If there was any doubt about David Tepper’s bid to buy the Panthers, there shouldn’t have been.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the looming effort to approve Tepper as successor to team founder Jerry Richardson is expected to “sail through” when the owners meet tomorrow and Wednesday in Atlanta.
Tepper’s effort became essentially a formality by virtue of the fact that he previously had been approved to purchase five percent of the Steelers. Like Browns owner Jimmy Haslam before him, the process of flipping from minority owner of one team to majority owner of another is essentially a rubber stamp process, especially since the other owners strongly favored Tepper as the buyer of a team that Richardson opted to quickly sell after news emerged in December that he had resolved multiple allegations of workplace misconduct.
With a net worth reportedly in the range of $11 billion, Tepper instantly becomes one of the richest owners in a club of billionaires. And he’ll get even richer as the value of the team grows steadily in a new age of legalized gambling.