Steve Ballmer, the Other Cuban and the $118 Million Infusion: Kawhi-Gate, Part IV

As the NBA commissioner and the richest owner in sports dig in their heels, Pablo scoops up more Aspiration receipts — from Mark Cuban's tweets to the Clippers' C-suite and the cellphone of Uncle Dennis. Meanwhile, Dan Le Batard breaks character to look after a muckraker running on fumes. • Part III: The Mystery Investor, the No-Show Payday and the "Smoking Gun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKJyKFdT8rQ • Part II: Team Ballmer vs. Team Sh*tting Bricks — an Argument with Mark Cuban https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwXcEG5BA6U • Part I: The Richest Owner in Sports, the Silent Superstar and the Rotten Apple Tree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OwzYk6OCFM • Subscribe: Pablo's newsletter has exclusive access, documents and invites https://www.pablo.show/ (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out, and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  I'm Pablo Torre and this episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale. Exceptionally smooth cognac for all your game day festivities. Please drink responsibly because today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  They did that. So I think he's right, that he's completely correct. That would be one, one of the avenues that you would use to circumvent the cap.

• 0:25Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 0:32Speaker 02

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• 1:26Pablo Torre?

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• 2:12Pablo Torre?

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• 2:34Pablo Torre?

  Dan, I was, I gotta admit, I was kind of hoping for a different Cuban in the screen that I'm looking at right now.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  You have an equally uninformed one, if you would like to start arguing. I love arguing when I don't have any facts and just have my blowhard opinion. So in that way, Cuban honors me as a fellow Cuban.

• 2:58Pablo Torre?

  That's right. I also want to honor you and your request for what this was gonna be, because you wanted to have a conversation, I think, with me, your friend, who we don't really see as often as either of us would like. But you wanted to have a conversation about journalism, and I wanted to honor that by forcing you to live it. If you're down for a bit of a ride that you definitely did not sign up for today.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  No, not what I wanted to do. I know now that you've got a series of papers in front of me and you want to do this thing you now do where you surprise David Sampson or Amin O'Hassan, and now I've got surprises here to look at. But I did want to, as preface, I did want to just simply talk to you because I have found the way journalists have reacted to your story to be super interesting in that it seems to me like a whole lot of people don't want your reporting to be true, when what I do know about your reporting is it's exhaustive, and I want people to understand that you've got lawyers listening in on every conversation that you're having these days because your stand

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Is one that is much higher than the people who are denying the story. You have to prove something with a degree of difficulty that all the deniers don't have to have as they deny it. And I'm just curious why so many people don't want this story to be true. But go ahead, your program, I'll sit back and wait to be surprised.

• 4:28Pablo Torre?

  I have lawyers hearing all this stuff. I'm vetting this. And I guess when I say lawyers, I mean lawyer. We have our lawyer vetting this stuff. We have our producers vetting this stuff and we have you vetting this stuff insofar as now you get to discover some new material developments in the story that no one else has heard publicly. By the way, we get these developments because we're spending your money to do this.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Oh, I know that part.

• 4:51Pablo Torre?

  So your fiduciary duty.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  And I thought the costs were lawyers because I've seen the costs. So I didn't think it was a single lawyer that was pocketing all of that.

• 4:59Pablo Torre?

  A lot of billable hours, lots of hours, all of them billable. A lot of developments that are in front of you waiting to be discovered in some sort of a sequence here because this is a breaking story, Dan. And I just need to catch everybody up as to why you are the Cuban in front of me instead of the most prominent critic of the journalism you kindly describe and fund, who is of course billionaire Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban, the guy from Shark Tank, who, by the way, emailed me last Thursday after the Dennis Wong episode came out because he was still skeptical about what it meant that Clippers co-owner Dennis Wong, who was also, by the way, Steve Ballmer's college roommate and had never invested in this so-called Green

• 5:43Pablo Torre?

  Bank before, suddenly wired $1.99 million to aspiration. And this despite the fact that he was explicitly informed in the signed purchase agreement we obtained that aspiration was financially collapsing and already being probed by the SEC. The big spoken detail, Dan, is that his investment company, Dennis Wong's, put in that $1.99 million the week before aspiration wired Kawhi Leonard's company the $1.75 million payment that aspiration was months late at this point in paying Kawhi Leonard as per the secret no-show $28 million endorsement deal at the core of this entire story. And so. According to Aspiration's internal bank statements, 1.99 million comes in from that very rich investor affiliated directly, personally with Steve Ballmer and the Clippers.

• 6:25Pablo Torre?

  1.75 million goes out nine days later, December 15th, 2022. And so I asked the guy I wanted to ask, Mark Cuban, who had publicly aligned himself with what he calls quote unquote "Team Ballmer" to come back on this show, to sit in that chair, and that afternoon, Thursday, he told me that he is quote "swamped right now" and quote "and could not do it."

• 6:48Speaker 04

  And he tweeted about it between Thursday and Monday. He tweeted nearly 100 times about Aspiration, and this is an affliction that plagues all the globe right now. He is so interested in his confirmation bias that he has arrived at a conclusion, and it doesn't matter the facts that you present him, he's gonna continue to stay with what his conclusion was. This is a plague throughout discourse in this country and other countries, where it doesn't matter the facts that you have. I can't believe that he's Team Ballmer, Team Wong, and now Team Wrong.

• 7:22Pablo Torre?

  Well, he's also Team going on someone else's podcast instead of this one, and Team talking about this same topic at length with them.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  They didn't declare bankruptcy until March of 2025. And Kawhi kept on getting paid after that 1.75 in 2022, right? So 7 million a year, 1.75 every three months. And so, yeah, he got his 1.75 out of the 1.99 that Dennis Wong put in, but what about next year and those next four 1.75s?

• 7:54Speaker 06

  So you're saying who put that money in there to make sure?

• 7:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, right, because they had to stay in business for another year and a half at least, and they weren't really...

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw that. It has been a marvel to watch you so ahead of this story with so much more information and so many facts. You've birthed a series of gasbag opinions that aren't paying attention to all of the facts. And that's a nice soft spot for him to land to talk about this story when he swamped those particular people who can't question him on anything he's saying.

• 8:31Pablo Torre?

  But the question he raised in that clip we played very deliberately, I think is actually the one that I want to take seriously because I think it's worth answering. What is funding this whole enterprise? How is this contract for Kawhi Leonard continually getting paid? And what documentary evidence and credible primary sources exist that allow us to follow the money through the lens of salary cap circumvention? And so the understanding that I have, Dan, given all of this across four episodes now, is that two things can be true. It can totally be true that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer was in fact a victim

• 9:12Pablo Torre?

  of a massive scam allegedly engineered by Aspiration co-founder Joe Sandberg, who pled guilty in federal court for wire fraud. But this could have been especially painful to Steve Ballmer because Steve Ballmer had also partnered with Joe Sandberg through Aspiration in a secret plan to scam the NBA and also profit in the process, potentially funneling tens of millions of dollars to Kawhi Leonard, his superstar, through a team sponsor right underneath the nose of Adam Silver and the NBA itself.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Allegedly.

• 9:47Pablo Torre?

  Creating, allegedly, allegedly creating what would amount to the most elaborate salary cap circumvention scheme in the history of professional sports. And so the denials, I think, are of course worth including here. The Clippers deny it, Ballmer denies it. They deny that they circumvented the salary cap. They initially called any such assertion, quote, "provably false." And then that phrase disappeared from the next statement. But to be even clearer about this, I think we're talking about the biggest scandal in the history of the modern NBA. That's what it feels like to me, given the level of interest and attention from all of these power brokers and literal and figurative players in the story. And so I want to take the advice of the other Cuban.

• 10:32Pablo Torre?

  My reporting's foremost public critic here today, Dan, because that good question of how did Kawhi keep on getting paid his $1.75 million installments? And who continued to put money in to the $28 million deal? We've been arguing about this entire time in public. Plus $20 million in equity in the company. A $48 million secret deal. It is bigger than anything else we've heard of in the history of cap sur convention. Leads me to a money trail that we're about to follow. And I think people are treating this as Mark Cuban has been treating this like kind of a true crime podcast. And the fact that there is no smoking definitive piece of paper that says, I'm doing the crimes. I'm doing cap circumvention with a signature on it.

• 11:14Pablo Torre?

  It allows people to fill in the blanks. What I'm doing is like providing a story and then releasing clips. And some people will only listen to the clips, which means that they're missing the surrounding context, which is so essential that I care about it every time. And so it just feels like frankly, I'm watching people get scammed by the people I'm investigating for scamming. I'm like seeing why they're falling for the thing that they engineered. Because they're not listening to the full story that I've reported about why this is in fact a scheme. They're kind of buying and biting the hook.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  It's just weird to me though, in this age of conspiracy, Pablo. I do not see this kind of sports journalism being done by much of anybody in the modern age, because people can't afford it. And furthermore, certainly not podcasters. It's super weird for me to see the amount of what feels like proof or circumstantial evidence.

• 12:17Pablo Torre?

  Alleged, alleged.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it feels, it feels, it's so, there's so much documentation that for people to ask you to do more in the way of documentation is weird. Because the amount of documentation you have doesn't have a lot of precedent in scandals that I'm used to seeing.

• 12:35Pablo Torre?

  I don't know how many more papers I can put on this goddamn desk.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  It's weird.

• 12:39Pablo Torre?

  To make it clear that there's something here. But you know what? As always, all you gotta do is stick around after the break.

• 13:05Pablo Torre?

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• 13:37Speaker 02

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• 14:06Speaker 03

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• 14:37Pablo Torre?

  Dan has his glasses on. He has his Lil' Glasses, Samson's style. And the first thing I need to do, Dan, is just be very clear about something, which is that inside of Aspiration, the $28 million contract with Kawhi's company, KL2 Aspire LLC, was extremely weird from the start. I was told that Aspiration's Chief Marketing Officer at the time, when he first heard about this deal, did not even know who Kawhi Leonard was.

• 15:03Pablo Torre?

  Like, that's the sort of dissonance in terms of climate change company going and giving the biggest deal on the market to who? To that guy who was described by people who had the company as dull?

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Aspiration co-founder Andre Cherney, this week, denied that it was a no-show job, correct? Denied that that was any such thing.

• 15:26Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, so this guy who signed the paperwork, yes, the former CEO, he emerged for the first time in public to dispute the reporting. He said, quote, "The claim that the contract with Kawhi Leonard was a no-show contract is false." And then he proceeded to argue that the beliefs provision in the contract, the thing that our friend David Sampson spotlighted for us in part one, in which Kawhi didn't have to do anything if it didn't align with his small b beliefs. Andre Cherney argued, "Actually, this is totally normal for celebrity endorsements. It's like, Dan, if you're a vegetarian," Andre Cherney was saying, "and you got asked to eat meat, of course." And I suppose in this case, the equivalent would be that Kawhi Leonard is whatever a vegetarian is for someone who doesn't do work.

• 16:10Pablo Torre?

  But most crucially, what Andre Cherney said on Twitter was, quote, "In the months of discussion among our executives before signing the sponsorship, I don't remember conversations about the NBA salary cap," end quote. And I just think that anytime someone says "I don't remember" instead of "there were no," it's a bit of a red flag for me, just as a person who reads a lot of statements.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  Can we believe anything this person is saying? Like, what is the credibility of this person?

• 16:39Pablo Torre?

  The credibility is that Mark Cuban had then tweeted out, "This is the guy to trust. Joe Sandberg, don't trust him. Andre Cherney is co-founder. This is the guy, that Cuban says, is not going to jail, and so, trust him." And so, what I did, of course, was I made some calls, and I got a joint statement, signed on the record by three former executives at Aspiration Partners, all of whom directly reported to Andre Cherney at the time, that Cherney signed the kale-to-aspire deal. They are... The former Chief Financial Officer, Roger Avanesian, the former Chief Legal Officer, Mike Chukero, and the Chief Technology Officer, Eric Anderson, and they write under their own names, among other things, quote, "The Leonard deal was presented to the company as a completed arrangement and executed by Mr. Churney,

• 17:23Pablo Torre?

  despite significant objections from members of the senior management team. It did not reflect any strategy previously communicated to us, nor was it reviewed through Aspiration's investment committee process. The team expressed concerns at the time regarding the high cost of the agreement and its lack of alignment of Aspiration's brand and business strategy. In our judgment, the Leonard deal was not in the company's best interest. It was strategically difficult to justify then, and it remains so today." End quote. So when I say the story is developing, Dan, people are now watching and saying, "I've had enough from the people who are saying, 'This reporting is bullsh-

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Oh, and you've got the names. Like, that's not anonymous. You're not even doing... These people, they're providing you the documentation that's saying, 'No, we sign off on Pablo Torre's reporting.'"

• 18:14Pablo Torre?

  And so this is where I just gotta tell you that despite that statement, and despite the fact that Kawhi's endorsement deal was, as previously reported, more than four times bigger than every other celebrity endorsement deal Aspiration had combined, Andre Churney does not sign off on our reporting here. We texted Andre for comment. The ex-CEO reiterated that this endorsement deal, in which Kawhi did literally nothing, was not a no-show contract. He again claimed that there were many months of internal discussion. And as for the statement by the CFO, CTO, and CLO, the General Counsel, Andre said, quote, "Their advice at the time was contained in emails that were marked 'privileged', so I am not able to publicly comment on whether they did or did not

• 18:59Pablo Torre?

  support the signing of the contract at the time." End quote. And then we asked if Andre disputed the three execs who told us that he presented the deal to them as, quote, "A completed arrangement." And Andre replied that Aspiration's General Counsel, Mike Chukero, quote, "Drafted the contract and spent months going back and forth with Leonard's team. The negotiations happened with Joe Sandberg and our General Counsel, as well as Leonard's team. I was not involved in those conversations." End quote. Then, Churney cited legal privilege about further details once again. All of which led me to obtain one new piece of evidence that I do think you should know about.

• 19:42Pablo Torre?

  Because I'm about to read to you the screenshot of a text message apparently sent from the cellphone number of Kawhi's uncle, Dennis Robertson, and addressed to Joe Sandberg. And the Uncle Dennis number writes, quote, "Good morning, Joe. Hope you had a wonderful weekend. Just a heads up, things are still dragging. Mike has the contract for about 14 days now. Haven't heard back. Thanks. Just keeping you informed." End quote. Mike Shuckero, aspiration general counsel, declined comment to us about this text message as the Mike in question.

• 20:24Pablo Torre?

  Dennis Robertson did not respond, neither did attorneys for Joe Sandberg. But I did in fact confirm that Shuckero is that Mike. The Mike who was, quote, "dragging his feet on the contract for weeks," per the Uncle Dennis text. I further confirmed that this text refers to Kawhi's additional $20 million equity deal in aspiration, an often overlooked part of the $48 million completed arrangement, which Joe Sandberg eventually resolved by offering those shares to Kawhi Leonard through Sandberg's own personal LLC.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  And I'm learning this for the first time. I have not actually been involved in the innards of this story. Pablo and his team informed me largely after things are over that, yes, perhaps Ballmer can bankrupt you if you get a thing wrong. Yes, they tell me afterward. That's the way everyone does good business, I'm sure.

• 21:21Pablo Torre?

  Which is why you're the perfect person, actually, short of the other Cuban in that chair today. Because what the other Cuban urged me to investigate relates directly to this, right? So his whole thing was, why haven't you looked into how the money was flowing into the contract?

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Why haven't you taken the time, Pablo? The time? Why haven't you taken more time to talk to more people as Cuban just wanders around gas-bagging to Kendrick Perkins?

• 21:46Pablo Torre?

  I unfortunately took that bait, and I proceeded to talk to more people. I proceeded to return, in fact, to anonymous source number one, who had worked inside of Aspiration's finance department, who has fully cooperated with the federal investigation that led to the arrest of Joe Sandberg. Even though source number one is also someone that Mark Cuban doesn't really appear to trust. So I hesitate, source number one, to drag you into my ongoing Twitter beef with Mark Cuban. But I do just want to read something that he wrote effectively about you and a growing number of your colleagues who have been daring to speak to me, because here's what he says. Quote, "For all the information you have, why didn't any of the people you

• 22:29Pablo Torre?

  have talked to while they worked there uncover the fraud?" Question mark.

• 22:34Speaker 07

  Who's to say that they didn't?

• 22:38Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 22:39Speaker 07

  Yeah. So around March or April of 2022, it was the Seattle Fish Market. It wasn't just smelling fishy. You couldn't escape it. And at that rate, many people within the finance department started to raise alarms and actually address with executive leadership the problems that they were seeing. To go so far as to say that a firm was hired in order to conduct an external investigation on the fishiness that was taking place within aspiration in regards to revenue, in regards to accounts receivable, in regards to accounts payable, the entire bucket that had occurred within 90 days of signing $300 million was

• 23:24Speaker 07

  already fishy enough for many of my old colleagues to go to executive leadership and raise the alarms.

• 23:33Pablo Torre?

  What was the the shelf life like for an aspiration finance officer?

• 23:39Speaker 07

  Shorter than milk, which is abnormal. I mean, put into context where this company is said to be going. And they don't even have a full time CFO. They don't even have a full time controller.

• 23:54Pablo Torre?

  A two-point-something-billion-dollar unicorn hadn't hired a full-time controller.

• 24:00Speaker 07

  Correct. They could not hire a full-time controller and they could not hire a full-time CFO after Roger Avenezian stepped down.

• 24:09Pablo Torre?

  One of the executives, by the way, who signed under his own name, that statement, which we referred to earlier, in which he rebuked the characterizations of Andre Cherney, the co-founder and CEO of the company. But I digress. He stepped down noticing that something was not right here.

• 24:28Speaker 07

  Right. Many of my colleagues actually quit due to their disappointment and discouragement and the response of the executive leadership team as a result of external investigations into the concerns that they raised. So I think it's a vast mischaracterization on the team itself to say that we didn't uncover anything, which goes to show why many people on the finance team left as quickly as they got there.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  When am I gonna get to start turning over papers here? Because I am really, I'm really enjoying that you are referring to another human being out loud as source number one. I don't think, I don't think a lot-

• 25:14Pablo Torre?

  Me and source number one have been spending so much time together. When Violet asks who you're talking to, I tell her I'm talking to source number one. Why aren't you at bedtime?

• 25:23Speaker 04

  You're not allowed to reveal your sources. Violet, you'll go to jail, willing to protect your sources. I don't want to do this to a young, a young child, but Violet needs to learn early that she can't reveal who source number one is.

• 25:35Pablo Torre?

  But the thing about what source number one is telling us is pretty eye-opening for people who are just kind of paying attention, because remember, aspiration raises like $300 million in fall 2021, Dan. What source number one is saying is that all that [BLEEP] is gone. It's gone so quickly. It's gone, in fact, before Kawhi Leonard ever got paid.

• 25:58Speaker 07

  Yes, so Ballmer himself put in $50 million in September of 2021 as a part of an ongoing fundraise effort that eventually brought in Oaktree Capital Management and an additional 250 or so. And as quickly as it's wired in, it's committed elsewhere. There were extensive legal fees, professional services fees, marketing contracts, sponsorships and endorsements, things that were promised that had to be paid. So as quickly as those funds come in, they're out the door.

• 26:27Pablo Torre?

  It's actually just spent on the other stuff that Aspiration, under the direction of Joe Sandberg, the co-founder, has been spending.

• 26:35Speaker 07

  Joe Sandberg and Andre Chirney.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  So Ballmer's putting in money that's not going to Kawhi Leonard?

• 26:41Pablo Torre?

  Yes, so they are spending it on all sorts of things. They have a giant marketing budget, they have a professional services budget, they're just spending money flagrantly. And so the question then, of course, is like, so to Mark Cuban's point, how does Kawhi Leonard then get paid if you're telling us that they're burning cash as soon as they get it? And I need to acknowledge something else, Dan, because Mark Cuban tweeted another thing that is worthy of inclusion in our discussion. And I have not brought this up yet in any of the episodes we've done to date. And so, Dan, could you just read Mark Cuban's tweet? You were not on Twitter, you missed this, but on Friday, he said this.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  While Pablo is focusing on the $2 million and $50 million from Wong Ballmer, he didn't really get into the millions of dollars in carbon credits that were purchased by the Clips and the Arena. I bring this up because it would have been a lot easier and a lot safer if he was trying to circumvent the CBA to just buy more carbon credits. They were almost all margin, as Pablo correctly pointed out, so they would have created the cash immediately to pay KL2.

• 27:43Pablo Torre?

  And so what Mark Cuban is saying there does actually make a ton of sense, I must admit, because Aspiration, for those not familiar, was functioning as a broker for carbon credits at this point in their company's history. Anybody who has been following the life cycle of the apple tree that proudly stands still outside of Intuit Dome at the end of our first episode, they know this. Carbon credits are there to offset the real-life emissions of businesses like Meta and celebrities, by the way, like Drake and...

• 28:12Pablo Torre?

  Other clients of aspiration such as the Clippers as Steve Ballmer explained himself on ESPN.

• 28:18Speaker 08

  This is a company that I got to know frankly through them approaching us about a sponsorship deal. My family and I were super keen to do work to stem climate change. We think that's an important thing. I was in the process of even changing the design of Intuit Dome so that we could be carbon neutral. And then we meet this company that focuses in on an aspect of carbon neutrality. To me, it seemed like a match, kind of made in heaven, if you will.

• 28:50Pablo Torre?

  And so this is a match made in heaven for aspiration on their end because according to my sources, they were charging a dollar a tree. That's five to 10 times what it costs to plant a tree, the 10 to 20 cents reportedly. And so that is the margin that Mark Cuban is referring to in his tweet. Just get more carbon credits. All that margin is what you'll use to pay Kawhi Leonard. And so the piece of paper, Dan, that I would like you to turn over, which nobody else has reported yet, has something that I need you to read out loud. Actually, just describe what you see at the top of the page.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  At the top of the page, I see the Clippers logo and it says East West Bank and it says Payment to Aspiration Sustainable Impact Services LLC. Please allow this letter to confirm approval by LA Clippers LLC of a withdrawal of 20 million 961,382 from escrow account number blank. The withdrawn amount will be used to fund the following carbon projects.

• 29:50Pablo Torre?

  What is the date, Dan, of that letter that you're holding?

• 29:54Speaker 04

  June 14th, 2022.

• 29:56Pablo Torre?

  June 14th, 2022 is when this letter is sent. This letter that you just read says that they're withdrawing $21 million to fund carbon projects. It names a reforestation project, some nature-based credits, and then it is signed at the bottom, Dan, for the record here, by who?

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Is that the chief financial officer?

• 30:17Pablo Torre?

  That is the Chief Financial Officer of the Clippers. On June 14th, 2022, Aspiration is informed that it is receiving $21 million in this letter you're holding from the LA Clippers, signed by the CFO. And this, I'm told, was enough to not only pay Kawhi Leonard, obviously. It was enough to hit its fundraising target. It was enough to keep the company afloat two weeks, two weeks, Dan, before Kawhi's initial no-show payment was due on June 30th, 2022. And so, according to two sources that I've spoke to, who had direct familiarity with this $21 million carbon credit deal with the Clippers, it was agreed to and put into motion very promptly. I am told that Steve Ballmer and the Clippers,

• 31:02Pablo Torre?

  their executive team, had heard Aspiration's sales pitch for the $21 million purchase just, quote, "a couple weeks" before the June 14th, 2022, letter came in, as you're holding it in your hands. And my sources found this very memorable for a contract of that size, in particular, because it's an enormous deal. And to quote one of them, "The money came in quickly. They didn't sit on it or anything." And so, instead of us connecting the dots here, I'd like to ask Source Number Two, former senior executive in Aspiration's finance department, to come to the stage and explain what might be the missing piece here.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Violet, protect Source Number Two with your life.

• 31:41Pablo Torre?

  So what did you think, Source Number Two, when you saw what Mark Cuban had been tweeting about how if you were to circumvent the salary cap and you were a carbon credits company, you would do this?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  They did that. I mean, literally, he described one of the few ways that the Clippers and Ballmer got money into Aspiration. He literally described exactly what they did. So, I mean, he's right, that he's completely correct. That would be one of the avenues that you would use to circumvent the cap.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  I don't know what Mark Cuban wants in terms of a paper trail, but something with the Clippers logo signed off by the CFO of the company? Like, that's pretty strong documentation.

• 32:30Pablo Torre?

  In the way that he literally said it would have happened if this was cap circumvention, in a way that I'd never said before in public.

• 32:42Pablo Torre?

  And so this is where I just need to say that the Clippers, when presented with a detailed list of questions, reiterated Steve Ballmer's commitment to sustainability and that he was duped. And they also told us this, quote, "Our development agreements for the arena included mandates to buy carbon credits, but after studying the issue of neutrality, we went far beyond those requirements, exploring ways to address emissions from our fans and contracting with Aspiration to directly purchase carbon offsets as well as broker the acquisition of additional offsets. Some of those commitments were built into the sponsorship deal with Aspiration, totally separate of the investment in the company, and we made payments to Aspiration until the company was unable to fulfill their responsibilities." End quote. And if you are now wondering if Mark Cuban

• 33:26Pablo Torre?

  has anything else to say on this same topic, you should know that he remains so, quote, "swamped" that he tweeted thousands upon thousands of words about this story and our reporting on Tuesday night alone, as one Twitter user, @MKEBucks11, put it, quote, "I'm starting to think @M Cuban is Ballmer's burner human." End quote. But the thing that Cuban wrote to his 9 million followers that I just quickly want to cite here is this.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  If I had to point to the things that the NBA should look at, it's going to start with whether Dennis and Steve were the only outside investors when the company needed money so badly. Could they not find anyone else? Why? The second thing I would look at was the $50 million deal the Clippers had for carbon credits. Carbon credits are a dicey business, to put it mildly. I know, I've loved and lost here. Great concept, but it isn't something that is simple, not by a long shot. Did the Clippers pay the money upfront or not? That would be a red flag if they did, specifically because it's a dicey business.

• 34:36Pablo Torre?

  So we'll get to the first thing Cuban wrote there about outside investors in a minute, but that second thing, I do want to clarify that not only did the Clippers withdraw that $21 million in carbon credits, and not only did the acknowledgment of carbon credit ownership transfer document, which I've also acquired, have an effective date of June 30th, 2022, which is the literal day that Kawhi's first payment was due, with signatures also from both the CFO of the Clippers and Andre Chirney. But also, according to Aspiration Bank's statements obtained by Pablo Torre Finds Out, the Clippers, less than three months before they prepaid that $21 million on those carbon

• 35:18Pablo Torre?

  credits, had already prepaid $3 million on April 1st. And then, on April 4th, the literal day that Kawhi signed the $28 million KL to aspire contract, the Clippers also wired Aspiration $32 million. Meaning that the Los Angeles Clippers prepaid a grand total of at least $56,403,462 on carbon credits from Aspiration in the spring of 2022 alone, tracking alongside Kawhi Leonard's payments as Aspiration was burning money.

• 36:00Pablo Torre?

  To answer Mark's question. And so, you may recall, in that clip of Steve Ballmer, he was talking about how they were designing the Intuit Dome, his baby, for carbon neutrality, right? A good guy move. He was trying to do that. But the thing about the Intuit Dome at this time, as they're buying carbon credits for this project, is that it wasn't open yet.

• 36:23Speaker 08

  It's still two years. The problem is, by energy, I want the thing here now, but it's still two more years.

• 36:31Pablo Torre?

  The Intuit Dome wouldn't be open until August 2024. And so, the whole rush of like, "We gotta get these $20 million in carbon credits in because we're..." The building didn't exist!

• 36:44Speaker 09

  I prefer the idea that the rush should be because the world is burning and Earth is gonna be destroyed, but that's not the rush. It's that Uncle Dennis is on the phone and we're late with our payments, allegedly.

• 36:56Pablo Torre?

  And so, to recap, in that context, we have millions more dollars coming into just broke-ass Aspiration at this point, from people affiliated clearly with actual quote-unquote "Team Ballmer," almost exactly, again, when Kawhi Leonard contractually needed to get paid by Aspiration. And it happened around, yeah, Kawhi's slightly late first payment in mid 2022, with the Clippers paid $21 million for those carbon offsets. And it happened, again, around Kawhi's extremely late second payment in late 2022, when the company had already gone into default, and the investment firm for the Clippers, one and only co-owner Dennis Wong, aka Steve Ballmer's college roommate, wired in personally $2 million, his first ever investment in the company.

• 37:40Pablo Torre?

  And so I'm just saying, you might notice a bit of a cycle, repeating itself and revealing itself here. Because according to my sources, what happens here is that it is paramount. It is so important.

• 37:53Speaker 07

  It was something that had to be done, and it was crucial to our relationships with Ballmer and the Clippers.

• 38:00Pablo Torre?

  The Aspirations relationship to Steve Ballmer, that Kawhi Leonard gets paid. Boardman must get paid on time for doing nothing. But Ballmer also, in this same cycle, hypothetically, he needed to keep the cardinal sin of this NBA scheme completely secret. Aspiration co-founder Joe Sandberg has declined to comment through an attorney. But what Sandberg appeared to need over and over again, of course, was more money. And what my reporting indicates is that it can still be true that through KL2 Aspire LLC and this potential cap convention scheme involving Steve Ballmer, Joe Sandberg realized he had a bit of leverage here in the power dynamic with the richest owner in sports

• 38:45Pablo Torre?

  who had lots and lots and lots of money to spend. Dan, I just feel like I'm living inside of The Game Clue, where we have the Clippers CFO with the $21 million carbon credit deal in the conservatory, and we have Dennis Wong with the $1.99 million wire transfer in, let's call it the billiard room. Those would be, in this cap circumvention mystery, the accusations for a payment one, for a payment two. Which brings us finally, finally, to 2023, and right back to Mr. Ballmer in what I can only presume would be the ballroom, and I would argue, another dagger.

• 39:29Pablo Torre?

  So put on your glasses and wait till after the break. Good tease.

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• 40:37Speaker 10

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• 40:54Speaker 10

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• 41:16Pablo Torre?

  Dan, to recap, we're still using your money to follow Steve Ballmer's money, and Kawhi Leonard was due another quarterly payment of $1.75 million in March 2023. Before we get to that point in time, that very crucial point in the timeline, you should have now another piece of paper in front of you. Can you just read what that one in your hands now says across the top?

• 41:42Speaker 04

  It begins with the word that Pablo loves to see when he's not supposed to see papers. It says right on it confidential. Confidential. Joseph Sandberg, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. Videotape deposition of Joseph Sandberg, Tuesday, October 16th, 2024.

• 42:06Pablo Torre?

  So in October of 2024, it turns out, Aspiration co-founder Joseph Sandberg, who would ultimately be indicted for wire fraud, was being personally sued by a direct lending fund named Clover Private Credit and the hedge fund that managed it, known as UBS O'Connor. And we do not, and I hate this part, we do not have the videotape of Sandberg's deposition. I would hit play on it so quickly. But thanks to the filings in this case, the case has since settled, by the way, with a judgment against Joe Sandberg and his affiliates of more than $278 million. What I have is the transcript. And so I just need to ask you, Dan, to do a bit of a table read with me.

• 42:48Pablo Torre?

  And in this deposition, which took place again, October 16th, 2024, in New York, New York, you will be playing the role of Joseph Sandberg, the co-founder of Aspiration, and I will be playing the role of the attorney asking him questions if you are ready to act a little bit.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  I am ready. Let's do it.

• 43:06Pablo Torre?

  All right. Aspiration, very publicly and promptly, had a number of celebrity investors. Is that correct?

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:16Pablo Torre?

  Including Drake, the rapper?

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:19Pablo Torre?

  Leonardo DiCaprio?

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:22Pablo Torre?

  Steve Ballmer?

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:25Pablo Torre?

  Former CEO of Microsoft, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, correct?

• 43:28Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 43:30Pablo Torre?

  In fact, at one point, Aspiration had a deal with the Clippers, did they not?

• 43:35Speaker 04

  I assert my Fifth Amendment rights.

• 43:40Pablo Torre?

  So I just need to, I need to break character for a second. Uh, just acknowledge.

• 43:42Speaker 09

  No, no, stay in character, Daniel Day-Lewis. Come on. He said, yes, yes, yes, yes, that's correct. And all of a sudden, Fifth Amendment.

• 43:50Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, that's right. Uh, no problem acknowledging Drake DiCaprio. But when it got to the, you know, the whole, uh, deal with the Clippers, Joe Sandberg pleads the Fifth, but I want to stay in character. We proceed.

• 44:02Pablo Torre?

  Have you met Leonardo DiCaprio?

• 44:04Speaker 04

  No.

• 44:06Pablo Torre?

  Have you met Drake?

• 44:07Speaker 04

  No.

• 44:09Pablo Torre?

  Have you met Steve Ballmer?

• 44:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 44:13Pablo Torre?

  Were you involved in securing their investment in aspiration?

• 44:16Speaker 04

  I assert my Fifth Amendment rights.

• 44:20Pablo Torre?

  Oh, Mr. Sandberg. Um, this is now me, just as me. Um.

• 44:25Speaker 09

  You've got to get better at this staying in character thing. You stink at staying in character. This is me, just as me, stinks. As, as a, as a transition, this is me, just as me is not helpful to anybody. Either stay in character or don't stay in character.

• 44:40Pablo Torre?

  But when he says repeatedly, I assert my Fifth Amendment rights, I just need to let everybody know that I did this same exercise with source number two.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think that tells you everything you need to know about whether Joe thought that the deal he had with the Clippers was potentially illicit.

• 45:03Pablo Torre?

  And so again, Dan, Joe Sandberg had declined to comment through his attorney. But there was another exchange in the deposition that we need to read here. And for this part, I need to call upon the theatrical talents of Roy Bellamy,

• 45:21Pablo Torre?

  your producer from The Dan Lebatard Show, sitting across the glass from you, I believe, if we've done this right, in Miami. Roy, are you there? Yes, sir.

• 45:30Speaker 09

  Are you yourself or are you in character? I can't tell, the acting is so magnificent. Which one are you? Which one?

• 45:35Pablo Torre?

  Roy, Roy will be playing, uh, Roy, do you know who you're gonna be playing here? I am playing Mr. Bernstein, Berstein. That's right. Mr. Berstein, uh, Joe Sandberg's lawyer, who plays a key role in this part of the play.

• 45:55Pablo Torre?

  During the period, November 2022 to May 23, you were trying to raise money to pay off the loan, correct?

• 46:02Speaker 09

  Vigorously.

• 46:04Pablo Torre?

  Did you manage to get any new investors into aspiration at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023?

• 46:09Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 46:11Pablo Torre?

  Who?

• 46:13Speaker 09

  Oh, Steve Ballmer.

• 46:16Speaker 09

  Don't look at me. I wasn't looking at you to answer, sorry. Let's see, Steve Ballmer, Dennis Wong versus his entity. I can't recall the name of his entity. Roy was terrible. Roy was truly terrible as an actor there. I felt like I was pretty bad, but Roy didn't do anything in terms of range. You were Mr. Bursting, Roy.

• 46:37Pablo Torre?

  There's, there's, there's, there's, it's a funny read in fairness because like on paper, Roy literally delivered it. I think there are two ways you could read it or perform it. One is, don't look at me.

• 46:48Speaker 09

  That's right. That would have been, that would have been, that's what we were looking for. We were looking for Sandberg's attorney saying, don't look at me. Don't, don't bring me into your mess.

• 46:58Pablo Torre?

  This is, this is, Bursting, the lawyer is not like Mariah Carey saying, no eye contact. In my reading of the deposition, Joe Sandberg, upon saying the name Steve Ballmer again, looks over at his attorney and the attorney says,

• 47:11Speaker 09

  Don't look at me. Don't look at me.

• 47:15Pablo Torre?

  That's it. The jazz hands are part of the theatrical direction that were not included in the transcript.

• 47:21Speaker 09

  Can we just do this again so that people can get the courtroom reenactment? I, I want this all the air as it is, but let's just do it.

• 47:28Pablo Torre?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's get, let's get, we're gonna insert at this point, the Law & Order sound effect here.

• 47:37Pablo Torre?

  Did you manage to get any new investors into aspiration at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023?

• 47:43Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 47:45Pablo Torre?

  Who?

• 47:47Speaker 09

  Oh, Steve Ballmer?

• 47:51Speaker 09

  Don't look at me.

• 47:53Speaker 09

  Oh, I wasn't looking at you to answer, sorry. Let's see, uh, Steve Ballmer, Dennis Wong versus his entity. I can't recall the name of his entity.

• 48:01Pablo Torre?

  And scene. I want to thank Roy for his, uh, services. This is a non-guild job.

• 48:09Speaker 09

  Excellent, excellent work, Roy. I'm sorry. You will be paid nothing for this. This is a job where you show up, it's the opposite of the Kawhi Leonard job. You show up and you do a thing and we don't pay you for it. I'm pro-union.

• 48:23Pablo Torre?

  The thing about this deposition transcript, which I love beyond the fact that Joe Sandberg's attorney is on the record telling him as he's pondering what he should say about Steve Ballmer.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Don't look at me.

• 48:34Pablo Torre?

  Don't look at me. Either way, you pronounce it, it's just pretty funny. But that part, the whole actual question and answer, hidden there is a timeline, right? It brings us back to December 2022. He's talking about, did you raise money at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023? And so this brings us back to when Dennis Wong, again, put in $2 million into aspiration. And I just need to reiterate here that the one and only new investor coming into aspiration during this round of fundraising was Dennis Wong, who has not responded to multiple requests for comment about his investment. But this was especially glaring because one reason, I suspect Joe Sandberg referred to

• 49:17Pablo Torre?

  this round of fundraising as vigorous, as you performed it, was because everybody else that he asked outside pretty much kept saying no. In the court documents in the Clover case, what I proceeded to find out was that Sandberg contacted at least 19 outside investment firms from fall 2022 to spring 2023, and all of them, Dan, all of them turned aspiration down. But Steve Ballmer, as Joe Sandberg, as you read in that deposition, did not. Which is now strange for another reason, because you may recall, Dan, that the comment the Clippers gave, Pablo Torre finds out, before episode one was published, was kind of bold.

• 50:02Pablo Torre?

  If you could read that for us right now, just remind us what they said.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  The team ended its relationship with aspiration years ago during the 2022-2023 season, when aspiration defaulted on its obligations. Neither the Clippers nor Mr. Ballmer was aware of any improper activity by aspiration or its co-founder until after the government instituted its investigation. The team and Mr. Ballmer stand ready to assist law enforcement in any way they can.

• 50:31Pablo Torre?

  Right. So let's now line up the timeline. So March 9th, 2023, when Steve Ballmer put in $10 million through his personal LLC, first reported by The Athletic. In the NBA context, there were only 14 games left in the Clippers 2022-23 regular season, okay? So Steve Ballmer, at that point, did the opposite of end his own personal relationship with Aspiration. He put in $10 million. And, look, that, of course, combined with the initial $50 million, takes us to $60 million. And this, according to nine sources with direct knowledge of the deal, as well as court filings,

• 51:14Pablo Torre?

  in other words, Dan, the opposite happened from what the Clippers' statement tried to convey before they knew we had mountains of documents.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  It's going to be hard for them to wiggle around some of this documentation. I don't know how much more NBA is going to do in the way of investigating beyond this, but it seems like every time you investigate a little more of this, more money starts appearing. Because we started at a $7 million a year arrangement, and it seems like there's more and more money happening here that's now doubling what your initial reporting is, more than doubling your initial reporting.

• 51:54Pablo Torre?

  Aspiration keeps on raising money from quote-unquote "Team Ballmer" along the direct point in the timeline at which Kawhi Leonard is due his quarterly payments. Again, we saw it with Payment 1, we saw it with Payment 2, now we see it in March 2023. And my second source, again, the former finance executive high up inside Aspiration, observed something even more eye-opening, given personal context.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Come March, March 23, I was still with the firm, even though a lot of executives had left. You know, a majority of them were let go, some of them left because they realized that there were some untoward activities taking place at the board level, certainly.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  We, inside of aspiration, knew that federal agencies were starting to look into aspiration. And in fact, Forbes published a article in early March about the fact that there's a new CEO.

• 52:59Pablo Torre?

  I'm just looking at the Forbes headline and the headline from March 6th, 2023 was, quote, "A floundering fintech's risky reboot."

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 53:10Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that at this point, like, people are noticing that things are not going close to good at aspiration.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 53:20Pablo Torre?

  I'm looking at the California State Database now. This is for the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, the Warren Act, in which you gotta disclose in advance ahead of a mass layoff. And when I look at the Warren Report for March of 23, I'm just pulling it up now and I search for aspiration, on March 24th, 2023, aspiration laid off permanently, it says, another 180 employees.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why I really want their bones.

• 54:00Speaker 07

  We were constantly in awe and in shock that Ballmer would invest in the company again. And I have text messages between myself and colleagues where we are wondering why Ballmer put money in to the extent where, how do you want me to read these?

• 54:20Pablo Torre?

  I would like to, I'd like you to show it to me and then I'd like you to just read out both sides of that conversation so we could understand it for the audio audience.

• 54:31Speaker 07

  Okay. So this is a text message I got from a colleague in all caps, "Ballmer put money in?" exclamation point, question mark, to which I responded, "It's just honestly so insane. This whole thing is just so insane."

• 54:48Pablo Torre?

  So in other words, smelled fishy at the time.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Seattle Fish Market.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  The smell in that place is pungent and I couldn't have thought of a better place to identify. I don't know, perhaps there are places in Japan where they're slaughtering whales and dolphins.

• 55:07Pablo Torre?

  But they're throwing fish at people and people are loving it. That's how fishy the Seattle Fish Market. Pike Place is, by the way, geographically also quite relevant to the origin of Steve Ballmer, but I digress. Look, according to court documents in the aforementioned Clover lawsuit, which we've been digging into here, Aspiration reported, Dan, these are the net losses for the company between 2019 and 2022. Losses of $772.5 million. Okay? So as we just get a sense of what was obvious inside the company, and in fact, because of the Forbes article, outside the company, before Ballmer decided, I'm back in for 10, we should point out here that there's another glaring revelation in these documents,

• 55:52Pablo Torre?

  which is that in December 2022, this is less than a week after Kawhi Leonard got paid the $1.75 million. The public company Aspiration was supposed to merge with and therefore deliver this massive windfall to its investors, including Steve Ballmer, who was trying to profit off of his investment in Aspiration. This company, this public company, held a special meeting. The public company's name is InterPrivate 3 Financial Partners, and according to court documents, 90%, 90% of InterPrivate's shareholders effectively bailed on the premise of Aspiration. They redeemed their shares at roughly $10.10 per share, tanking the company, hollowing out the entire financial proposition of it.

• 56:37Pablo Torre?

  And it helped explain, by the way, why on the outside, they couldn't get anybody else to put in money. But on March 9th, 2023, about 18 months after Ballmer put in $50 million at $11 per share, $11 per share was his original investment, that was the share price, the owner of the Clippers didn't just go back for more.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Ballmer invested $10 million more.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  At a $23 share price, over 23, just over $23. So more than double what he invested in as a share price in 2021, when the company was actually publicly in a good financial state. Even if you were to believe that there was no diligence done. March 2023, not only was this publicly known and it was all over the media and all that, we had to give disclosures as part of that investment round. And in those disclosures, the actual financial state of the company at that point were disclosed. Um, so that, that should tell you a lot.

• 57:43Speaker 04

  This is lunacy. It really, it really is. I'm trying to think of what is the item here that is, uh, most damning. The dollar amounts, obviously, but we've also now got another Clipper official inserted in the middle of these transactions and he happens to be their chief financial officer.

• 58:00Pablo Torre?

  I mean, what Steve Ballmer, Dan, as you try to power rank, how is this, how is this escapable? What Steve Ballmer has admitted on ESPN is that he, or at least his staff, reviewed what he called, quote, "primarily fraudulent financials." Even though, of course, we say that there are disclosures that we have vetted that indicate in so many key ways, truly detailed ways, how the company was obviously [BLEEP]. Meanwhile, though, as we talk, Steve Ballmer on Tuesday went onstage for a panel hosted by Sports Business Journal.

• 58:37Speaker 13

  And I know that you've had a lot going on, including allegations against the team about the partnership with Aspiration. I don't know if you want to address it right off?

• 58:44Speaker 08

  Sure. Uh, we're not, we're not, we're, this is not a fun thing to, to be through. Uh, I was personally defrauded, uh, through our interactions with, with the company and, and some of the staff. The fraud sort of extended broadly through that. We had many relationships with the company. Sponsor. Activation was through carbon credits, all a bunch of complicated stuff. But the important thing is our relationship with the company and our players' relationship with the company.

• 59:26Speaker 08

  We're independent, which is important under the rules of the NBA. I feel I feel quite confident in that, that we abided the rules. And so I welcome the investigation that the NBA is doing. It's a great way, from our perspective, to get the facts out there. And as I say, there's nothing, there's nothing fun about being highlighted in this way. It's a whole lot more fun to be highlighted for building a great arena. But this, this too shall pass and.

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  Pablo, you're not going to let them get away with the complicated stuff, are you?

• 1:00:05Pablo Torre?

  I mean, I want to make it simple, actually. Let's just recap it. September 2021 to March 2023, quote unquote, teen bomber, meaning Steve Ballmer, the governor of the Clippers, Dennis Wong, the alternate governor of the Clippers, the CFO of the Clippers, and also the Clippers themselves via the letterhead with these weird carbon credits. They proceed to give a grand total of $118 million to aspiration. In 18 months, each new payment, I would argue, less defensible than the last. Which reminds me, by the way, of something another billionaire owner had told me, like a couple of episodes ago.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  Because if Steve knew, and the minute he found out that this was falling apart and these guys were a scam, he'd say, let me invest some more money so you can pay off Kawhi, so this whole thing goes away and there's no evidence of it any longer, and let's just erase all this from the books. You don't leave this outstanding debt out there. If Ballmer was involved and he just immediately squared the circle, to use your term, the minute things went sour, he's a fucking moron.

• 1:01:17Pablo Torre?

  You're saying save aspiration personally to prevent bankruptcy, to prevent all of this stuff.

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  That's one option, or invest more money, right? And just tell them to pay off Kawhi. Because it would have made no sense to do this on an annual basis. It would have made a lot more sense to pay it off, put it away. Nobody knows any better.

• 1:01:37Pablo Torre?

  And so, weeks after Steve Ballmer's March 2023 investment, I am told, after the round of fundraising is completed, this is the spring of 2023. Another thing worth noting here is that that's about when federal agencies start interviewing dozens of aspiration employees, just two of which, by the way, you've already heard from in this episode today. In fact, March 2023 happens to be when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency, had opened its investigation into aspiration's carbon credit business, I am told, which had been a real source of frustration for the aspiration employees who actually got into this whole business to, you know, help the planet.

• 1:02:21Pablo Torre?

  And so, there's a lot of complicated stuff here. There's also a lot of simple. And to me, the binary that Mark Cuban posed to us, are you Team Ballmer? Or, as I called it, Team [bleep] Bricks? The bricks are bigger than I thought.

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've got a text here from an NBA owner, and it says some of how it is the mood has changed since that Board of Governors meetings where Ballmer was running around and telling everybody he'd been conned. One of the things this owner says is, "The difference between this and prior situations is that Ballmer is highly respected. He has done a great job as Audit Committee Chair. The impression from the Board of Governors meeting was that most owners hoped he didn't do it, but these last pieces of information are huge. You've got other details involving Clippers by name.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  It's not just Ballmer. You've got paperwork here that is awfully damning here, attached to people in important roles. I don't know how the Clippers are going to be able to slither around some of this."

• 1:03:47Pablo Torre?

  Just one last thing, Dan, before we let everybody finally go and see their families. I was listening back to Adam Silver and his remarks after the NBA's Board of Governors meeting on September 10th, 2025, as we contemplate, what does he do? What does he allow? How can the slithering allegedly happen? And the commissioner said this.

• 1:04:08Speaker 14

  When the podcast came out, it was news to me. I frankly never heard of the company, Aspiration, before, and I'd never heard a whiff of anything around endorsement deal with Kawhi or anything around engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers. So it was all new to me. I heard it. I saw some of the follow-up information.

• 1:04:30Pablo Torre?

  So I obtained another document, Dan, which is, I believe, in front of you. It's a copy of Aspiration's $300 million founding sponsorship agreement, which was scheduled, by the way, to give Aspiration the Clippers jersey patch in July 2023. And if you could read the clause that I hope is in front of you, this is Section 15.16 of this massive contract. It says what?

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  Section 15.16A, this is NBA rules and regulations, special remedy for adverse change in NBA rules and regulations. This agreement and all of sponsors' rights and the team party's obligations herein are subject to NBA rules and regulations. This agreement and any amendment heretofore must be submitted prior to its execution for NBA's approval and shall not be effective or enforceable until it is expressly approved by the NBA.

• 1:05:26Pablo Torre?

  So that is the on-the-books, publicized, big founding partner sponsorship agreement, the one that Adam Silver apparently suggested he had never heard of before. It says in that deal that it must be submitted before execution, shall not be effective or enforceable until it is expressly approved by the league Adam Silver runs. And I also want to point something else out. During the first two seasons of that deal, which is where we've been living in this episode, by the way, 2021, 22, and then 2022, 23, the NBA seasons, aspiration, as it was burning cash immediately, as quickly as it was getting it, was putting $7.5 million, according to this agreement, into the Clippers annually. Team Ballmer, meanwhile,

• 1:06:11Pablo Torre?

  was putting money into aspiration, which had to pay a $7 million annual salary for Kawhi Leonard that nobody ever spoke publicly about. So just doing the math here, pretty good deal. Team Ballmer still coming out ahead, about a half million dollars a year, despite the $28 million thing that we've been focusing on in this particular episode. And so when Adam Silver says, after the Board of Governors, right, that he'd never heard a whiff of anything around an endorsement deal with Kawhi or anything around engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers, what I want to know, Dan, is if the aspiration deal was in fact submitted and expressly approved by the NBA.

• 1:06:56Pablo Torre?

  And so what I decided to do was tweet all of this out, again, almost word for word, as I just said it to you. And on Tuesday afternoon, in a livestreamed, on-the-record conversation at Front Office Sports Tuned In Conference, Adam Silver got asked about this by the interviewer, Daniel Roberts.

• 1:07:16Speaker 14

  Almost all the investigations we've done since I've been at the NBA, certainly the bigger ones, the media plays a large part in them. As we are seeing in this investigation here, it began with Pablo and his podcast. This was not something that was on our radar to even be thinking about.

• 1:07:34Speaker 15

  I think what's hard for people to understand in all this, and you know, Ballmer has said, basically, I was hoodwinked. You know, it was a fraudulent company, and this company... You know, had executives that have been prosecuted and it went bankrupt. He has said that. You have said you hadn't heard of aspiration before. But a $300 million deal with the team, you know, the team was going to be like a jersey patch sponsor. They had aspiration on the back of the courtside seats. I think Pablo-

• 1:07:59Speaker 14

  Just to be clear, I'm not sure if I said I never, if I said I never heard of it, I meant in the context of the accusations here. I mean, I certainly was aware of the brand, but I didn't know anything about-

• 1:08:09Speaker 15

  Got it, yes. Because I think just earlier today Pablo tweeted, he said that because it was a $300 million deal, it was a founding sponsorship agreement. And those, as I would expect, have to be approved at the league level.

• 1:08:22Speaker 14

  Yes, you know, there's a league approval process, but it goes, it doesn't go deep into, you know, interviewing executives for every deal that comes through the league office.

• 1:08:34Speaker 15

  Does it need to?

• 1:08:34Speaker 14

  Well, I think that's a fair question, and maybe at a certain level they do. I think we'll have a better sense of when we understand what happened here. Look, I accept my responsibility ultimately is the integrity of this league. And especially when it's a competitive issue. I mean, we've had other larger investigations, but be honest, even when it involves misconduct of owners, it doesn't get fans' attention of 30 teams in the way something does where there's a suggestion there's an unlevel playing field, that somebody has a greater advantage because they have deeper pockets, or they have a relationship or a connection. And I think from a fan's standpoint, look, I'm never going to be in a position where I can sit here and say, I can promise nothing untoward is going to

• 1:09:16Speaker 14

  happen in the league. But what we do want to pledge to our fans is that from a league office standpoint, we treat everybody the same. As I said, we respect due process. We're going to be fair to involve everyone involved, whether that's a team executive, an owner, or a player. But that we care deeply about competitive fairness in this league. And that's what this issue potentially touches on, which is, I think, why in part it's getting so much attention.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  I don't know what Adam Silver's supposed to do here, either publicly or privately. I feel like he's a bit boxed in and it sort of reminds me a little bit of what recently happened here with John Gruden, where people who adjudicate these things are saying it's ridiculous that the arbitration that involves Roger Goodell would be heard by Roger Goodell? What an awkward position for Adam Silver to be in, given everything he's done publicly, that he's not actually the boss of Steve Ballmer, that Steve Ballmer is the boss of Adam Silver, and now he's got to figure out how to be a commissioner, the way that he

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  showed us with Donald Sterling, when the only reason Donald Sterling happened, Pablo, is because all of the other owners wanted it to happen. I'm not sure what they want to happen here, but I don't think it's that they want Ballmer gone, or that they want Ballmer disgraced, when Ballmer's really useful to them. And you know how these people admire money? So of course, they're going to admire the person who has more money than any of them.

• 1:10:48Pablo Torre?

  Yes. There is a very strange dynamic where Steve Ballmer is, as you put it, useful. He set a record for NBA team sales when he bought the Clippers from Donald Sterling. He is a guy who has all of the money, I mean frankly, to buy out everybody else if he wanted to. And the question that the owners have to ask themselves, I think, that Adam presumably would be asking himself is, no, there's no equivalent documentary smoking gun like Donald Sterling saying on tape, the most unsayable thing you could probably say as an NBA owner, specifically. But when does the mountain of what you might deem, quote unquote, circumstantial, which may simply be the best possible evidence accumulating

• 1:11:32Pablo Torre?

  in the absence, deliberate absence, of writing down on a piece of paper, that confession? When does that also seem embarrassing to you?

• 1:11:41Speaker 04

  I have only one piece of paper left here that I have not looked at. Are you going to let me turn over this last piece of paper to have the punctuation on the episode?

• 1:11:50Pablo Torre?

  So, please turn that piece of paper over. Because this is a tweet, of course it is, from the billionaire NBA owner that I started this episode complaining that you were not. Because when it comes to how he sees this story and why he's continued to devote so many hours of his free time to it despite having billions of dollars, the thing he says in response to a follower complaining that, quote, "I wish he would use his time on healthcare," end quote, is this.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  This is my diversion. Sometimes I need a break.

• 1:12:20Pablo Torre?

  And on that point, Mark Cuban, my wife and child, my boss, my staff, and me, in my heart of hearts, I think we all probably do agree on that.

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  Violet, you gotta be willing to go to jail to protect your sources, Violet. You gotta be willing to do that.

• 1:12:40Pablo Torre?

  Dan, my friend and employer, and truly my favorite Cuban, let the record show. Thank you for supporting our journalism.

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  Your credibility is shot, my friend. Everyone knows that your favorite Cuban is Papa. You are a liar in public. I've caught you! Dan Lebatard finds out.

• 1:13:13Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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