UWM’s stock slide puts Phoenix Suns owner’s wealth in focus

After a punishing stock slide and a series of setbacks put his mortgage company under new scrutiny, billionaire Mat Ishbia addressed his critics directly.

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“UWM has never been stronger than we are today. Never,” he said in a four-minute video posted to LinkedIn. “From an AI, technology, operations, sales, broker channel — never been stronger. And now stronger from a capital and liquidity perspective. We’ve never been stronger than we are today.” 

Ishbia delivered this pep talk during a weekly meeting with UWM Holdings Corp.’s clients and sales team in an attempt to quell any concerns about the resilience of the company. UWM shares fell by as much as 49% on Aug. 6 after it suspended its quarterly dividend and announced new financing from Oaktree Capital Management, the latest blow in a slide that’s erased more than 80% of the stock’s value in two years. 

“People are like, oh, the stock, your company’s doing OK?” Ishbia told his audience. “Our company’s doing as good as it’s ever been. We’re great.” 

But the stock rout and the Oaktree deal cloud the picture for Ishbia, who owns nearly 80% of UWM’s equity directly and through a family holding company. Previously unreported filings show that his brother, Justin Ishbia, pledged his economic interests in his private equity funds to secure loan facilities with JPMorgan Chase & Co. that now total $2.3 billion after an increase last year; that the entity behind Ishbia’s basketball team has pledged future distributions to the bank; and that he used tax rebates tied to his UWM stake to help secure the deal with Oaktree.

After taking UWM public via a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, Ishbia’s net worth soared to $13 billion. Newly flush, he included most of his family’s equity in UWM as collateral to secure as much as $1.8 billion in loans from JPMorgan, and bought a controlling stake in the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury. 

Around the same time, Justin Ishbia also posted additional collateral to back the loans, according to a Michigan UCC filing. Justin Ishbia runs Shore Capital Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm with about $17 billion under management, and is personally worth $4.8 billion. A spokesperson for Shore Capital Partners declined to comment. In 2025, the JPMorgan facility was increased with a fifth loan, bringing the total principal to about $2.3 billion.

Since its peak, Mat Ishbia’s fortune, which is largely tied to his company’s share price, has fallen by more than half to $6.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“JPMorgan did not request additional collateral from Mat Ishbia after last week’s selloff,” a spokesperson for the bank said in a statement. 

Since UWM made its public debut, its quarterly 10-cent dividend has been one of Ishbia’s most consistent sources of cash. SFS Corp., the holding vehicle through which Ishbia and his family own most of their shares, received nearly $6.3 billion in distributions between 2020 and 2025, according to filings, mostly from dividend payouts. 

The company used the equivalent of more than 96% of its net income to fund those distributions, leaving it with little cushion, and total equity fell even as it racked up profits. Alongside Oaktree’s new capital investment, those dividends will cease, with much of that redirected to pay the 10% coupon on newly-issued preferred shares.

Oaktree bought $1.5 billion of the preferreds. Ishbia bought $150 million. The financing came about after UWM lost roughly $600 million on an interest rate hedge tied to its failed effort to buy mortgage servicer Two Harbors Investment Corp.

Ishbia also pledged the rights to payments he receives through a tax receivable agreement with UWM, according to a Michigan UCC filing dated Aug. 5. As of June 30, UWM reported a TRA liability of $280 million, according to its most recent quarterly report.

As for the Suns, which were profitable before Ishbia purchased the team, the franchise lost money in his first season as controlling owner, according to court documents. Any future dividends or distributions, as well as any potential proceeds from a bankruptcy or insolvency, have been pledged as collateral to secure a loan from JPMorgan, according to a Delaware UCC filing. 

It’s unclear from filings whether the Suns’ interests were linked to the lending facilities backed by Ishbia’s UWM shares. A spokesperson for the Suns didn’t respond to a request for comment.
 
A spokesperson for UWM said none of this poses a liquidity issue for Ishbia. “Trying to use this deal to suggest Mat’s financial situation with UWM or the Phoenix Suns is threatened is clearly ignoring the facts,” the spokesperson said in a statement, noting that Mat has personally committed multiple hundreds of millions of dollars alongside Oaktree. Oaktree and Ishbia are backstopping a $400 million UWM common-stock offering expected to come later this year. 

“Our agreements with JPMorgan are credit facilities and the outstanding balance on those facilities is so low they could be paid off anytime,” the spokesperson said. “They are immaterial and the rhetoric around them is nonsense.”
 
Ishbia is also in the process of buying out the remaining Suns and Mercury shareholders, the spokesperson said. 

The move would follow a dramatic change of hands at another NBA team. Billionaire Mark Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers for a record-breaking $12.5 billion to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger on Wednesday, part of a broader effort to raise money to pay down loans to his insurers.

In a ratings action issued last Friday, Fitch Ratings downgraded UWM and said that it was treating the preferred shares as debt. It also pointed to “elevated key person risk” at UWM because of Ishbia’s “significant control” over the company. On Wednesday, Moody’s also downgraded its outlook on UWM’s debt, to negative from stable.

Embrace the spotlight, Ishbia told his audience this week, saying the attention on his company affirms its relevance. “If in three years or four years and we have a bad month or a bad quarter or a bad year, and they don’t talk about us, that’s what I’m scared about, because it means we’re not relevant,” he said. “Everyone wants us to fail. And the best part is, they ain’t gonna get what they want.”