The NFL keeps getting richer.Earlier this month, the Paul Allen Estate agreed to sell the Seattle Seahawks to a group led by billionaire tech investor Vinod Khosla and his wife, Neeru Khosla, for $9.612 billion, a massive sum that exceeds the NFL’s previous record for a team sale by nearly 60 percent. As part of the agreement, which is subject to the approval of club owners at their Aug. 26 meeting in Atlanta, Neeru will serve as controlling owner and their son, Neal Khosla, will have “a significant leadership role,” according to an NFL memo sent to team executives and obtained by The Athletic.The price tag alone says plenty about the NFL’s seemingly unbounded growth; it was only three years ago that the Washington Commanders sold for a then-record $6.05 billion. But the significance of the Seahawks deal extends beyond the financials. The Khoslas are entering a new chapter for the franchise after nearly three decades under the Allen family — bringing a similar tech and business legacy, but a very different personal history.Vinod and Neeru Khosla were born in India and immigrated to the U.S. to continue their studies and launch careers as entrepreneurs. Vinod is now widely regarded as one of the most influential innovators and investors in Silicon Valley. In the NFL, the Khoslas will join the Vikings’ Zygi Wilf (Germany) and the Jaguars’ Shahid Khan (Pakistan) as the only other principal owners born outside the U.S.Vinod, 71, received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, then earned his master’s in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and in business administration from Stanford. Two years after getting his MBA, he co-founded Sun Microsystems, the pioneering computer company that reached a peak market capitalization of about $200 billion at the turn of the century.Vinod, however, turned to investing in 1986 and is now widely regarded as one of the world’s leading technology venture capitalists, with an estimated net worth of $13.2 billion, according to Forbes’ latest billionaire rankings. He spent 18 years at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers before launching his own firm in 2004. Khosla Ventures, a heavy backer of artificial intelligence along with climate and healthcare start-ups, was the first venture capital firm to invest in OpenAI. Now, seven years later, the company is valued around $852 billion.“I would say the one piece that works really well in all business is go for high risk, higher consequences,” he told David Rubenstein in a 2022 interview for Bloomberg. “… I don’t mind a 90 percent probability of failure if there’s a 10 percent chance of changing the world.”Vinod Khosla has built a career on taking risks and has repeatedly spoken about his own business failures, citing them as necessary tools for his successes. He’s also claimed that he’s a poor advisor on investing because “we’re really in this other business of company building” at Khosla Ventures.But the NFL has proven to be one of the safest investments for the ultra-wealthy, and Khosla is on the verge of buying one of its most successful clubs.“NFL valuations are going to keep going up, not because it’s about status but because the numbers justify it — the cash flows, the multiples of revenue,” said Marc Ganis, the founder of Sportscorp Ltd. and a consultant to multiple leagues and teams. “The NFL is arguably the best-run sports league in the world, and sports is playing a greater and greater role in global society and with technology.”Neeru Khosla, once an aspiring doctor, grew up in India and England before joining Vinod in the U.S. She started in molecular biology, earning her master’s from San Jose State and working in gene expression research at a Stanford lab. But she stopped due to concern about being around radioactivity while pregnant with her first child (the Khoslas have four children). Her interest in education was born during her time as a volunteer at her children’s school. Neeru decided to go back to school at age 50 and earned another master’s degree, from Stanford Graduate School of Education, before launching CK-12 Foundation, a non-profit that provides free and customizable digital textbooks for children.“As I went through that process with my four kids, I said, ‘Why didn’t I have education like this?’ That’s where the larger questions started coming up,” Neeru said in a 2013 interview with the Bridgespan Group. “Why is it that we cannot provide this kind of education for every kid? What stops us?”Neeru adds to Seattle’s core of women sports owners, following Jody Allen, who has led the Seahawks since 2018, after the passing of her brother, Paul Allen. Samantha Holloway owns the Seattle Kraken and One Roof Sports and Entertainment, and is pushing to land an NBA expansion team in the city. Melinda French Gates recently became a minority investor in the Kraken and One Roof.Neal Khosla, the only son of Vinod and Neeru, co-founded Curai Health, an AI-powered virtual care company. While studying mathematics and computer science at Stanford, he interned with the San Francisco 49ers’ football operations for two months, with a focus on the team’s draft process. He co-authored a research paper published by the Journal of Sports Management in 2014 that examined the determinants of live-game RSN ratings for the NBA, NHL and MLB.Neal received his master’s in computer science from Stanford in 2016, and less than a year later launched Curai.His “significant” involvement in the Seahawks, as the NFL memo described it, indicates he could be viewed as the future principal owner for the family. The NFL requires every club to file a succession plan and update it annually to try to ensure seamless transitions of power within families.But in order to lead the Seahawks, the Khoslas will have to divest their 3.1 percent share in the 49ers, which they purchased last year. The NFL prohibits owners from holding interest in multiple franchises.“My father and I have been season ticket holders for 30 years, going to games at the Stick starting when I was a child through the last 11 years at Levi’s Stadium,” Neal Khosla said in 2025. “For us, becoming members of the 49ers family is a dream come true and we’re honored to be a part of the team’s future success and continued impact on the Bay Area community.”The Khoslas, who said in a statement attributed to Vinod earlier this month that they are “honored to be entrusted as the next stewards of the Seattle Seahawks,” declined to comment further for this story.The NFL has tweaked its ownership policies over the years to make it easier for families to pass down franchises through generations and to make the purchase of teams slightly more attainable for new owners. In 2024, the league raised the debt limit to purchase a team to $1.4 billion and began to allow select private equity firms to invest up to 10 percent (non-control) in a team.But the NFL, unlike the other American pro leagues, still requires an individual, not a group or institution, to be principal owner. That person must own at least 30 percent. (For teams owned by the same group for at least 10 years, the threshold for control is only 1 percent, provided the family collectively owns 30 percent.) The NFL also caps the number of limited partners for each team at 24 people.The league’s restrictive policies have often raised the question of whether it will need to loosen them further to attract a broader pool of candidates who can afford its now-multibillion-dollar teams. Ganis believes NFL team values could reach $20 billion in the next seven years, requiring a principal owner to put down at least $6 billion to have control.If the Seahawks deal proved anything, however, it’s that the league has so far not run into a shortage of billionaires eager to join its elite club. The Khoslas’ $9.612 billion offer toppled the previous NFL team sale record of $6.05 billion, paid by Josh Harris for the Washington Commanders. The Seahawks, in a smaller market, drew multiple bidders during a sale process that took only five months. Allen’s estate, overseen by his sister and sole trustee, Jody, selected the Khoslas over at least one other group, which was led by Celtics owners Wyc Grousbeck and Aditya Mittal, according to Sportico.After this sale, the market for an NFL team could be dormant for a while. But the deal agreed to by the Khosla family kept the NFL’s ownership arrow pointed up.“You got to give a lot of credit to Jody and (Seahawks vice chair) Bert Kolde,” Ganis said. “In the eight years since Paul passed, this team has gone up dramatically in value. They’ve won a Super Bowl, their fanbase is incredibly strong and they bucked some serious economic headwinds. I think they deserve a lot of credit — a lot more than they get.”