Who owns DraftKings? Ownership structure explained (2026)

DraftKings is one of the few American consumer companies where the founders still hold effective control more than six years after listing. That is not because they own most of the stock. Jason Robins owns about 2.1% of the Class A shares that carry the economic value of the company. He also owns every share of a second class that carries ten votes each and no right to a dividend or a liquidation payout at all.

The result is a company whose public shareholders supply almost all of the capital and bear almost all of the risk, while one person decides the outcome of every shareholder vote. DraftKings says so plainly in its own proxy statement: the election of directors, the ratification of the auditor, and the executive pay vote are assured regardless of how every other shareholder votes.

That matters more in 2026 than it did in 2021. The company is now fighting on three fronts at once: states raising betting taxes, prediction market exchanges attacking its core product from outside gambling regulation, and courts filling with addiction and deceptive-promotion lawsuits. Every decision about how to respond runs through one controlling shareholder.

DraftKings was founded in 2012 in Boston by Jason Robins, Matt Kalish, and Paul Liberman. The three had worked together as analysts at Vistaprint, and they started the company with a daily fantasy baseball contest. The original insight was that season-long fantasy sports asked for months of commitment, while a one-day contest could be entered, settled, and paid out before the user lost interest.

Daily fantasy carried DraftKings through its first six years and produced the marketing war with FanDuel that made both brands household names. The business became what it is today only after May 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal law confining legal sports betting to Nevada. DraftKings launched an online sportsbook in New Jersey that August, and the fantasy company became a betting company.

Today it operates an online sportsbook, an iGaming casino product, the original daily fantasy business, the Jackpocket digital lottery app, and, since December 2025, a federally regulated prediction markets platform. It remains headquartered in Boston, and the listed entity is incorporated in Nevada.

The economics have finally turned. Revenue reached $6.05 billion in 2025, up 27% from $4.77 billion in 2024, and the company posted positive net income for the first full year in its history on adjusted EBITDA of $620 million, against $181.3 million a year earlier. First quarter 2026 revenue was $1.646 billion, up 17%, with net income of $21.1 million against a $33.9 million loss a year before.

The market has not rewarded it. DraftKings guided to $6.5 billion to $6.9 billion of 2026 revenue against analyst consensus near $7.3 billion, and the shares fell hard. At the close on August 5, 2026, DKNG traded at $21.76, a market capitalization of roughly $10.8 billion.

DraftKings Inc. trades on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker DKNG. Anyone can buy the stock. What they cannot buy is a meaningful say in how the company is run.

There are two classes of common stock. Class A shares carry one vote each and hold all of the economic rights. Class B shares carry ten votes each and, by the terms of the charter, have no economic rights at all. Class B holders do not participate in dividends, and in a liquidation they receive nothing until Class A holders are paid in full, at which point nothing is left. The Class B stock is a voting instrument and nothing else.

Under the company's charter, Class B shares may be issued only to Jason Robins and to entities wholly owned by him. He holds all 393,013,951 of them. As of the March 19, 2026 record date, there were also 495,742,804 Class A shares outstanding. Because the Class B block carries 3.93 billion votes on its own, Robins commands approximately 88.3% of the total voting power.

DraftKings acknowledges the consequence directly. It qualifies as a "controlled company" under Nasdaq listing standards because Robins controls a majority of the voting power for the election of directors, an exemption that relieves the company of certain independent-board requirements that apply to ordinary listed issuers.

The gap between economic ownership and control is the most important fact about DraftKings' cap table, and it is easy to miss.

Robins beneficially owned 11,472,868 Class A shares as of the 2026 record date, 2.1% of the Class A stock. That is his economic stake. The 393 million Class B shares that give him 88.3% of the vote are worth nothing on their own. He controls the company through an instrument that pays him nothing.

His co-founders hold ordinary equity and ordinary influence. Matt Kalish beneficially owned 6,999,555 Class A shares, or 1.3% of the class. Paul Liberman owned 4,696,792, less than 1%. Neither holds Class B stock, and neither can. All directors and executive officers as a group, fourteen people, held 26,291,186 Class A shares, 4.9% of the class, plus the Class B block, for 88.5% of the vote. The insiders who built and run DraftKings own less than 5% of its economic value and cast more than 88% of its votes.

DraftKings raised a reported total of approximately $719 million across nine private rounds before going public. Round labels differ across sources for the earlier financings, so the table below identifies rounds by date and lead investor, which are better documented than the letters attached to them.

The July 2015 round defined the pre-public shareholder base. Fox Sports led with roughly $150 million for a reported 11% stake, and DraftKings agreed to spend $250 million on advertising across Fox properties over three years. The round also brought in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer, The Madison Square Garden Company, and Legends, alongside existing backers Atlas Venture, DST Global, GGV Capital, The Kraft Group, The Raine Group, and Wellington Management. Selling equity to the leagues it needed as partners made the sports establishment financially invested in a product it had spent years opposing.

DraftKings did not run a traditional IPO. On April 23, 2020, it completed a three-way business combination with Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company run by media executives Harry Sloan and Jeff Sagansky, and with SBTech (Global) Limited, a Bulgaria-based betting technology provider. The combined company began trading on the Nasdaq the following day as the first vertically integrated pure-play sports betting operator listed in the United States.

The SBTech half mattered for ownership as well as technology. Its founder, Shalom Meckenzie, emerged as the largest individual shareholder with a reported 11% stake and took a board seat. He has sold heavily since, beginning with a reported $180 million of stock in June 2020, and he does not appear among the eleven director nominees in the 2026 proxy statement. The size of his remaining position is not disclosed there.

In 2022 DraftKings completed a holding company reorganization in connection with its acquisition of Golden Nugget Online Gaming, placing a new Nevada-incorporated DraftKings Inc. at the top of the structure. The dual-class arrangement carried through unchanged.

The outside register is dominated by large asset managers, which is what you would expect of a Nasdaq-listed company of this size. What is unusual is how little that ownership buys them.

The Vanguard Group is the largest, holding 39,263,911 Class A shares, or 7.5% of the class, as of the 2026 record date. Its position is almost entirely index-driven. It holds DraftKings because DraftKings is in the benchmarks, not because it has a view on sports betting. FMR LLC, the parent of Fidelity, held 26,590,349 shares, or 5.1%. Janus Henderson Group held 25,313,909, or 4.8%, and BlackRock held 24,834,364, or 4.7%. Janus Henderson's is the most notable of the four because it is actively managed rather than mechanical.

The important detail is what none of them has. Vanguard's 7.5% of the Class A stock translates into roughly 0.9% of the total voting power, because the Class A pool casts fewer than 500 million of the company's 4.4 billion votes. The four largest institutions together own more than 22% of the economic value of DraftKings and control less than 3% of its votes. Governance leverage that would be decisive at almost any other company this size is, here, close to symbolic.

DraftKings has never paid a dividend, and its Class B structure would make one awkward, since the controlling stake would receive nothing. It returns capital through repurchases instead. The board authorized an inaugural $1.0 billion buyback in July 2024 and doubled it to $2.0 billion in November 2025, repurchasing 16.0 million shares for $571.5 million during 2025. Because Robins's control rests on the non-economic Class B block rather than his Class A position, buybacks do not change who runs the company.

Jason Robins is chairman and chief executive officer, and has held both roles since the company went public. He is the only person who can hold Class B stock, which means he is the only person whose departure could unwind the control structure. Combining the chairman and CEO titles at a company where the CEO already holds 88% of the vote removes the last conventional check on executive authority.

Matt Kalish serves as president of DraftKings North America and Paul Liberman as president of global technology and product. Both are directors. Having all three founders still in operating roles fourteen years on is rare in consumer technology, and it is a real asset in a business where product judgment and regulatory relationships both compound.

The named executive team beyond the founders includes chief financial officer Alan Ellingson, chief legal officer and secretary R. Stanton Dodge, and chief accounting officer Erik Bradbury.

The board nominated eleven directors in the 2026 proxy statement: Robins, Harry Sloan as vice chairman, Liberman, Kalish, Woodrow H. Levin, Jocelyn Moore, Ryan R. Moore, Valerie Mosley, Steven J. Murray, Marni M. Walden, and Gregory W. Wendt. Sloan's presence is a direct legacy of the SPAC: he brought the company public and stayed.

What is confirmed is that Robins controls the outcome of every director election. What is inferred is how much practical independence the outside directors exercise. Nothing in the public record suggests the board is passive. The structural point is that its composition is not decided by shareholders in any meaningful sense.

The governance criticism of DraftKings is not that the founders run it. It is that no shareholder mechanism exists to change course if they run it badly.

Ten-vote super-voting shares are common in technology listings. What is unusual here is that the controlling class carries no economic rights whatsoever, which severs the normal link between skin in the game and voting power. If the Class A stock fell by half, Robins's voting position would be unaffected.

Say-on-pay votes are advisory everywhere, but at DraftKings they are advisory and predetermined. The proxy statement says the outcomes of the director elections, the auditor ratification, and the compensation vote are assured notwithstanding a contrary vote by every shareholder other than Robins. Index funds like Vanguard and BlackRock, which increasingly use their votes as their primary engagement tool, have essentially no lever here.

States have discovered how much revenue online betting produces and have begun taking more of it. Illinois went furthest, raising its online sports betting tax from 15% to 40% and adding a per-wager excise of up to $0.50, the first state to tax individual bets rather than operator revenue. New Jersey lifted its rate from 14.25% to 21%, Louisiana from 15% to 21.5%, and Maryland from 15% to 20%.

This is structural rather than a one-off. Sportsbook margins are thin relative to the headline handle, and these taxes apply to gross gaming revenue rather than profit. DraftKings has responded with surcharges in some states and by adjusting promotional spend, but each response risks pushing customers toward untaxed offshore books or toward prediction market apps that sit outside state gambling law. Management's 2026 guidance does not assume further increases, which leaves room for downside if more legislatures follow Illinois.

Federally regulated event contract exchanges arrived as a direct attack on DraftKings' core product. Exchanges overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission can offer sports outcome contracts nationwide, including in states where sports betting is illegal, and they pay no state gaming tax. The economics available to competitors like Kalshi and Polymarket are structurally cheaper than DraftKings', and brokerages including Robinhood have pushed into the same category.

DraftKings chose to join rather than fight. It launched DraftKings Predictions on December 19, 2025 under CFTC oversight, offering event contracts across 38 states including sports contracts in California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, where its sportsbook cannot operate. In 2026 it acquired Railbird Exchange LLC, a CFTC-licensed exchange, for $84.8 million, and committed $200 million to $300 million of investment for the year. Annualized trading volume passed $2.3 billion in April 2026, with customer acquisition costs down more than 80% against its sportsbook.

The legal ground underneath this is unsettled. State regulators in Nevada, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Tennessee, New Jersey, and Arizona have issued cease-and-desist orders or pursued enforcement against event contract operators, and the CFTC sued Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois in April 2026 seeking to block state enforcement. Federal preemption has held so far, including in a Third Circuit ruling that same month, but DraftKings has told investors that a narrowing of preemption could force it to stop offering contracts in some states.

DraftKings faces a growing body of consumer litigation over how it acquires and retains bettors. Class actions in Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, and other states allege that "risk-free bet" and "no sweat first bet" promotions were deceptive, and that the product design rewards escalating risk while responsible gambling tools are hard to find or ineffective. In June 2026 an Illinois man who says he lost more than $2 million sued the company over its role in his gambling addiction.

Regulators have also acted. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission fined DraftKings $450,000 in July 2025 for accepting bets funded by credit cards, the largest sports betting penalty in the state's history. Separately, DraftKings agreed to a $10 million class action settlement in 2025 over its NFT marketplace.

Not every challenge has landed. The securities class action built on Hindenburg Research's 2021 short report about SBTech's alleged black-market operations was dismissed with prejudice in January 2023, the court finding the claims rested on the report's unsourced allegations. The addiction and marketing cases are a different category, because they go to the mechanics of the business rather than a single disclosure.

Control concentrated in one founder cuts both ways, and DraftKings is demonstrating both directions at once. The advantage is speed under uncertainty. When prediction markets emerged as a threat to state-licensed sportsbooks, DraftKings committed $200 million to $300 million and bought a CFTC-licensed exchange inside a few months, entering a product line that cannibalizes its own regulated business in some states and that regulators are actively litigating over. A board answerable to quarterly-focused shareholders would have found that much harder. Robins did not need to persuade anyone.

The cost is that there is no correction mechanism. DraftKings spent most of its public life unprofitable, reached its first full year of positive net income only in 2025, and then guided 2026 revenue well below what analysts expected. Shareholders who disagree with the strategy, the pace of investment, or the pay packages have one option, which is to sell. That is a real discount factor, and one reason a company generating $6 billion of revenue trades at roughly $10.8 billion.

For institutional investors the structure changes what ownership means. Vanguard, FMR, Janus Henderson, and BlackRock together own more than 22% of the economics and control under 3% of the votes. Index funds cannot exit a benchmark constituent, so their normal tool, the vote, is unavailable. Their exposure to DraftKings is exposure to Jason Robins's judgment, priced accordingly.

For customers the connection is less visible but still real. Promotional generosity, how aggressively state tax increases are passed through as surcharges, how responsible gambling controls are designed, and how far the company pushes into prediction markets are all decisions made by a management team that cannot be voted out. Regulators, courts, and legislatures are now the binding constraint on DraftKings, not its shareholders. Given the litigation and tax pressure building around the business, that is where the real oversight will come from.

DraftKings is listed on the Nasdaq under DKNG, so its economic ownership sits with Class A shareholders, led by The Vanguard Group at 7.5% of the class, FMR at 5.1%, Janus Henderson at 4.8%, and BlackRock at 4.7% as of the March 2026 record date. Control is separate. Co-founder and chief executive Jason Robins holds all 393,013,951 Class B shares, which carry ten votes each, giving him about 88.3% of the total voting power.

Jason Robins is chairman and chief executive officer. He co-founded the company in 2012 and has led it since, including through the April 2020 SPAC merger that took it public. He is the only person permitted to hold Class B stock under the charter, which is what gives him voting control.

Jason Robins, Matt Kalish, and Paul Liberman founded DraftKings in Boston in 2012, starting with daily fantasy baseball contests. All three remain with the company and all three sit on the board. Kalish is president of DraftKings North America and Liberman is president of global technology and product.

Yes, on the Nasdaq under DKNG since April 24, 2020, following its business combination with Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp. and SBTech. It did not run a traditional IPO. Its market capitalization was about $10.8 billion at the close on August 5, 2026.

Far less than his voting power suggests. He beneficially owned 11,472,868 Class A shares as of the 2026 record date, 2.1% of that class and essentially all of his economic stake. His 393 million Class B shares carry no dividends and nothing in a liquidation. They exist to deliver votes, and they deliver about 88.3% of them.

A reported total of approximately $719 million across nine private rounds. The largest was a $300 million Series D in July 2015 led by Fox Sports at a valuation above $1.2 billion, which also brought in Major League Baseball, the NHL, MLS, Madison Square Garden, and Legends. Earlier rounds were led by Atlas Venture, Redpoint Ventures, and The Raine Group.