While the Philadelphia Eagles are easily the crown jewel of Jeffrey Lurie’s empire, they’re far from the only thing on his plate.
Lurie is an Academy Award–winning film producer with the kind of business instincts you don’t learn at Harvard. He bought the Eagles in 1994 with $185 million in borrowed money — today the franchise is worth around $8 billion.
So when a man with a net worth of $7.6 billion unexpectedly appears at practice on an ordinary Thursday in November, you can bet his time isn’t being wasted. He’s not there unless something truly matters.
This time, what mattered was putting out a fire inside the locker room of the defending Super Bowl champions — at the urging of legendary Eagles security chief Dom “Big Dom” DiSandro.
That fire? A.J. Brown. Again.
The star receiver had jumped on social media to vent about the offense, calling the season a “(expletive) show” during a Twitch stream.
And this while the Eagles are 7-2, winners of three straight, and holding a comfortable three-game lead in the NFC East.
“Today at Eagles practice Big Dom got Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie and AJ Brown together and it looked like they had a very good conversation about AJ‘s frustration and they all want the offense to be better,” NBC Sports Philadelphia’s John Clark posted on X on November 13.
Ask yourself: what would you do if an employee you pay $32 million a year kept blasting the company publicly?
You’d probably want a little chat, too.
Lurie’s Hollywood Fortune
Lurie’s family money traces back to his grandfather, Philip Smith, who founded the General Cinema chain in 1935. It grew into one of the largest operators of drive-ins and indoor theaters in America, at one point running more than 1,500 screens nationwide.
Before landing the Eagles, Lurie twice failed to buy an NFL team — once losing out to Robert Kraft for the Patriots, and again to Stan Kroenke for the then–St. Louis Rams. He finally secured the Eagles in 1994 for $185 million.
He’s also earned three Oscars for documentary films, including “Inside Job” (2011) and “Summer of Soul” (2022).
A Controversial Figure
While it’s logical to assume Lurie visited practice to have a hard conversation with Brown, he’s got some experience navigating his own controversies.
This summer, as he aggressively defended the Eagles’ famous Tush Push, Lurie created his own PR mess.
“Lurie (said) regardless of whether the play was banned, it was a ‘win-win’ for the Eagles, adding that it was like a wet dream for a teenage boy’ to create a play that was so successful that the only way for it to be stopped was for it to be banned,” ESPN’s Seth Wickersham reported on May 21. “ … executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent chastised the Eagles owner for the ‘wet dream’ comment, specifically for saying it in front of women in the meeting.”