Michael Jordan’s second act is hitting top gear on Nascar’s fast track

No Nascar owner in history has opened a Cup season hotter than Michael Jordan has in 2026. Photograph: Jordan Bank/Getty Images Michael Jordan the basketball player is success personified, the legend against whom all others are measured. Michael Jordan the sports executive, on the other hand, has spent much of the past three decades falling short of his own impossible standard.

In 1999, Jordan joined Abe Pollin’s Washington Wizards ownership group as a history-making minority partner, but neither his star power nor a brief return from retirement translated into sustained team success. Eleven years later, he took over the Charlotte Bobcats, replacing BET co-founder Robert Johnson as the league’s only Black majority owner – but poor roster moves, questionable hires and three playoff appearances in 13 years, with nary one series victory, ultimately became his legacy as the principal steward of the retro-branded Charlotte Hornets. When he sold his stake in 2023 for $3bn, in part to focus on his nascent 23XI Nascar Cup operation (pronounced twenty-three eleven ), a joint venture with Jordan Brand racing ambassador Denny Hamlin, many assumed Jordan the exec would only bring about more disappointment before fully retreating into his golf and gambling hobbies.

Turns out, the 63-year-old was simply on the wrong track. “I’m cursed with this competitive gene, that anything I do is from a competitive lens,” he told CBS’s Gayle King . “In some ways, that keeps me young.

It keeps me aggressively thinking positively. [It] has transcended and taken over everything that I do. ” No Nascar owner in history has opened a Cup season hotter than Jordan has in 2026.