The NBA’s Billionaire Shitstorm They Don’t Want to Talk About Is the Scandal of Our Time

Leonard’s contract is 0.00066 percent of Ballmer’s entire net worth. Like LeBron, that is a steal for a proven NBA Champion who can fulfil Ballmer’s dream of surpassing the Lakers in America’s second-largest media market in his fancy new arena. You see where this is going?

Now it should be noted that despite the ferocity of the documentation that Torre has compiled leading high-level league insiders to tell him that the Clippers are in a really tough situation, this is podcast court as Torre calls it. It’s not real court, so we have to lean on the word “alleged” at least until the NBA concludes its investigation. That said, I can quote Mark Cuban as saying that if all of Torre’s extensive reporting is true, Steve Ballmer is “fucked.”

But Cuban doesn’t think Ballmer is fucked, and went to posting war on Twitter across weeks for his fellow billionaire to try to poke holes in Torre’s reporting. Torre even had Cuban on his podcast to try to make the case for Team Ballmer, and it essentially boiled down to Cuban arguing that powerful men like him and Ballmer are too busy to look too deep into whether they put $50 million into a scam or not.

Ballmer is going on ESPN doing a smol bean routine, talking about how embarrassing it is for him to get up there and defend himself by saying the ninth richest man alive knew nothing and was simply conned by someone under federal indictment for scamming people. It would be a convincing argument, if it weren’t for things like his only minority co-owner and college roommate Dennis Wong giving money to a company he hadn’t invested in before who had to legally disclose to him that they were in default at the time he put a little less than $2 million in (after Ballmer had already put $50 million into Aspiration the year before). That is a curious number that matches up with the company paying Kawhi Leonard his sponsorship money they owed him and were late paying him on, something Kawhi’s representative Uncle Dennis reportedly called Aspiration about quite a bit. Not only did Ballmer’s trusted right-hand man have to acknowledge he knew he was giving money to a company in default (for a miniscule ownership percentage of a failing billion-dollar enterprise), but the documents Wong signed that Torre obtained also told him the company he was investing in was under federal investigation. What a steal!

It is gobsmacking to listen to how the Clippers seemingly routed what looks like $48 million to Kawhi Leonard (a sum similar to what the Raptors could pay him above everyone else) outside the NBA’s salary constraints through a company we can legally say is a scam—a company the Clippers put on their freaking jerseys—and then have to listen to Steve Ballmer and Mark Cuban pretend like Ballmer couldn’t possibly have known anything about the vast fraud inside Aspiration that all of Pablo Torre’s sources in the finance department told him they were sounding the alarm about for at least a year. They’re telling us with a straight face that this all makes sense even though Aspiration paid Kawhi Leonard after Wong paid Aspiration even though Aspiration couldn’t pay anyone else who actually showed up to work for them not long after that. We also have to accept that Aspiration paying Kawhi Leonard far more than they paid Leonardi Di-freaking-Caprio in sponsorship money for a climate company makes any kind of sense (and Torre has e-mails and texts from high-level Aspiration executives at the time saying it doesn’t!). The final payment from Wong when Aspiration is being investigated by the feds is a smoking gun in my book because no sane investor can defend it, yet we have to do this song and dance because the richest most powerful men on the planet apparently need to be treated like delicate flowers who don’t know such things like what the word default means or where their extra $50 million went.

This is the smol bean billionaire scandal of our era. It has everything. At it’s core it’s about the American dream: a multi-million-dollar no-show job. The scandal broke on a podcast run by a sports guy. The core of the fraud we know for certain about was a failed climate project with celebrity endorsements and one endorsement that sticks out like the sorest thumb you’ve ever seen. The billionaire defendant has even been caught once doing what it’s alleged to have been doing here, and we’re being asked with a straight face to give them the benefit of the doubt they didn’t put their hand in the cookie jar again. This is a story about billionaire impunity even among billionaires in a world increasingly without rules and only power. A billionaire demonstrating terminal posting disease even went on the podcast to argue in favor of smol bean billionaire impunity, and it even has rank billionaire stupidity unfolding in public!

The funniest thing to happen in a long while in sports came when Mark Cuban criticized Torre’s reporting last month by saying that if he were going to run the scheme that Torre alleges Ballmer ran, he would do it through carbon credits purchases. Torre went back to his sources, and they told him on the record that’s exactly what they did at Aspiration and provided him documentation for it with the Clippers’ logo on it. It’s so good I’m breaking my Twitter embargo to share this story.

EXCLUSIVE: Two weeks before Kawhi’s first “no-show” payday, the Clippers bailed out Aspiration with a $21M deal signed by the team CFO.

(Yes, @mcuban sent @PabloTorre down this rabbit hole: “He literally described exactly what they did,” a source says, “to circumvent the cap.”) pic.twitter.com/5lQNMLm8Or

— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) September 18, 2025

The Minnesota Timberwolves were fined the maximum $3.5 million and lost five first round picks when they were caught circumventing the cap with Joe Smith in 1999, and Steve Ballmer’s Clippers were fined $250,000 in 2015 for violating league rules around third-party endorsements in trying to sign DeAndre Jordan. Now a decade later they’re ensnared in a much larger shitstorm with a third-party endorsement with a much bigger star in Kawhi Leonard with far more damning documentation and a couple of federal indictments to boot. We shall see what the NBA’s investigation turns up, but if it’s anything like what Pablo Torre’s has, as Mark Cuban suggested, Steve Ballmer is “fucked,” assuming he still lives in any kind of world subject to rules for powerful men like him.