before my mom got to [him]."
The first Mike's Ski & Sport sat in the Plymouth Square Shopping Center at the corner of Butler and Ridge Pikes. Another opened in Bryn Mawr. The count by the time he finished school, depending on which account you read, was three or five, with stores reaching into New York state. He bought a Porsche around his sixteenth birthday — before, in one telling, he was old enough to drive it — and informed his parents after the fact. "She was not happy," he said of his mother. "She was definitely not very happy."
Then the ice ramp. Then the winter.
The numbers from that collapse shift every time he tells it, and the shifting is itself a kind of evidence. To the Times in 2010 he was $120,000 in debt and settled for $37,000. At Wharton in 2019 it was $200,000 in bills against $100,000 in inventory, plus the Porsche, settled for $38,000. To the Inquirer in 2024, a $100,000 hole and a $30,000 settlement, with "several lawsuits" along the way. The figure is less important than its shape: a teenager who had overextended himself into a weather-dependent business and lost, rescued by his father on one condition. Ken Rubin would lend the money if Michael went to college.
Michael agreed. Within the year — still in high school, still technically on the hook to his father — he heard about $200,000 of ski inventory being offered for $17,000. His father, reasonably, declined to lend him another dime. So he borrowed the $17,000 from his neighbor's uncle and resold the lot to ski shops around the country for $75,000. He enrolled at Villanova to study business and lasted, by various counts, six weeks or one semester. "There was no stopping the freight train that was going in that direction," he said.
At forty-one, worth $2.7 billion, he told Entrepreneur that if he could go back he would have stayed in school, maybe even gone to business school. The freight train, he had come to believe, would have waited for him. It is one of the few moments in two decades of interviews where Rubin expresses something like regret about speed.
The Price of Arriving at the Wrong Time
By the time he dropped out he had taken over two stores outside Albany that sold footwear and skiwear, and the stores happened to be carrying Umbro soccer shoes. He called the manufacturer to ask whether it had surplus. It did. He bought 12,000 pairs at $5 apiece. Then he called Boscov's, the Pennsylvania department-store chain, and offered the shoes at $15. They settled at $11.50. "I was hopping up and down," he told the Times, "because I had made $78,000 in one day."
On Guy Raz's How I Built This, decades later, the story is told with a different brand — Diadora, out of Italy — and a sharper structural point: the department store agreed to buy before the check to the manufacturer had gone out. He got paid before he paid. Whether that was one deal or two, whether the shoes were Umbro or Diadora or both, the lesson that stayed with him was not about shoes. It was about the float — the interval between the money coming in and the money going out — and about the fact that a nineteen-year-old with a phone and no capital could stand in that interval and get rich.
He named the new company KPR Sports, for his parents' initials. Ken, Paulette, Rubin. It bought and sold other companies' excess sporting goods. It launched its own footwear line, called Yukon, and the name is worth a pause: a closeout kid from the Philadelphia suburbs naming his boots after the coldest, emptiest frontier in North America, a place where it always snows. KPR crossed $1 million in sales in 1993, the year he turned twenty-one; by 1995 it was doing $50 million. The profits, by his later account, were running around $10 million a year while he was still in his early twenties.
In October 1995, People magazine ran a profile under the headline "Sneaker Stud."
That same year, KPR bought 40 percent of Ryka, a publicly traded maker of women's athletic shoes, and Rubin was installed as chief executive. Two years later the company was renamed Global Sports Inc. He was twenty-five, the CEO of a public company, with a business model whose entire premise was that brands and retailers routinely misjudge demand, and that the misjudgment can be bought by the pallet.
And here, because the story keeps doubling back on itself, two other men enter. In 1995 — the year of "Sneaker Stud," the year of Ryka — the brothers Alan and Mitchell Trager opened a store in the Orange Park Mall outside Jacksonville, Florida. They called it Football Fanatics. It sold local-team merchandise, mostly gear for the Jacksonville Jaguars, an expansion franchise playing its first season. The Tragers were not closeout men; they were the opposite, the people who stocked exactly what local fans wanted at exactly the moment they wanted it. Their business would move online, and a decade and a half later it would be absorbed into a company run by the kid who'd been banned from a Pennsylvania mall. Neither party could have known. One brother pair bets on the hometown team; one young man bets on everyone else's mistakes. Eventually the second swallows the first and spends the rest of his career trying to become it.
Screw These Internet People
The call came in 1998 from the only Wall Street analyst covering Global Sports. "What are you doing," the analyst asked, "about this e-commerce thing?"
Rubin's first instinct was contempt. He recounted it at the Wharton Sports Business Summit in 2019 with unusual candor: "I knew nothing about it, and I thought, 'Screw these internet people, they lose a lot of money.'" This was 1998; the internet people were, in fact, losing a great deal of money. A man whose entire fortune rested on buying cheap and selling dear had no natural sympathy for companies that sold below cost in pursuit of something called eyeballs.
What turned him was not a vision. It was a customer survey. He called his biggest accounts and vendors — Sports Authority among them — and asked whether e-commerce mattered. They said it did. More than that, they said they didn't know how to do it, and that he might. "They said, 'You're young, you're 25, can you solve this problem for us?'" He discovered, as he put it in 2010, that "no one was focusing on bringing brick-and-mortar stores online." Amazon was building a store. Nobody was building the back of other people's stores.
The founding of what became GSI Commerce is a portrait of 1998 improvisation: Rubin called a high school friend who did web design and asked him to build sites for his brands. He called Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley — the analyst who had, by then, become the closest thing the early internet had to an oracle — for advice. Meeker arranged a meeting with Softbank Capital. That introduction would echo nineteen years later, when SoftBank led a $1 billion round into Fanatics.
When Entrepreneur found him in 1999, at twenty-seven, the magazine noted with some bemusement that he was "today's rarity": someone who had built "a $145 million company first and then delve[d] into the Net." It called him "a fast-talking, no-frills, get-to-the-point kind of guy." The phrase holds. Twenty-five years later William Cohan, profiling him for Town & Country, would describe a "scrawny 53-year-old billionaire" being hustled between appointments by assistants — "We need to pick up the pace," one of them barks — and the reader recognizes the same metabolism, just with more helicopters.
GSI became plumbing. It ran websites, fulfillment, customer service, and marketing for retailers who did not want to learn how, and by the early 2000s it had become the leading e-commerce provider for professional sports leagues, which is to say that when a fan in Denver bought a jersey from a league website, GSI picked it, packed it, and shipped it. It was a large, public, unglamorous company headquartered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and in 2010 its CEO went undercover on the premiere season of CBS's Undercover Boss, working in his own warehouse and call center. At the end, identity revealed, he gave an employee who had recently lost a baby $10,000 so the man and the baby's mother could have the wedding they wanted. The gesture is quintessential Rubin, and so is the venue: generosity performed at network scale, entirely sincere and entirely televised.
That same year the Times ran a short Q&A with him in its "The Boss" column. Age: 38. Hometown: Lafayette Hill. Favorite movie hero: Maximus, from Gladiator — the general reduced to a slave who wins his freedom by entertaining a stadium.
He would later judge GSI with surprising severity. "I feel that we failed upward," he told a retail audience in January 2026, "because we got the strategy right, but I think our execution wasn't near good enough. And I never loved the core business." It is an odd thing to say about a company you sold for $2.4 billion. It is not odd at all if the thing you actually loved was the small piece of it that had to do with sports.
What eBay Didn't Want
In 2011, eBay paid $2.4 billion for GSI Commerce. Rubin, thirty-eight, took home roughly $150 million. eBay wanted GSI for one reason — the fulfillment business for large retailers, which would help it compete with Amazon — and was indifferent to nearly everything else. "eBay bought us to get brands on their platform," Rubin said later. "But they weren't interested in the Fanatics business."
GSI had, by then, acquired the Tragers' Jacksonville company, folding Fanatics and its online stores for every major North American league and hundreds of teams and colleges into the larger machine. So when eBay shrugged at the consumer businesses, Rubin bought them back: Fanatics, the flash-sale fashion site Rue La La, and a retail benefits program called ShopRunner. Forbes would title its 2012 profile "Newly-Minted Billionaire Is Spinning eBay Scraps Into Gold." Fanatics' own corporate history uses the phrase "fire-sale price."
What that price was depends, again, on who is telling it. Forbes reported $500 million for majority ownership of all three assets. Rubin, at Wharton, said the Fanatics business alone was bought back "for $300 million." The holding company for the trio was called Kynetic and sat in Conshohocken, the same river town where his first ski shop had stood. Locals, one neighborhood site noted in 2017, wondered "who is always coming and going in the big helicopter." It was him.
He was, in other words, a closeout buyer again. Twenty years and two billion dollars later, Michael Rubin was doing exactly what he had done with Brett Bauman's off-season skis and the Umbro shoes: buying the inventory a bigger, more rational player had decided it didn't need. The difference was that this time the inventory was a company, and this time he intended to keep it.
The same October, as if to underline the point, he bought into sports itself. He joined the investor group led by Josh Harris and David Blitzer that won the Philadelphia 76ers for $280 million — the NBA approved the deal on October 13, 2011 — and in the same month joined another Harris-Blitzer group buying the New Jersey Devils and the Prudential Center for $320 million. Harris, a private-equity man described by the Inquirer that summer as someone who "lives for competition and success," would turn out to be useful in ways that had nothing to do with basketball. Rubin would eventually become the Sixers' third-largest shareholder.
Fanatics needed money. In April 2012 it raised $150 million from Insight Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz and used it to buy its Florida rival, Dreams Inc., for $158 million in cash plus $25 million in assumed debt — bringing in FansEdge and the memorabilia business Mounted Memories, which became Fanatics Authentic. Deven Parekh of Insight, who has been on the cap table since 2011, would later go on Colossus's Business Breakdowns to explain the company to an interviewer, Jesse Pujji, who opened by confessing that he had met Rubin at seventeen on a pre-college business program visit and walked out thinking, "I want to be just like that guy one day."
By June 2013 the Wall Street Journal reported Fanatics' valuation had topped $3 billion.
The original idea, Rubin has said, was "Zappos for licensed sports" — the best online store for fan gear. It did not survive contact with his own anxiety. "I was terrified, however, that Amazon and Alibaba would kill everyone," he told the Wharton audience. So the company "radically changed the vision into something called v-commerce, which is vertically integrated commerce," modeled on Zara and H&M. Fanatics would not merely sell the jersey; it would design it, make it, and ship it, and it would do so fast enough to catch the moment — the trade, the breakout game, the championship — before the moment passed.
This is the ice ramp again, scaled. Sports demand is weather: it arrives without warning and departs without apology. A traditional licensee printing jerseys months in advance is a ski shop praying for snow. A vertically integrated manufacturer that can turn a Tuesday trade into a Wednesday jersey is a sixteen-year-old with 45,000 pounds of ice.
In April 2014 Fanatics hired Doug Mack from One Kings Lane as CEO and opened a Bay Area office to hire engineers. Mack's mandate, as the trade press described it, was to turn a domestic e-commerce business into a mobile-first, direct-to-consumer brand with its own factories. In 2015 Silver Lake put in $300 million. In early 2016 Fanatics bought Kitbag, a UK soccer retailer, for $17 million. And in April 2017 it did something that, in retrospect, reads as a declaration of method: it bought Majestic Athletic, Major League Baseball's longtime uniform maker, from VF Corporation — months after Fanatics had won the deal that would replace Majestic as baseball's partner.
The sequence is the tell. Win the rights; then buy the company that just lost them. It would happen again.
The Business Side of Sports
"You want to be around sports," Rubin told the Inquirer in 2024, "but I found the place I was good at in sports was the business side of it."
It is the most revealing sentence he has ever said in public, and he says it as if it were obvious. A boy who could not play finds the door marked staff. A man worth billions buys a seat at the table and then discovers that the seat at the table is not enough; he wants to be in the locker room, at the party, on the plane, in the group chat. Fanatics is, among other things, a company that sells proximity to people who cannot get closer. Its founder is its most devoted customer.
He met Meek Mill at an NBA All-Star Game, roughly four or five years before 2018. Meek — born Robert Rihmeek Williams in North Philadelphia, a battle rapper turned platinum artist — had spent most of his adult life entangled in a probation case dating to his teens, and in late 2017 a judge sent him back to prison for violations that included, among other things, popping a wheelie on a dirt bike. Rubin, by then a Sixers owner, hired lawyers, investigators, and publicists and campaigned for his release. Meek told him from prison about a recurring dream: "Michael, I keep having this dream where you pick me up and you fly me out in your helicopter and that's how I leave."
On April 24, 2018, the call came that Meek had been ordered released on bail. The Sixers had a Game 5 against the Miami Heat that night, a series clincher. "Me and like six people were like, 'We're picking him up in the helicopter!'" Rubin told Billboard the next day. Josh Harris owned Harrah's casino in Chester; "Josh made an arrangement within a few minutes for us to land at Harrah's and get him to the game in time." Rubin posted to Instagram from the road: Just left visiting Meek with @kevinhart4real and I'm on the way back to pick him up as we speak! That night Meek Mill, in a Joel Embiid jersey, rang the ceremonial bell at the Wells Fargo Center. "The universe works in a crazy way," Rubin said.
He gave the universe some help. In January 2019 he co-founded REFORM Alliance with Meek, Jay-Z, Robert Kraft, Daniel Loeb, Michael Novogratz, Clara Wu Tsai, Robert F. Smith, and Laura Arnold, with a shared $50 million pledge to rewrite probation and parole laws. At Wharton that year he spoke about his own "awakening to how white and black Americans are treated differently by the criminal justice system." The annual REFORM gala he hosts at Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City raised $24 million in 2023. He and Meek gave $15 million to 100 Philadelphia schools in January 2022, and with Kevin Hart another $7 million to 60 schools a year later.
The friendships multiplied. In January 2021, at a baccarat table in the Bahamas, he met Lil Baby, seated alongside Drake and Meek. Baby — Dominique Jones of Atlanta, who served two years on drug and weapons charges and did not start rapping until after he got out — remembered the evening for Vanity Fair with admirable economy: "We ain't win. We had a great night, though." By 2022 he was rapping, "I get my advice from Mike Rubin." "He's got the best story ever," Rubin said of Baby, "because this guy didn't even rap until he got out of prison, and it shows you, you can do anything at any time in your life."
You can hear what Rubin hears in these men. A late start, a failure that should have been final, a reinvention against the odds. He sees his own sixteenth winter in their prison terms, which is generous and also, perhaps, a little presumptuous — the difference between owing $120,000 to ski suppliers and losing years to the Pennsylvania probation system is not a difference of degree. Rubin, to his credit, seems to know this most of the time.
Not all of the time. On The Breakfast Club on August 14, 2024, defending Meek against online rumors, Rubin said, "It's the one thing I've learned about Black culture that I don't like is that Black hate on hate." He prefaced it with a self-aware disclaimer — "I'm probably going to get killed for saying this because I'm a white rich guy" — that did not help. ScHoolboy Q led the backlash. The next day Rubin posted on X: "I got a phone call from one of the people I have the most respect for in the world — they told me while they appreciate my intention, it's not my place to speak on black culture. I get it and really appreciate the input!" He signed off: "My bad."
In the same interview he admitted he had banned Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us" — the summer's most-played diss track, aimed at Drake — from his annual July 4 White Party, out of consideration for Drake, who was in attendance. The White Party is the other half of this picture: a Hamptons gathering of athletes, rappers, actors, executives, and models in mandatory white, chronicled annually by People and Page Six, attended in recent years by Teyana Taylor, Alex Rodriguez, Alicia Keys, Cardi B. On Pardon My Take he issued Barstool's Dave Portnoy a lifetime ban, a sentence delivered with the gravity of a man who understands that exclusion is the most valuable thing a host can offer. Town & Country's 2025 headline asked whether he was "America's Most Popular Billionaire." The question was not entirely rhetorical.
There is a phrase he uses about himself with rappers that is both a joke and a confession: "I really feel like I've had a profound effect on rappers' timeliness." He said it on his company's ten-seat jet in June 2023, flying between charity events with Lil Baby, while MLB commissioner Rob Manfred called to ask how he could get involved. His seventeen-year-old daughter, Kylie, rested her head against the van window on the way to the airfield. The scene has the quality of a painting with too many figures in it. At the center — "easy to miss," Cohan would write two years later of a similar tableau — is a slight man from Lafayette Hill, talking fast, checking the weather.
"It's cool to be an entrepreneur," he told Baby in that van. "It was almost nerdy to be an entrepreneur when I was a kid."
Six Days in Easton
In 2017, when Fanatics bought Majestic, it acquired a jersey factory near Easton, Pennsylvania, that had been struggling. Three years later, on or about March 15, 2020 — "It was maybe March 15," he recalled — Rubin woke in the middle of the night with a thought: "Wait a minute, I own a baseball jersey manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania."
"Sure enough, six days later we converted an entire Major League Baseball jersey manufacturing facility to make a million masks that we gave away to front-line workers." The fabric was the same mesh used for Yankees, Red Sox, and Phillies uniforms. The masks and gowns — more than a million — went to more than a dozen states; 15,000 went to the Cleveland Clinic alone. The Philadelphia Citizen compared him, without irony, to Henry Ford, and its writer had been reading A.J. Baime's The Arsenal of Democracy — the account of Detroit retooling to build bombers — when he got Rubin on the phone and found him "in his plain-spoken single-mindedness to get shit done" apparently stepped "right out of the book."
The comparison flatters, but the mechanism is real. The factory existed because of v-commerce. V-commerce existed because Rubin had been terrified of Amazon. The terror had a factory; the factory had fabric; the fabric became masks. Every piece of the response was a consequence of a strategic decision made years earlier out of fear.
In April 2020 he launched the ALL IN Challenge. The format was a celebrity sweepstakes: stars donated prized possessions or once-in-a-lifetime experiences, fans bid or entered, proceeds went to Feeding America, Meals on Wheels, No Kid Hungry, and World Central Kitchen. It raised $60 million — nearly 300 million meals. Fast Company called it "the wildest $50 million celebrity charity contest ever" when it was still on its way up. It was the Rolodex, weaponized for good.
The business, meanwhile, did something he had not predicted. "He told his board that Fanatics would be down 50 or 75% when sports paused," a Penn State student reporter wrote after a webinar that October. It went up 30 percent. Rubin drew a lesson from this that is either mystical or cynical depending on how you read it: "Every time I've spent time trying to make the country a better place, our business has done better. I really think karma matters." He added, a little ruefully: "I would always give money away but I never spent my energy."
The money that followed was staggering. August 2020: $350 million at a $6.2 billion valuation. March 2021: $320 million at $12.8 billion. August 2021: $325 million at $18 billion, with Jay-Z and Roc Nation among the investors. The leagues themselves had been in since 2017, when the NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, and the NFL Players Association joined SoftBank's $1 billion round — a fact worth sitting with. The rights holders were shareholders in the company buying their rights.
And with the August 2021 round came an announcement: Fanatics would no longer be a merchandise company. It would be "a global digital sports platform." Trading cards. Betting. NFTs. Ticketing. Media. Rubin, who had been executive chairman, took the CEO title of the broader portfolio.
Prying the Cards Loose
The Topps Company was founded in 1938. It invented Bazooka bubble gum, and its gum-and-card packs became the default physical artifact of American baseball fandom — the 1952 Mickey Mantle, the shoebox in the attic, the thing your mother threw out. For roughly seventy years it held MLB's trading-card license. On August 19, 2021, CNBC reported that the relationship was ending. Fanatics had secured long-term card rights from MLB and the MLB Players Association, and in the same frenzy, from the NBA, the NBPA, and the NFLPA. The Wall Street Journal's headline: "With a Frenzy of Deals, Fanatics Swoops In to Reorder the Trading-Card World."
A month later the new Fanatics Collectibles raised $350 million at a $10.4 billion valuation. It had no factory, no brand, and no cards.
So in January 2022 it bought Topps — the company it had just stripped of its crown jewel — for $500 million, absorbing roughly 350 employees. The Journal captured the sequence in a headline that could stand as Rubin's epitaph: "Fanatics Pried Baseball Cards From Topps. Now Fanatics Is Buying Topps." It was the Majestic maneuver again, executed faster and with more nerve. Win the license. Watch the incumbent's value collapse. Buy the incumbent at the new price. The Bazooka candy business, which came along with Topps, was sold to Apax Partners in October 2023. Rubin had no use for the gum.
In June 2022 he hired Mike Mahan, former CEO of Dick Clark Productions — the company behind the Golden Globes and New Year's Rockin' Eve — to run the collectibles division. The hire tells you how Rubin understood the business. He did not think he was selling cardboard. He thought he was producing television.
The cards that resulted are designed less as products than as events. The innovation he is proudest of — "the best invention I think in the history of trading cards," he told Boardroom in 2025 — is the debut patch. A player making his major-league debut wears a special patch on his jersey. "There's only one in the world. When they get done that first game, we take that patch off of 'em." The patch is cut out and embedded in a one-of-one card, autographed. In March 2025 the debut-patch card of Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes sold for $1.1 million — the highest price for a baseball card since 2010 and the highest for any relic card ever.
Think about what that object is. It is a square of fabric that was present at a moment. The moment is over. The fabric is not.
Rubin worked the athletes the way he worked the rappers. "There were less than 10 baseball players who collected baseball cards when we bought Topps," he said. "Now, there are more than a hundred." He flew to Japan in March 2025 to meet Shohei Ohtani for the first time at the Tokyo Series, he told the New York Post, "because Ohtani is that important to us." Topps had signed Ohtani to an exclusive global card deal the previous August. Fanatics, Rubin said, now works with "about 5,000 athletes on an individual basis." A Topps "Rip Night" in early 2026 put 160 athletes in 800 stores. The ambition, he said, had been to multiply the number of collectors by ten. Four years in: "Maybe we've two or three times'd" them.
The licenses kept falling. The Premier League in May 2024. Topps NBA cards returned in October 2025 for the first time since the 2009–10 season. Fully licensed NFL cards came back to Topps in April 2026 for the first time since 2016. And on May 7, 2026, FIFA announced that beginning in 2031, Topps would become its exclusive licensee for cards, stickers, and trading card games — ending a World Cup relationship with Panini that had lasted more than five decades. Panini, the Italian sticker company whose albums have been filled by schoolchildren on every continent, had already sued Fanatics in 2023 alleging anticompetitive behavior.
Not every collectible was physical. In May 2021 Rubin co-founded Candy Digital with Novogratz and Gary Vaynerchuk to sell sports NFTs. MLB signed on as its first content partner. By October it was valued at $1.5 billion, with Peyton Manning among the investors. In January 2023 Fanatics divested its 60 percent stake.
"I knew it wasn't going to work," he told Boardroom. "We gave our investors the money back basically and said, this isn't going to work." The candor is disarming, and the lesson is implicit in the contrast: the debut patch worked because a body wore it. The NFT was a moment with nothing to touch. Rubin, who grew up handling inventory — skis, boots, 12,000 pairs of soccer shoes — has never been very good at selling things that don't exist.
The Wrong Side of the Gaming Business
He was twelve the first time he went to Atlantic City. He won $3,000. He called his mother to share the good news. "She said, 'Get your ass back home. You're grounded.'" He tells this story onstage now, at the National Retail Federation, to a room of executives, by way of explaining why Fanatics is in the sportsbook business. "I've always liked the gambling business," he said in January 2026. "I've always been on the wrong side of the gaming business as a customer."
The strategic logic was simpler than the biography. "The biggest cost for companies like DraftKings and FanDuel was acquiring customers," he explained to Boardroom's Rich Kleiman. "And we already had a very big installed customer base." About 80 million customers when he made the call; about 120 million by mid-2025. If customer acquisition was the industry's single largest expense, a company that already knew the names and addresses of every person who had ever bought a Jalen Hurts jersey was starting the race several laps ahead.
There was a problem: he was an owner of two sports franchises. In June 2022 he announced he was selling his stake in Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment — the Sixers and the Devils — to focus on Fanatics. The stake went, in a deal completed in October, to David Adelman. The conflict with a betting business and with Fanatics' player partnerships was too obvious to finesse. He had spent more than a decade as one of the Sixers' largest shareholders. He had told Penn State students in 2020 that "your job is to win championships — and if anyone tells you anything other than that, they're confused." He gave up the team to keep the house.
Fanatics opened its first retail sportsbook in January 2023 inside FedEx Field — the first legal sportsbook in an NFL stadium. For the online business, it bid $150 million in May 2023 for the U.S. operations of the Australian operator PointsBet. DraftKings countered at $195 million. Fanatics raised to $225 million and won. The first states transferred that August. To run the division Rubin hired Matt King, former CEO of FanDuel — the incumbent's own general, recruited to march against it.
"When you really look at it, no new entrant has been successful," Rubin told the Post in February 2026. Fanatics now holds, by his count, 7 to 8 percent of the U.S. sports betting market and about 6 percent of online casino. DraftKings and FanDuel together hold 75 to 80 percent. His weapon is FanCash — loyalty currency earned on every bet and redeemable for merchandise. "This year we're going to give away a billion dollars in FanCash." The jersey funds the bet; the bet funds the jersey. In August 2025 the company tied all of it together in a loyalty program called Fanatics ONE. In December 2025, in partnership with Crypto.com, it launched Fanatics Markets, a prediction market live in twenty-four states, where users can trade on sports results, economic indicators, and political outcomes.
He is aware of the objection and answers it without visible discomfort. "Some people who say, 'Hey, you're in the betting business, you're a horrible person, and you shouldn't take bets,'" he told the Post. "Here's the reality: Everyone bet on sports before. Now they're going from illegal books to legal books, and we're making it better." It is the closeout buyer's argument, essentially: the demand already exists; I'm only moving it to a better shelf. Whether that's an argument or an alibi is a question the company's founder, by his own cheerful admission a lifelong losing customer, is perhaps not best positioned to answer.
Some Glass Along the Way
"If you're changing an industry," Rubin told Sports Business Journal in October 2021, "you're going to break some glass along the way."
He was asked, in the same conversation, whether he still had "sharp elbows." He paused. "Look. I wouldn't consider them to be sharp elbows. I'd say I'm focused." What he had done in commerce, he said, was "get into a tired business that hadn't been innovated since it started. Some might consider that sharp elbows."
The concern among rivals — whispered, the publication noted, rather than said — was structural. A single company holding licensing, manufacturing, e-commerce, trading cards, sports betting, and potentially ticketing and media across every major American league would have leverage no licensee had ever had. NBA commissioner Adam Silver brushed it off.
— Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner, to Sports Business Journal, 2021I don't see it as leverage over the league. We granted him those rights. Michael is one of the hardest working guys. He's competing 18 hours a day.
The courts, so far, have agreed with the commissioner. In September 2024 a federal judge, Andrew Carter Jr., dismissed a suit brought by Casey's Distributing against Fanatics and MLB; in July 2025 the same judge dismissed Casey's case against Fanatics and the NFL, which had argued that the league's approval requirements for online sales violated the Sherman Act. Panini's suit remains the loudest grievance, now carrying the added sting of FIFA.
The glass that broke in public in 2024 was a uniform. That spring, MLB's new jerseys — designed by Nike, manufactured by Fanatics — were mocked by players and fans for flimsy fabric, undersized lettering, and, memorably, pants that were partly see-through. The Guardian headline: "'Everyone hates them.'" Fanatics took the early heat, as manufacturer. Then a Players Association memo circulated with an unusually clean verdict: "This has been entirely a Nike issue. At its core, what has happened here is that Nike was innovating something that didn't need to be innovated." Nike promised fixes for 2025. Fanatics, which had spent a decade championing innovation in a "tired" industry, was rescued by a memo arguing that some things should be left alone.
Rubin, for his part, insists he worries constantly. "I'm paranoid about competition," he said at Wharton. "I would be stupid and a bad business person if I didn't worry." He has said, on Emma Grede's Aspire podcast, that "success is a terrible teacher. It hides problems." He told the Sunday Times in January 2025, "I don't have a work-life balance. It's not who I am." He has also, in 2026, told the Post that Fanatics is "not thinking of any acquisitions right now. We have no need, if I'm being blunt" — a striking reversal for a company assembled substantially through purchase, and one delivered while Panini, the rumored target, was still suing him.
And he has a habit of reversing himself in public without seeming to notice. In 2025 he explained why Fanatics had studied and declined the media business: Amazon, YouTube, Apple, and Netflix were all coming, "and anyone who said they weren't getting into the sports media business… you're like, 'Yeah, that's bullshit.' … That's not a business I'm going to get into." In January 2026 Fanatics launched Fanatics Studios, a joint venture with OBB Media, run by OBB's founder Michael Ratner, with projects involving the Olympics, Tom Brady, and ESPN. Its first production aired during halftime of Super Bowl LX. He also launched an advertising division that year, Fanatics Advertising, with Jeremi Gorman as chief revenue officer, selling access to "100M+ fans."
"In 2011, I wanted to win the deal," he said in 2021. "Now, I want to win. Now, I want to win it long term." Long term, it turns out, includes the right to change your mind.
Ice in August
The first Fanatics Fest opened in August 2024 at the Javits Center on Manhattan's far west side — 3.3 million square feet, three days, more than 70,000 people. Tom Brady, Peyton and Eli Manning, Allen Iverson, Derek Jeter, Jay-Z, Hulk Hogan, Kevin Durant. Inside the hall, the company had built a full-scale replica of the 40/40 Club, Jay-Z's Manhattan sports bar, which had recently closed. A club that no longer existed, rebuilt for a weekend inside a convention center, as a green room for celebrities. During a rare break, standing at that bar, Rubin told the Inquirer:
— Michael Rubin to the Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2024I didn't know two weeks ago whether this would be a success or a disaster. I couldn't wait to have the experience of it. I couldn't wait to play the game. Maybe this would have been a disaster. You don't know. I love that quest.
Somewhere in the crowd that weekend a young boy was told by his mother that Rubin was nearby. "Michael Rubin," the boy shouted, "is someone I gotta see!" The bad athlete had become the attraction.
The second Fest, in June 2025, drew 125,000 at a minimum of $60 a head and introduced the Fanatics Games, in which athletes, celebrities, and creators competed against fans for more than $2 million in prizes. William Cohan, wandering the halls for Town & Country, watched Brady toss a fake Lombardi Trophy to Rob Gronkowski, and watched it break, "by design," into pieces. "The fake astonishment," Cohan wrote, "immediately becomes just another instant Fanatics Fest social media meme." The third, in July 2026, ran four days, drew 200,000, featured more than 400 athlete and celebrity appearances, and hosted the first World Cup Finals press conference ever held outside the host stadium.
The festival does not exist to make money. Rubin says so plainly; Sportico's headline in June 2025 said the event "Prioritizes Building Brand 'Evangelists' Over Profit." It costs, he told Sports Business Journal in July 2026, $80 million to $90 million. It is the largest marketing expense in the company and it is built, every summer, out of nothing, in a hall on the Hudson, to be torn down a few days later.
It is very hard, standing in that hall, not to think of 142 feet of ice in Conshohocken in August, in ninety-eight degrees, built so that people could try the skis.
But the ice is not where this ends, because ice was the boy's answer, and the man has a better one. In March 2025, a square of fabric that Paul Skenes wore on his chest for a single afternoon at PNC Park — stitched on before the game, cut off after it, signed, sealed into a card numbered one of one — sold for $1.1 million. It had been present at a moment that can never happen again. It was taken off of him. It was kept.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania, in a year with no snow, a sixteen-year-old stood in an empty ski shop with a Porsche he couldn't legally drive and a letter from a bankruptcy lawyer saying he was too young to go broke. He had built a mountain in summer and lost it all in the winter that didn't come. The patch doesn't melt.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract method from biography — not the motivational residue of Rubin's interviews, which is abundant and mostly generic, but the structural moves he has repeated across four decades, often without naming them. Some are financial, some are relational, one or two are psychological. Each is grounded in what he actually did, which is not always the same as what he says he did.
Twelve Principles
- 1.Stand in the float.
- 2.Buy what the rational player discards.
- 3.Let your biggest customers write your pivot.
- 4.Win the rights, then buy the loser.
- 5.Own the factory so you can own the moment.
- 6.Enter new markets through the customer file, not the front door.
- 7.Manufacture scarcity from moments.
- 8.Spend on proximity, not on reach.
- 9.Negotiate for the fifth deal, not the first.
- 10.Kill the thing with nothing to touch.
- 11.Sell the conflict before it sells you.
- 12.Treat fear as a design input.
Principle 1
Stand in the float
The Umbro trade — 12,000 pairs at $5, sold to Boscov's at $11.50, $78,000 in a day — is usually told as a story about hustle. It is more usefully read as a story about timing of cash. In the How I Built This version, Rubin had a buyer committed before the check to the manufacturer had gone out. He was not financing inventory; his customer was. A teenager with no credit, who had just been rescued from insolvency by his father, built a business in which capital requirements approached zero because the sequence of commitments did the financing for him.
The same instinct runs through the buyback from eBay — acquiring cash-generating businesses at a distressed price using proceeds from the sale of the parent — and through the 2017 SoftBank round in which the NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, and NFLPA themselves became shareholders. When your counterparties are also your investors, the line between who is paying whom gets usefully blurry. And it shows up in Rubin's 2026 statement that Fanatics has "no liquidity needs, zero-zero pressure" to go public — the posture of a company engineered so that time is on its side.
The point is not cleverness for its own sake. A business that is paid before it pays can survive a winter without snow. The sixteen-year-old's ski shop could not, because it had bought inventory on credit against demand that never arrived. Everything afterward looks like a deliberate inversion of that structure.
Tactic: Before your next inventory or capacity commitment, line up the buyer — or at least the binding intent — first, and treat any deal that requires you to finance the gap as a deal you haven't finished designing.
Principle 2
Buy what the rational player discards
Out-of-season skis from Brett Bauman. A $200,000 ski lot for $17,000. Manufacturers' surplus sneakers. Then, at scale: the consumer businesses eBay considered irrelevant to its Amazon fight, bought back at what Fanatics itself calls a "fire-sale price." Rubin's career is a sequence of purchases of things that larger, more rational players had decided were not worth the trouble.
The insight is that "rational" is relative to a strategy. eBay was being perfectly rational in 2011; it wanted enterprise fulfillment, and Fanatics was a distraction from that goal. Its discard was not a judgment about Fanatics' value but about Fanatics' fit. Closeout buyers make their living in the gap between those two things — between what an asset is worth and what it is worth to the current owner. Rubin found that gap at nineteen with soccer shoes and at thirty-eight with a company.
Tactic: When a larger company announces a strategic focus, list the assets that fall outside it — they will be priced on fit, not value, and that spread is your opportunity.
Principle 3
Let your biggest customers write your pivot
Rubin's instinct about the internet in 1998 was wrong. "Screw these internet people, they lose a lot of money." What corrected him was not a thesis but a phone survey of his largest accounts — Sports Authority among them — who told him that e-commerce mattered and that they could not build it themselves. "You're young, you're 25, can you solve this problem for us?"
This is a more disciplined way to pivot than it appears. He did not decide the future; he asked the people who paid him what they were afraid of and offered to absorb the fear. GSI's entire model — the back end of other people's stores — was literally the shape of his customers' incompetence. The trap the principle avoids is the founder who falls in love with a technology and goes looking for a customer. Rubin went the other way: he found a customer with a problem and then, grudgingly, learned the technology.
It is worth noting what he did not do: he did not let his own skepticism stop the inquiry. The contempt was real. He made the calls anyway.
Tactic: When you're skeptical of a trend, call your five largest customers and ask whether it's a problem they can't solve — if three say yes, your skepticism is now irrelevant.
Principle 4
Win the rights, then buy the loser
The most distinctive move in the Fanatics repertoire is a two-step that has now been run at least twice with precision. First, win the license away from an incumbent whose business depends on it. Second, once the incumbent's value has collapsed, acquire the incumbent for its factories, people, and brand.
F
The Two-Step
Licenses won, incumbents displaced, and what happened next.
| Rights won | Incumbent displaced | Then |
|---|---|---|
| MLB uniform manufacturing (with Nike) | Majestic Athletic | Acquired Majestic from VF Corp, April 2017 |
| MLB & MLBPA trading cards, August 2021 | Topps (≈70-year license) | Acquired Topps for $500M, January 2022 |
| NHL exclusive jersey, from 2024–25 | Adidas | Replaced No acquisition; Fanatics already owned the capacity |
| FIFA collectibles, from 2031 | Panini (five-plus decades) | Litigation Panini suing; Rubin says "not thinking of any acquisitions" |
The logic is ruthless but not cynical. The license is the real asset; the operating company is the means of production. By winning the license first, Fanatics guarantees that it, alone, can make the incumbent whole again — and that no one else will pay a premium. The Wall Street Journal's headline on Topps reads like a confession: "Fanatics Pried Baseball Cards From Topps. Now Fanatics Is Buying Topps."
The risk is reputational. It is precisely this pattern that generates whispers about leverage and lawsuits about competition. The 2021 SBJ question about "sharp elbows" was not really about personality.
Tactic: Before acquiring a capability, ask whether you can first win the contract that makes the capability valuable — then buy it at the price the market sets once the contract is gone.
Principle 5
Own the factory so you can own the moment
The pivot from "Zappos for licensed sports" to v-commerce was driven, by Rubin's own account, by terror of Amazon and Alibaba. A pure retailer of other companies' merchandise could be undercut by anyone with a bigger warehouse. A company that designed and manufactured could control the scarcest variable in sports commerce: time. When a trade happens or a rookie breaks out, the value of the jersey is highest in the first hours and decays fast. Owning production means owning the window.
The masks are the proof of the principle in an unexpected direction. Because Fanatics owned the Easton factory, Rubin could convert it in six days. A retailer could have donated money. A manufacturer could donate production. Vertical integration is usually defended on margin; Rubin's career suggests its deeper value is optionality — the ability to make a different thing quickly when the world changes.
Tactic: Identify the single moment in your product's life when demand peaks fastest, and invest in owning whatever step of the supply chain most limits your speed to that moment.
Principle 6
Enter new markets through the customer file, not the front door
Rubin's case for entering sports betting was not that Fanatics understood odds-making. It was that the incumbents' largest expense was customer acquisition, and Fanatics had 80 million customers when it decided and roughly 120 million by 2025. "If the biggest expense is customer acquisition, we have so many direct relationships." The insight is to look at an adjacent industry's cost structure, not its product, and ask which line item you already own.
FanCash is the second half of the move: making the two businesses feed each other, so the merchandise customer becomes a bettor and the bettor becomes a merchandise customer. A billion dollars in FanCash in 2026 is a customer-acquisition budget disguised as a rebate. Rubin hired King from FanDuel to run the product, because the customer file gets you in the room but does not make you competent once you're there. At 7 to 8 percent share against a duopoly of 75 to 80 percent, the jury on competence is still deliberating.
Tactic: Rank adjacent industries by the size of their customer-acquisition cost, then enter the one where your existing customer relationships most directly erase that cost.
Principle 7
Manufacture scarcity from moments
The debut patch is the cleanest product idea in the Rubin catalog. A player wears it once. It is cut away. It becomes a one-of-one card. Its value comes not from the material but from the guaranteed irreproducibility of the moment it witnessed. Skenes' sold for $1.1 million.
What makes this a principle rather than a gimmick is that it converts an ephemeral event — the most perishable thing in sports — into a durable asset, and it does so using the company's privileged position inside the game itself. Only a licensee working with the league and players can put a patch on a uniform in a real game. The scarcity isn't artificial; it's structural. And it is the exact opposite of Candy Digital, which tried to sell digital scarcity untethered from any physical moment and failed.
Tactic: Find the moments your customers already treat as sacred, and ask what physical artifact of that moment you are uniquely positioned to capture and preserve.
Principle 8
Spend on proximity, not on reach
Fanatics Fest costs $80 million to $90 million a year and is not meant to turn a profit. That is an extraordinary marketing budget to spend on something that reaches, at most, 200,000 people in person. Rubin's bet is that proximity converts at a rate reach cannot — that a fan who has watched Gronkowski catch a breakaway trophy, ripped packs beside a player, and stood near the man himself becomes an evangelist who spends across every vertical.
The same logic governs the White Party, Merch Madness, the jet full of rappers, the ALL IN Challenge, and Make-A-Wish. Rubin sells proximity because he is its most committed buyer; the bad athlete who found the business side of sports has built a business out of letting other outsiders feel briefly inside. The 2024 Breakfast Club episode is the cautionary corollary: proximity is not membership, and when you confuse the two you will, as he was told, speak where it is not your place.
Tactic: Budget at least one marketing line for an experience so close to the thing your customers love that it can't be replicated by advertising — and measure it on downstream behavior, not attendance.
Principle 9
Negotiate for the fifth deal, not the first
"In 2011, I wanted to win the deal. Now, I want to win. Now, I want to win it long term." And: "We want to make sure that everyone we work with trusts me. There are five more things we want to do with you." This is the explicit evolution in Rubin's dealmaking, and the evidence bears it out. The leagues that granted Fanatics merchandise rights later granted it card rights, invested in its rounds, and stood beside it in court.
The flying trip to meet Ohtani in Tokyo belongs here too. Rubin claims to work with about 5,000 athletes individually and says, without embarrassment, that "your job is to figure out who the most important constituencies are." The relationship is the asset; each deal is a payment on it. The paradox — and it is real — is that the same company is accused of anticompetitive behavior. Long-term trust with partners and sharp competition with rivals are not contradictory; they may be the same strategy viewed from opposite sides of the table.
Tactic: In every negotiation, write down the next three things you'd want to do with this counterparty, and give up enough on the current deal to make those three more likely.
Principle 10
Kill the thing with nothing to touch
Candy Digital went from founding in May 2021 to a $1.5 billion valuation that October to divestment in January 2023. Rubin's postmortem is notable for its speed and its lack of ego: "I knew it wasn't going to work. We gave our investors the money back basically." He then asked, in his telling, "How am I going to be better? What are we going to do?"
The deeper pattern is that Rubin's successes are almost uniformly physical — skis, shoes, jerseys, cards, events, even sportsbooks in stadiums. His one prominent failure was the one product with no body. That may be a coincidence. It may also be that a man who learned business by handling inventory has an accurate instinct for which things people want to hold and an inaccurate one for things that live only on screens. Knowing which side of that line you are good at is half of portfolio discipline.
Tactic: For every new venture, write down what the customer physically or experientially gets that they could not get before — and if the answer is only a token, set a short kill date.
Principle 11
Sell the conflict before it sells you
In June 2022 Rubin agreed to sell his stake in the 76ers and Devils. He had been one of the Sixers' largest shareholders for more than a decade, had flown Meek Mill to a Sixers playoff game on the day of his release, had lectured students that "your job is to win championships." He sold it anyway, because a sportsbook operator and athlete-partnership company cannot credibly also own teams.
Founders rarely divest things they love in advance of a regulator forcing them to. Rubin did it before Fanatics' betting business had launched. The move protected the larger enterprise from a slow-burning conflict that would have compounded with every new vertical. It also had a cost he plainly felt: the owner's box was the closest the bad athlete had ever gotten to the game.
Tactic: When a new line of business creates a conflict with an existing asset, set a date to resolve it before anyone else raises it — even if the asset is the one you'd rather keep.
Principle 12
Treat fear as a design input
V-commerce came from being "terrified" of Amazon and Alibaba. The Easton factory came from v-commerce. The masks came from the factory. "I'm paranoid about competition," he said; "success is a terrible teacher. It hides problems." Rubin's strategic history reads like a series of defensive structures built in anticipation of being killed, which later turned out to be offensive weapons.
This is different from the generic advice to "embrace fear." Rubin does not embrace it; he operationalizes it. He asks, by his account to his team, what would kill the company, and then builds the thing that would prevent it. The snowless winter is the founding trauma: an existential threat that came from outside, that he could not control, that wiped him out. Every major structural choice since looks like an attempt to make sure no single external event can do that again.
R
From One Business to a Platform
How each new vertical answered a specific vulnerability in the last.
1998
GSI founded after customers ask him to solve e-commerce for them.
2011
GSI sold to eBay for $2.4B; Fanatics, Rue La La, ShopRunner bought back.
2017
Majestic acquired; $1B round led by SoftBank with leagues as investors.
2018
10-year NFL/Nike deal for all Nike NFL fan gear at retail.
2020
Easton plant converted to masks in six days; Series E at $6.2B.
2022
Topps acquired for $500M; valuation reaches $31B; Sixers stake sold.
2023
First NFL-stadium sportsbook; PointsBet U.S. acquired for $225M; Candy Digital exited.
2024
First Fanatics Fest; exclusive NHL jersey supplier begins.
2025
Fanatics Casino, Fanatics ONE, Fanatics Advertising, Fanatics Markets launch.
2026
Fanatics Studios launches; FIFA collectibles deal; NFL cards return to Topps.
◆
The Portfolio by Phase
Where each business sits as of 2026.
| Business | Started | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Fanatics Commerce | 2011 | Scale |
| Fanatics Collectibles / Topps | 2021 | Scale |
| Fanatics Betting & Gaming | 2021 (launched 2023) | Try |
| Fanatics Events | 2023 | Try |
| Fanatics Markets | 2025 | Scan |
| Fanatics Studios | 2026 | Scan |
| Candy Digital (NFTs) | 2021 | Exited 2023 |
Tactic: Once a quarter, write down the single external event most likely to kill your company — then fund one project whose only job is to make that event survivable.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Michael Rubin, Sports Business Journal, October 2021If you're changing an industry, you're going to break some glass along the way.
— Michael Rubin, Sports Business Journal, October 2021In 2011, I wanted to win the deal. Now, I want to win. Now, I want to win it long term.
— Michael Rubin, Sports Business Journal, October 2021I'm unrelenting. If I want to do something, I'll just keep going at it until I either accomplish it, or I fail miserably, and I'm fine with either outcome.
— Michael Rubin, Wharton Sports Business Summit, 2019I'm paranoid about competition. I would be stupid and a bad business person if I didn't worry.
— Michael Rubin, to Penn State students, October 2020Every time I've spent time trying to make the country a better place, our business has done better. I really think karma matters.
Maxims
- Get paid before you pay. The cheapest capital is the customer's commitment that arrives before your supplier's invoice.
- Discards are priced on fit, not value. When a bigger player sheds an asset, it is telling you about its strategy, not about the asset.
- Ask the people who pay you what scares them. The pivot your customers need is more reliable than the one you imagine.
- Win the license, then buy the factory. Rights determine what operating companies are worth; secure the rights first.
- Own the step that controls speed. In businesses driven by moments, the winner is whoever can reach the moment first.
- Make the moment keep. The most valuable product captures something that cannot happen again.
- Proximity outsells reach. An evangelist made in person is worth more than an impression bought at scale.
- Every deal is a down payment on the next five. Trust compounds; leverage depreciates.
- Kill fast what nobody can hold. Give the money back before the market makes you.
- Build for the winter without snow. Design the company so no single external event can wipe it out again.
