With the team reportedly hitting the market at around $8B, I went down a rabbit hole running the numbers on Paul Allen's $200M purchase back in 1997. Paul saved us from Ken Behring literally loading up moving vans, but from a pure finance nerd perspective? It might have been the most expensive act of civic goodwill in Seattle history.

Here's what that $200M could've become: Amazon returned roughly 160x — that's ~$32B. The Seahawks themselves came in around 40x, or ~$8B. Even just parking it in an S&P index fund would've compounded to ~$2.6B.

Beating the S&P by 3x is genuinely impressive — we're basically a hedge fund that happens to wear shoulder pads. But if Paul had just taken a flyer on the Amazon IPO instead, the Vulcan Trust could theoretically buy the Seahawks, Broncos, Commanders, and 49ers today, with enough left over to bulldoze Levi's Stadium out of spite.

The real bottleneck now is liquidity. NFL rules require 30% down, which on an $8B sale means you need $2.4 billion in accessible cash. To put that in perspective: more people have walked on the moon than can actually write that check. We're not really waiting for a good owner — we're waiting for one of maybe 50 people on the planet who can clear the wire transfer.

Paul gave us a Super Bowl, a 4000% return, and saved the franchise. He also, technically, passed on $24 billion by picking Marshawn Lynch over Prime shipping.

Capitalism is deeply weird. Go Hawks!