Tom Dundon’s calculating nature made him a billionaire and helped transform Carolina into one of the NHL’s premier franchises

Dundon visits Raleigh a few times per month but lives in Dallas.Ben McKeown

Tom Dundon stands alone on the top level of a luxury box on opening night of the Carolina Hurricanes’ 2023-24 season. The team’s owner leans forward on the counter in front of him, his blue eyes focused intensely on the ice at PNC Arena.

Before entering the box that night, a visiting reporter is told by a team staffer, “You might not want to talk to him too much while the game is going on.” 

Tom Dundon, you see, loves owning the Carolina Hurricanes. But there’s a reason he doesn’t love going to games: 

“The chance you might lose.” 

When he’s at his 13,000-square-foot home outside Dallas, it’s less of a problem. Dundon can simply turn off the game and be surrounded by his family.

But in Raleigh, where he does not own a home, it’s different. “It’s tough to lose and then go back to the hotel,” he said. 

Fortunately for Dundon, the Hurricanes don’t lose on this night, beating the Ottawa Senators before a sellout crowd of 18,893. For nearly three hours, Dundon keeps his attention on the game. During stoppages, he exchanges quick notes with former Hurricanes star and golf buddy Justin Williams, seated nearby, about subjects as specific as the faceoff strategy employed by Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour. 

That night marks the start of another successful regular season, one that ultimately nets the Hurricanes’ third straight campaign with at least 100 points, a first in the franchise’s 45-year history. The playoffs start next week, and Carolina will be there for the sixth straight time, more than all the previous playoff appearances the franchise had made since relocating from Hartford in 1997. 

With two trips to the Eastern Conference Final since 2019 but no Stanley Cup title since 2006, the Hurricanes are facing a Cup-or-bust postseason. That has become the norm since Dundon bought the team at a valuation of $420 million six years ago. The club’s recent success includes averaging a franchise-record 19,526 fans per game in 2022-23, a figure boosted by a sellout crowd of 56,961 for an NHL Stadium Series outdoor game across the parking lot at N.C. State’s Carter-Finley Stadium; this season they are averaging 18,798 per game, 100.6% of capacity at PNC Arena.

And after long being the subject of relocation rumors, the team has a more secure future in Raleigh than ever. Last August, Dundon reached a deal to extend the team’s lease through the 2043-44 season and to redevelop the land around PNC Arena into a transformative mixed-use development. By most estimates, the value of the Hurricanes has more than doubled since Dundon bought majority control of the team from longtime owner Peter Karmanos Jr. (he became the team’s sole owner in 2021 after buying Karmanos’ remaining shares).

Dundon’s ownership of the Hurricanes is only part of what has become a substantial sports portfolio. In addition to being a key investor behind the rise of Topgolf prior to buying the Hurricanes, Dundon has become the most influential behind-the-scenes figure in the fast-growing sport of pickleball. He also briefly took over the Alliance of American Football, a spring football league he shuttered before the end of its first season in 2019.

And now his deep pockets and swift success with the Hurricanes have made Dundon a top choice to be a potential lead investor for a group aiming to bring an MLB team to the state. 

“We talked about potential candidates, but specifically one: Tom,” said Tipping Point Sports CEO Mitchell Ziets, a consultant for the group led by former North Carolina State Budget Director Charlie Perusse and outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper. “He was clearly the top choice.”

Dundon, 52, went public with his intention to bring an expansion franchise to North Carolina in October, and while he’s officially open to other locales across the state, he’s made it clear that he’d prefer to put the team in Raleigh. Whenever MLB does decide to expand — perhaps by the end of the decade — Raleigh will be up against trendier markets, including nearby Nashville, but will benefit from having a billionaire with a burning desire to win at everything he does.

“The biggest thing about Tom is he’s super competitive,” said Hurricanes Chief Marketing Officer Mike Forman. “So, if all of a sudden it’s either us or another city that’s going to get an MLB team, he’s going to do whatever it takes to win.”

The Hurricanes’ signature Storm Surge celebration has been a common sight in Raleigh since Dundon took over, as Carolina has topped 100 points in three straight years.getty images

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A few hours before the season opener, Dundon is sitting in his office at PNC Arena. His name is on the door, but clearly he doesn’t spend much time there. The few decorative items — a couple of random framed action shots of Hurricanes players on one wall and an oversized team bobblehead flanking an empty desk — look as if they’ve been plucked from arena storage to jazz up the otherwise sterile space, and a ringing landline phone catches him by surprise.

“I didn’t even know I had a phone,” he says, irked by the presence of what he considers an anachronism in a modern workplace. “I gotta ask why we put phones in.”

Dundon’s longtime friend Mark Molthan made the trip to Raleigh for opening night and is flying back to Dallas with him after the game. 

Molthan is astonished when Dundon sits and answers questions for more than an hour.

“He’s hard to get to know. He doesn’t have a lot of good friends,” Molthan said. “I’m surprised he sat there for that long — I was shocked.”

That description jibes with Dundon’s reputation as one of the more enigmatic and eccentric figures in sports business. Several people contacted for this profile declined to talk about their business dealings with him. He usually avoids any press that puts him at the center of the story; Molthan chalked up his willingness to talk to SBJ to a desire to promote his MLB ambitions.

Asked whether Dundon is close with his fellow NHL owners, Commissioner Gary Bettman said that “he likes to focus his energies and intentions and efforts on the Hurricanes and, frankly, if you’re a fan of the Hurricanes, that’s good news.”

Florida Panthers owner Vinnie Viola, who considers Dundon a friend, said he and Dundon have bonded over their mutual penchant for using statistics to drive their business decisions.

“He’s actually kind of shy,” Viola said. “I don’t think people see him that way, but I do. He’s a family, stay-at-home guy.” 

Dundon, who has five children ranging in age from 7 to 22 with his wife of 23 years, Veruschka, spent more time in Raleigh than usual last summer to nail down the terms of the lease extension and redevelopment agreements. He visits a couple of times a month during the season for a day or two at a time — not quite as often as he did when he first bought the team and needed to fix things up.

“I stay in a hotel, it’s easier,” he says of his visits to the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, later adding that he’ll likely establish a residence in the new development around the arena once it’s complete.

Though he isn’t a constant physical presence in Raleigh, he’s far from an absentee owner.

“Tom is very in tune with what’s going on with his team,” said Dallas Stars President Brad Alberts, who corresponds with Dundon regularly about both business and hockey. “The economics, salaries that are paid to players, the culture around his group — there is no question about it.”

In fact, Dundon is known as being among the most hands-on bosses in the league. He bristles at this characterization — “I don’t even live here,” he says — but those he’s closest to in the organization aren’t afraid to say so.

“You name it, he’s involved in all of it,” said Brind’Amour. “I don’t think you have another owner in sports that’s as involved in his team as he is.”

Bettman also characterized Dundon as “very hands-on,” noting that his office often hears from the Hurricanes owner multiple times a week.

“Our hockey operations people, our officiating people will hear from him if there’s a call he’s concerned about — after the fact, of course, not during the game,” Bettman said. “He’s always raising good questions about the collective-bargaining agreement and the salary cap and he’s always trying to make sure that the Hurricanes are doing everything possible within the rules to get an edge.”

Attendance has soared at PNC Arena under Dundon.getty images

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Tom Dundon learned at an early age that he liked money — and he was willing to hustle to get it.

“I always wanted to have money if I didn’t have it,” Dundon recalled. “It’s always been enjoyable to me to figure out how to make money.”

Dundon did not grow up wealthy. In fact, he says, “I didn’t know what Wall Street was. I didn’t know anything more than being an electrician or whatever. I [thought I] would’ve been much more blue collar — that’s how I thought about the world.”

Dundon spent his early childhood in Atco, N.J., a small town 25 miles southeast of Philadelphia, as the youngest of two sons to a mother who worked as a secretary and a father who managed a few pizzerias.

His family moved to Houston for two years before settling in Dallas when Dundon was 15. After graduating from Plano Senior High School, Dundon attended Southern Methodist University, where he kept a pair of needle-nose pliers handy to adjust the busted radio dial in his pick-up truck.

After graduating with a degree in economics in 1993, Dundon’s first professional venture — a burger restaurant called Izzy’s — was a flop and shut down within a year. 

“I was literally poor,” Dundon recalled. “I lived in my mom’s one-bedroom apartment and had like 100 grand in debt.”

A few of Dundon’s college buddies were working at the Frank Parra Autoplex, a large Chevrolet dealership in Irving, and suggested he come join them. He got a job in the finance office and learned about the business of auto loans. It clicked with Dundon’s analytical, detail-oriented disposition.

Soon, he and a few associates decided to start their own business that would work with dealerships to offer loans to buyers with bad credit. It was the early days of subprime auto lending, and that company, Drive Financial Services, soon found an edge against larger financial institutions.

“We were competing with Capital One and Ford and General Motors and Chase — companies that seemed much smarter,” Dundon said. “But we were able to gain an advantage with a little more entrepreneurial way to go about it, and then once you get larger, if you keep some of that efficiency in spirit, then it’s easy to beat the big companies.”

In 2006, Banco Santander bought 90% of the company for about $650 million. Instead of cashing out, Dundon kept his 10% share and became CEO of Santander Consumer USA. That company was spun off and went public in 2014 at a valuation of more than $8 billion. Dundon stepped away from the company a year later and, in 2017, reached a settlement agreement that netted him $713 million. 

By this point, Dundon had already dipped his toe into the sports industry with an investment in Topgolf, which he says he chose primarily to get his kids as excited about playing golf as he is. He currently owns 10% of the business, which he helped elevate into the “eater-tainment” behemoth with more than 80 outposts nationwide.

A few years after Santander, however, Dundon sought a new passion project.

“I was either going to buy a company to fix — I like to try to figure out what’s broken — or buy a sports team,” he said. 

The Hurricanes fit both criteria. When he received a call from a banker about purchasing the team in 2017, Dundon didn’t even know where they were located. 

“I thought they were in Charlotte,” he admits. 

That’s not to say Dundon was a stranger to hockey. He inherited his father’s New York Rangers fandom as a child and, decades later, was a Dallas Stars season-ticket holder.

“But when the Hurricanes came to Dallas, it was a game I wouldn’t go to,” Dundon said.  

The Hurricanes weren’t that popular in their own city, either. The club averaged a league-worst 11,776 fans during the 2016-17 season en route to an eighth straight season without qualifying for the playoffs. Their unexpected Stanley Cup title in 2005-06 was becoming a distant memory.

Hurricanes president and general manager Don Waddell remembers welcoming Dundon for his first visit to PNC Arena as a prospective buyer.

“We had like 3,000 people — it was preseason,” Waddell recalled. “And he says, ‘This looks like a disaster.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not great, but it’s better than this.’”

By that point, Dundon had already explored purchasing a few other teams, including the Carolina Panthers, Houston Rockets and Brooklyn Nets — each of which ultimately sold for north of $2 billion — as well as a professional soccer team he can’t recall offhand. He was ready to make a deal. 

“I didn’t see it as good investment,” Dundon said. “It’s worked out very well, but when I did it, I was trying to figure out how much I was willing to lose to do something that I really enjoyed. I was lucky enough to be in a position where that number was greater than zero.”

Dundon has been unafraid to crank up the pressure on people he negotiates with.getty images

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Dundon’s attire is typically the same every day: a sweatshirt-trackpants combination, often all black, with a matching Hurricanes baseball cap.

“Doesn’t matter if he’s going to a league meeting or a hockey game,” Waddell said. “Everybody’s in suits and stuff, he’s in a sweatsuit. He couldn’t care less, and that’s what I like about him.”

He may not dress like a sharp-elbowed businessman, but Dundon has nevertheless earned a reputation for taking a hardball approach to his running of the organization.

“Some people around the league feel that way, but he wants to be fair,” Waddell said. “He always wants to be on the good side of the fair deal, but he’s told me multiple times when I was making deals, ‘I just want a fair deal.’”

Dundon’s guiding principle, Waddell said, is that a player’s price tag is “worth the value that they bring.” Hurricanes assistant general manager Eric Tulsky, regarded around the league as one of the foremost analytics experts, said Dundon “wants every piece of information he can get” to make that type of determination.

“It really comes down to strict discipline within the numbers,” said Viola, the Panthers owner. “He’s one of the most disciplined owners that I’ve observed in the league.”

Off the ice, Dundon’s cold calculations have led to the departure of two fan-favorite broadcasters who had been with the organization since its Hartford Whalers era. After the 2018 season, Dundon reportedly asked longtime radio announcer Chuck Kaiton to take an 80% pay cut to stay with the organization following the expiration of his contract. When he declined, Dundon decided to simply simulcast the audio of the team’s television broadcast on the radio, something that several other NHL teams have also adopted.

“I want to put all the money on the ice,” Dundon told a local sports radio show when the organization split with Kaiton.

John Forslund, whose stint as the team’s TV announcer also dated to its time in Hartford, is also no longer with the organization. The franchise stalwart, who has also worked on national broadcasts for NBC and TNT, said that when his contract with the Hurricanes expired in June 2020, Dundon gave him a take-it-or-leave-it offer. He declined to go into specifics on the financials, but said there was “zero negotiation.” 

“There obviously was no history with regard to how he viewed my position in terms of the number of years I was there, or what kind of impact I had on the community or what kind of job I did for that organization,” said Forslund, who is now the TV voice of the Seattle Kraken. “Obviously, that meant nothing to him.”

Even Brind’Amour, who Dundon points to as the most important person to the team’s turnaround, hasn’t been spared the owner’s tough tactics. Typically, NHL teams that plan to keep their head coach in the fold negotiate an extension prior to the last season of their current contract. Brind’Amour, however, has coached the entire season on an expiring contract. He did the same in 2020-21 — a season in which he won the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year — before signing a three-year, $1.8 million extension weeks after the team’s playoff run ended; Waddell acknowledged that amount was “on the lower side” for a coach’s second contract.

“There’s business and there’s the personal side — he separates it,” Brind’Amour said. “I’m assuming with our relationship and how things have gone, I don’t think this will be too much of a problem, but I also know it’s a business.” 

Dundon, however, said it’s difficult to separate the personal from the professional when it comes to Brind’Amour — so much so that he’s taking an uncharacteristically hands-off approach to negotiating the coach’s new contract.

“It’s very different when you’re dealing with someone you care about, and it’s weird if your relationship transcends the business part of it,” Dundon said.

Overall, though, Dundon believes he has softened over the years in his approach to negotiations.

“I realize how I’ve been pretty lucky, and so I don’t need to win [every negotiation],” he said. “I just need to be happy and to feel like it’s fair.”

Those outside the organization have had similarly challenging discussions with him. Centennial Authority Chairman Phillip Isley, whose agency serves as the Hurricanes’ landlord at PNC Arena, said negotiating the new lease and redevelopment deal was bumpy. The Hurricanes will continue to pay property tax on state land, something Isley said typically “does not happen,” and that Dundon quickly agreed to build workforce housing as part of the mixed-use development around the arena.

“I told Tom I enjoy talking to him 85% of the time,” Isley said. “He laughed and said, ‘If it was 100% of the time, I’d be doing something wrong.”

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“In probably his first year and a half, we might have had two conversations about, ‘Are there other places that might be better?’” Waddell said. “And I kept saying, ‘Let’s give this a chance here.’ Once we got to that point where we got the lease and attendance was getting better, he felt better that we can make it in this market and do well here.”

These days Dundon is all in on the City of Oaks. While he still doesn’t own a home in the area, he’s signed a 20-year lease extension that will keep the Hurricanes at PNC Arena and plans to lead an $800 million development of the surrounding area. Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin called it the “biggest economic development project in the history of the city.”

“Tom Dundon has done a fantastic job of actually getting some really good, solid information on our economic growth potential to where he’s recognized that,” Isley said. “To his credit, he wants to benefit from that.”

Perhaps the biggest testament to Dundon’s faith in the market is his commitment to lead an effort to bring an MLB expansion team to the area. While MLB has yet to launch a formal expansion process, multiple reports suggest the league will be seeking a fee of around $2 billion when it decides to add franchises. Despite his success with the Hurricanes, Dundon still doesn’t view buying a sports franchise as a great financial investment.

“You’re not outsmarting anybody by buying a team right now, and it’s going to be worth way more money,” Dundon said. “It would be a great investment for me, because I’d enjoy it, but it wouldn’t be the best use of my capital.”

Unlike the Hurricanes, Dundon said he most likely wouldn’t own 100% of the MLB team.

“You can get a public-private partnership to build a great stadium, and I think the people would support it,” Dundon said. “The revenues would do really well here, and we could sell tickets and sponsorships to be of value to Major League Baseball.”

Isley, who is overseeing the development around PNC Arena for the state, said that unlike other markets, Raleigh doesn’t have the “sports building fatigue” that comes with funding several major publicly owned professional sports facilities.

“It would absolutely be the cherry on top if it was located somewhere near our facility,” Isley said. “This really could be the next great entertainment district in the South.”

Charlotte, Mexico City, Montreal, Nashville, Portland and Salt Lake City are all likely to be on MLB’s radar when the league decides the time is right to expand, but Raleigh’s reputation as a professional sports market in 2024 is stronger than it’s ever been, and much of the credit for that is due to Dundon.

“He’s doing a great job in a market that some people many years ago questioned,” Bettman said. “But nobody does anymore.”