LIV Golf’s bankruptcy filing is the story that keeps on giving. I was hoping to get this newsletter out earlier this week, but between the NYC Marathon breakdown and this, reading 300+ pages of financial disclosures took longer than expected.
That said, I’m glad I took the time to do it. While everyone else is using LLMs to scrape through boring legal documents, taking out a highlighter to manually review them is still a superior process. In fact, it enabled me to uncover some really unique items, including how much LIV’s executives and players were getting paid, how much LIV was spending on its office space in Hudson Yards, how much the league paid Donald Trump (and other members of his administration) to use their golf courses, the details behind LIV’s TV deal with Fox, a list of unpaid vendors totaling tens of millions of dollars, and much more.
Here are 15 of the most interesting things I discovered:
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Many sports agents, executives, and investors have quietly questioned why an experienced executive like Scott O’Neil would not only join LIV Golf but also keep fighting for its existence after Saudi Arabia pulled its funding. Well, now we have our answer. According to LIV Golf’s latest bankruptcy filings, O’Neil was personally getting paid $214,000 every month. O’Neil also received two separate bonuses — $1.88 million in December 2025 and $2.69 million in February 2026 — along with a $6.38 million “retention bonus” just months before the bankruptcy filing. That’s a total of $13.67 million, with O’Neil’s “retention bonus” likely contingent on him staying on as CEO of LIV Golf 2.0.
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