september 3 etc
The biggest NBA news of the day isn't NBA news. It's news news via Pablo Torre Finds Out. TL;DR Kawhi Leonard and Steve Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the LA Clippers, allegedly did a little dealio to circumvent the league's salary cap and violate the league's CBA.
From PTFO's Twitter:
Kawhi Leonard signed a $28M endorsement deal for a "no-show job" with a fraudulent tree-planting company funded by $50M from Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, according to documents obtained by [Pablo Torre].
Also:
From PTFO's Twitter:
Our full episode, btw, is a full-length documentary about how two Democratic politicians from Harvard are behind a $2.3B scheme centered around climate change.
They had a key donor: the richest owner in sports.
The full episode can be seen here at PTFO's home on YouTube. Here's the episode summary if that is the kind of thing you like:
Did the richest owner in sports sweeten the pot for the most private star in the NBA? Pablo Torre investigates a tree-planting green bank called Aspiration... unearths more than 3,000 pages of exclusive documents... and speaks to high-level sources, ultimately linking Kawhi Leonard's "no-show" endorsement deal to his contracts with the Clippers; to his Uncle Dennis; and to owner Steve Ballmer's personal $50M investment in a company that's now being probed by the U.S. government. Former front-office executives Amin Elhassan and David Samson react to the reporting and wonder how Adam Silver will look into these new allegations of salary-cap circumvention — and whether Ballmer's money took "a round trip."
Asides:
👉🏽 Steve Ballmer's net worth is around $150Bn.
👉🏽 Because partisan media outlets will (purposely) miss the point to throw their base(s) red meat, the fact that the two politicians (Andrei Cherny and Joe Sanberg) behind Aspiration, Inc. are Democrats is incidental to the fraud. The fact that they went to Harvard is also incidental to the fraud.
👉🏽 Aspiration, Inc. is a lame name for a company.
👉🏽 The last time an NBA team tried to do this kind of chicanery, the Minnesota Timberwolves were fined $3.5MM and had five first-round picks taken away from them.
The NBA/basketball implications of this story are massive, but because this isn't a sports blog, I won't get into the ins and outs of the CBA, the salary cap, the aprons, and the summer of 2019 when my Toronto Raptors so desperately wanted to re-sign Leonard to try to win back-to-back chips but were spurned so Leonard could go back to play in the city where he's from (Riverside, CA).
This isn't a story about basketball, though. It's a story about all kinds of corruption. Outside of the obvious NBA-related issues (salary cap circumvention, competitive advantage fraud, etc) this is about financial fraud and securities fraud, money laundering, sportswashing, greenwashing, and about fifty shades of political corruption.
A thing I don't write a lot about but think and talk about a lot is how the world of today is wildly (and senselessly) corrupt, and how bad actors are allowed to thrive because no one seems particularly interested in stopping them and the public is firehosed with a thousand stories about how the world is fucked every day —— almost ensuring that individual stories about wrongdoing and corruption don't stick.
That said, this story seems like it's going to stick.
And it should.
On y va!
🎵❤️ The world is bad but this 16-year-old Joel Plaskett song is good. (Spotify)
🎵❤️ The world is bad but this nine-minute Cloud Nothings song is great. (Spotify)
🗣️🗣️ Every now and again I think about this short film that won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 2016 and today is one of those times. (YouTube/@newyorker)
📘📕 I just started reading Our Dope Future, Tony Tulathimutte's new story in Joyland and thought you might want to as well. IMO Tulathimutte is one of the best writers in America and a throwback to a time when writing mattered to people. (Joyland)
🤖🤖 Ted Gioia took down the paywall on his Substack post about the AI bubble's imminent bursting that I think you should read. (The Honest Broker)
🤒🤒 Florida is ending state vaccine mandates, and the guy leading the charge literally said that "every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery." I have so many questions, but the main one —— echoed by my partner just now —— is how does something drip with slavery? (Reuters)
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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