purchase

Kobe Bryant rookie trading cards aren’t particularly rare. And because rarity equates to value, standard issue 1997 cards featuring the late Lakers great retail for a pedestrian $100 to $300.

Then there are 1997 Kobe Bryant Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems Green cards, which just by typing that highfalutin name can give even the most savvy collector goose bumps.

The key word is green. Most Bryant rookie Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems cards have a red background and fetch around $300,000. Only 10 were made with a metallic green background and only three have been graded by respected grading firm Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA).

So green translates to greenbacks. Alt, a company that enables users to sell, buy and securely store collectible cards, announced Thursday it purchased one of those — take a breath first — 1997 Kobe Bryant Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems Green cards in a private transaction for $3.15 million.

The company said on Instagram that the purchase makes it the most expensive Bryant card ever sold, eclipsing the previous record of $2.4 million set in September. Another copy of the same card sold for $2 million in 2022.

“It was on every collector’s wall, in every price guide, at the top of every wish list,” Alt CEO Leore Avidar Avidar said on Alt’s Instagram page. “Acquiring it for our fund is personal, but it’s also a reflection of where this market has gone.”

The image of Bryant in midair passing — not shooting! — highlights the card, which earned a PSA 5 grade.

The card adds to Alt’s impressive collection. The fund set price records at time of purchase for LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Giannis Antetokounmpo cards in addition to the one of Bryant.

The most paid for a sports trading card was $12.932 million for a 2007-08 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection Dual Logoman Autographs signed card featuring Bryant and Michael Jordan last fall. The purchase was made by investor and “Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary along with veteran collectors Matt Allen and Paul Warshaw and surpassed the previous record of $12.6 million held by a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card.

The Bryant/Jordan card is the second-most expensive sports collectible of all time behind Babe Ruth’s 1932 World Series “called shot” jersey, which sold for $24.12 million in 2024.

High-end Bryant cards remain coveted by collectors. Allen, well known in the industry as Shyne150, privately spent $4 million on two Bryant 1-of-1 signed Panini Flawless Logoman cards.

In 2019, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater needed a lifeline. Forced out of its edge-of-downtown home of more than 55 years, the beloved troupe with its thousands of handcrafted puppets — a saucy black cat in heels, a fish out of water that can’t help but wiggle — ultimately found a new location in a Highland Park theater.

Signing a 10-year lease was a sigh of relief for the company, the result of a lengthy search that included more than 80 spaces and ensured its playful, fanciful shows would continue to be a multigenerational, SoCal tradition. But yearly rises in rent, as well as the looming end of the contract, remained a cause of stress for the nonprofit.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater can exhale once again.

The saucy black cat puppet in a performance at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater.

(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Marionette Theater)

The theater’s executive team said it has entered into an agreement to purchase its current location at the corner of York Boulevard and North Avenue 50, which had former incarnations as a movie theater and a Korean church. Once completed, the $5 million acquisition will ensure the theater has a permanent home, a place where skateboarding clowns and leek-haired onions can continue to frolic and dance for decades to come.

“This is monumental for us,” says Alex Evans, the theater’s co-executive director. “It’s been decades of us struggling to survive. Now we’re at this moment where it’s not a struggle. It’s a blossoming moment where our future is set up forever.”

Bob Baker’s Highland Park home was originally built as the York Theater in 1925, hosting movies and vaudeville performances during that era. It most recently housed the Pyong Kang First Congregational Church. Over the years it has also been a barbershop and the site of an organ sales and repair store.

The purchase comes at a celebratory time for the troupe. While its annual Bob Baker Day Festival at the Los Angeles State Historic Park had to be postponed from April 12 to the fall due to a forecast of rain — the historic and fragile puppets cannot be exposed to water — the company still took its show on the road to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Its adults-only May fundraising event the Puppet Prom, which typically raises more than $30,000, is nearly sold out, and the theater, which also hosts film screenings and concerts (with puppets, of course), continues to pack in full audiences — partly due to its location in a walkable neighborhood with young families.

And in the coming weeks the theater will launch its first new show in 40 years, “Choo Choo Revue.”

“Now is the time,” says Evans, who notes that while they have built new puppets and tweaked existing shows, this is the first proper new production since 1981’s “Hooray LA!” “We have the staff to implement it. We have a sustainable business to be able to pull off what is going to be close to a half-million-dollar production to mount a new show.”

In going public with its intent to secure the York Boulevard theater, the company is initiating a new round of fundraising. Bob Baker over the last year has raised $4.5 million of the $5 million purchase price. It is seeking $500,000 to close the gap as well as an additional $2 million for what it describes as critical renovations, such as repairing the building’s roof and restrooms.

Some of the eccentric canines puppets.

(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Marionette Theater)

Mary Fagot, Bob Baker’s co-executive director, says the theater has in place a $500,000 loan to ensure the deal closes. Yet Bob Baker does not want to to begin its new era with debt.

“We think it’s an achievable gap,” Fagot says, pointing to community fundraising the theater had to enact to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the days of the shutdown, for instance, the company was able to raise $365,000 in 365 days.

Rising rent, say the co-executive directors, was a key driving factor in the decision to approach the building’s ownership to purchase the space. This year, Bob Baker will pay close to half a million in rent, an amount, says Evans, that is double the theater’s budget when it was in its prior space near downtown L.A. That, coupled with the lease’s impending expiration in a couple of years, acted as a sort of deadline to craft a proposal that could appeal to its building owners.

“We started to have discussions in 2023 with the owners of the building, and those evolved into this becoming a real possibility,” Fagot says. “Then we started the hard work of talking to our biggest supporters about getting behind us.”

Bob Baker, founded in 1963 by its namesake puppeteer, now attracts more than 145,000 audience members per year, including about 20,000 students via school field trips. Funding for the building purchase was secured, in part, by gifts from the Perenchio Foundation, the Kohl Family Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the late Wallis Annenberg, and celebrity donors such as Jack Black and Tanya Haden.

A sidewalk performance outside the Bob Baker Marionette Theater featuring ladybug puppets.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“I’m proud to have played a small part in helping safeguard such a beloved institution that has enriched Los Angeles for decades,” says Brian Mikail of Capstone Equities, which rents the space to the troupe. The hope when signing the lease, says Mikail, was that Bob Baker could someday be set up to purchase the venue.

The agreement, says, Fagot, is a win-win for both sides.

“I think we were the ideal owners for this space,” Fagot says. “If it’s for any other purpose, it would need a giant transformation, and for us, it’s exactly what we need.”

“Choo Choo Revue” is set to open May 16 and will feature more than 100 brand new, handcrafted puppets. Look, for instance, for a conductor with a clock as a face, dancing luggage and a cicada jug band, among a host of other oddities. Expect, perhaps, a crescent moon in pajamas to be a new favorite. Or maybe audiences will instead fall for the singing mushrooms.

“The show invites audiences to go on a train ride, where the show is looking out of a train window and seeing flights of imagination,” Evans says. “It’s daydreams outside of a window. Windmills run around. It’s weird, fantastical abstractions of what’s possible. The hope is by the end of the show people are inspired to be more creative and to look at the world more beautifully.”

There’s also a clear hunger for the type of whimsical, family-friendly entertainment that the theater provides. Gross revenues topped $3.1 million in 2025, up from $699,211 in 2018, according to its most recent annual report. Fagot says the COVID pandemic only increased the demand for the “special brand of magic” that Bob Baker creates.

“People needed community,” she says. “They just need joy. They need inspiration and creativity and want to do it together, and that is what we do.”

There’s a 12-ticket maximum for each fan across all sports and sessions, plus 12 tickets for soccer sessions that don’t count toward the general maximum. A four-ticket maximum per ceremony for the opening and closing ceremonies is included in the general limit. Each attendee, including children of any age, will need a ticket to attend.

Tickets included in hospitality packages sold by On Location, the official hospitality provider of the LA28 Games, will not count toward the general limit.

Jury finds that two tweets posted in May 2022 by Musk contained false statements responsible for a plunge in Twitter’s share price.

A federal jury in California has found that tech tycoon Elon Musk misled Twitter shareholders, driving down the company’s share price as he was poised to buy it in a $44bn deal.

The verdict delivered on Friday in the class action securities lawsuit means the world’s richest person could be ordered to pay billions of dollars, according to damages calculated by jurors.

After a three-week trial in a San Francisco federal court – which included in-person testimony from Musk – the jury found that two tweets posted in May 2022 by the Tesla and SpaceX CEO contained false statements responsible for a plunge in Twitter’s share price.

Investor Giuseppe Pampena had filed the suit on behalf of people who sold Twitter shares between mid-May and early October 2022.

Jurors agreed that Musk violated a securities rule that bars false and misleading statements that sink a stock price, in this case that of Twitter, the verdict form showed. A lawyer for the plaintiffs estimated the damages at about $2.6bn.

But the nine-person jury absolved Musk of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not “scheme” to mislead investors.

Minutes after the judgement was announced, lawyers for Musk, who acquired the social media platform in late October 2022 and later renamed it X, said their client will appeal the decision, characterising it as a “setback”.

Musk, who has a near-constant presence on X, did not immediately react to the verdict, which marks a rare legal defeat for the billionaire often dubbed “Teflon Elon” for his ability to emerge unscathed from lawsuits he is expected to lose.

In 2023, a jury in the same San Francisco federal court cleared him within hours of similar charges brought by Tesla shareholders, following his 2018 tweets claiming he had the funding to take the automaker private.

Musk abandoned his effort to get out of buying Twitter in late 2022 after the company took him to court to uphold the contract. He has since merged the social media platform with his artificial intelligence startup xAI and his private space exploration firm SpaceX.

Forbes magazine earlier this month estimated Elon Musk’s net worth at $839bn, a figure based primarily on his stakes in his portfolio of companies including Tesla and SpaceX.