Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano were introduced on Monday as the new owners of the Padres, completing a change at the top of a team now valued at $3.9 billion, a Major League Baseball-record figure. The couple committed nearly $2 billion of their fortune to become the lead investors, setting up a new ownership era with Feliciano initially serving as the control person under league rules.
The introduction matters because it puts Jones, one of the two lead investors, at the center of a deal that was years in the making and arrives with the Padres carrying the weight of San Diego’s only major franchise. The team was expected to be introduced at Petco Park on Monday afternoon, adding a public face to a transaction that had already reset the value of the club at the top of MLB’s market.
Feliciano and Jones said the goal was never just to own a team. He said they tried to map out what they wanted to achieve in terms of dreams rather than dollars, while Jones said they wanted to make an impact in their community that was big and outsized. Feliciano said sports is much more than a business and argued that buying a team means contributing to society in a way few other organizations can match.
The pair traced that ambition back to an afternoon in Central Park when they were younger, when they sketched out their hopes with a pen and a pad. They later built parts of their lives and plans in Manhattan, and they have also donated to a nonprofit and helped fund a building at Princeton, a pattern that fits the way they describe this purchase: patient capital, measured in decades and hopefully generations.
That long view matters because league rules still require one control person, so Feliciano will speak for the club at the start even though the ownership is a husband-and-wife venture. Jones did not frame the deal as quick upside; she called it patient capital, and Feliciano called it a long-term investment, saying the question is whether baseball has a positive future in 10 years, 20 years and 30 years. For the Padres, the next chapter begins with new money, a record price and a promise to stay in it for the long haul.
