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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Let's bring in Pablo Torre from Pablo Torre founds finds out to host investigative journalist. What's going on? And he's on an absolute terror. What are you doing?
Speaker 2:Pablo,
Speaker 3:it's an honor to have you. I was telling John before the show started. We podcast for a living. I'm not a big I don't I don't follow very many sports very much, but every time there's a sports story, I go find your content. And when I watch your content, you make me feel like an amateur because you're just so good
Speaker 1:Really good.
Speaker 3:At what you do. So good at yapping, but then you're also an elite investigative journalist, and we wanted to take a victory lap with you.
Speaker 2:So it feels like a Yeah. Show is designed thank you, a. B, my show is designed for people who don't care about sports at all to find it even mildly entertaining and interesting, and this is a story that has immersed me in the world of securities law and the funneling of money and billionaires and especially one particular billionaire who used to run a certain company called Microsoft. And so all of this, I think, is actually in your guys' wheelhouse. So happy to be on with you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I remember I remember I watched some of your content around a year ago Yeah. When you were originally breaking this story. I was surprised that the story like at least went away out of the out of the public eye for some time. I'm sure you were still following it.
Speaker 3:But take us Yeah. Maybe from back a little bit to first kind of uncovering this and then we'll get all the way to the present.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this was an investigation that started with a tip. And the tip was there's a weird company out in LA called Aspiration. It was a tree planting startup aka a carbon credits company.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:ESG things, you guys may recall during the pandemic was a real thing. We're gonna be good guys. Right? Everyone's gonna be a good guy now. The endorsers So cynical.
Speaker 2:Hey.
Speaker 3:Hey. Hey.
Speaker 2:I love I love trees.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I love planting trees too. I love what they do to carbon and oxygen
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Reportedly. So aspiration has all these endorsers that are public. There's Robert Downey junior. There's Leonardo DiCaprio. There's Frank.
Speaker 2:There's Cindy Crawford, people who grew up in the nineties. Six got Woah. Toronto figures into the story in lots of ways, it turns out.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But the point is that there are all these a list stars, Orlando Bloom, I didn't even mention. All these a list stars that this good guy company is paying Mhmm. To tell everybody about what they are.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And what I get a tip on is, hey. You should look into this company. It's kinda weird. They just signed a deal, $300,000,000, to be the Jersey patch sponsor of Los Angeles Clippers.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And, you know, they have another endorser that you'd be interested in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And when I look into this, it's not immediately obvious, like, what they're talking about. But when this company goes bankrupt because and this is gonna be in your wheelhouse again, they were gonna go public via SPAC. Yeah. What a time. Right?
Speaker 2:What a time. SPACs, ESG. We're all gonna get rich being good guys, and no one really needs to ask many questions. Just trust us. It's gonna be fine.
Speaker 2:And what turns out is this company is cofounded by two people, two big damn donors, classic good guys, went to Harvard. But, I mean, I resemble the remark. I wanna say that, like, this has been also awkward for me. Steve Ballmer, Harvard, all these guys, all of this. Right?
Speaker 2:Pedigree, all of it. Mhmm. The thing that's interesting is that when you dig in to how this company fell apart and they go into bankruptcy, you, of course, get to examine some public filings.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And one of their big creditors was a company called k l two Aspire LLC. Mhmm. And if you're a basketball fan who is aware of the Clippers, you may realize that k l Yeah. Sounds like Kawhi Leonard. Two sounds like his jersey number.
Speaker 2:K l two Aspire sounds like a vehicle you've invented to accept money from
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he was owed $7,000,000 outstanding. And the weird part was that this dude had no public record of being associated with aspiration personally at all. Mhmm. And so when you dig in and you begin to ask questions to people who used to work at a company that has now gone into bankruptcy in which the cofounder, Joe Sandberg, is now, by the way, serving fourteen years in federal prison for fraud. You get people who are interested in explaining how crazy their life has been.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And what they say and what they provide in the tonnage of all the reporting I did for months, seven months before we came out with part one of the series one year ago today was documentation that attested to the fact that Kawhi Leonard was paid, according to this agreement, a total of $48,000,000.20 in stock, 28 in cash to do nothing Yeah. For a deal that never got announced. And the question was, why? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you follow the threads, and you get to, oh, wait. There's a massive salary caps or convention scheme in which the richest owner in American sports, Steve Ballmer, is trying to use all of his wealth in ways he's not allowed to to get money to a guy that he he needed to take away from the Lakers and the Toronto Raptors Mhmm. In order to make his dream of owning a professional basketball team exactly the dream that he imagined.
Speaker 1:So how
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:How strict are these rules? Because I can imagine that's a funny thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We we so we covered we covered the whole, like, the AI talent wars last summer every single day. It was crazy. And we kept coming back to this idea, part of why the talent wars worked in in many ways and why why is there's no salary cap. Right?
Speaker 3:So could just spend exactly as much money as as the players or the talent would accept. But Yeah. In this case, rules are act there's actual laws.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I guess I just mean like if I'm a if I'm a player and I know that the owner runs a hedge fund and I see the benefit of putting some of the money that I earn directly with their hedge fund, it gets me access. Or, oh, I know that the owner of the team is friends with the CEO of Nike and I might be able to get a shoe deal. There's some level of just, like, doing business above board that's probably acceptable, but is this a blurry line? Like, how how defined is this?
Speaker 1:Like, how clear is it to you?
Speaker 2:So two things to know. One is that this is a cardinal rule of sports in which you raise a very astute point. Mhmm. If you are LeBron James, it's kind of insane, no disrespect intended, to the latest person who got bidded up between, you know, meta and OpenAI and a drop pick or whatever. Disrespect.
Speaker 2:LeBron James is probably thinking to himself, why can't I make a $100,000,000 a year? Yeah. Yeah. Salary is capped. And if you have problems with that, I get it.
Speaker 2:Sports is a fun mix of socialism and capitalism that is convenient, typically for the owners of these teams who are wealthier every time you check the news.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So point a, well taken. Point b, though, is that it's a cardinal rule of sports. Meaning that sports is one of the few places where your spending power is not automatically Mhmm. Supposed to let you just buy whatever you want. Right?
Speaker 2:This is how big markets and small markets ostensibly Yeah. Get to some level of parity. This is how and this is debatable, of course. We're getting to more philosophy than I expected, but it's a fair point. It gets into the question of, like, what's actually moral and not?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What Steve Ballmer did, given that blurriness around the ethics of it, was violate and really, I would say, blow past any semblance Mhmm. Of plausible deniability that hold on. I thought this was something that we could do here. And I say that because according to the NBA's investigation and my own, this was not merely a scheme that he ran to funnel money with one company aspiration.
Speaker 2:He did it with four. He did it with the scoreboard manufacturer, multimillion dollar deal for Kawhi Leonard to do nothing. He did it with the insurance company, Locked In Insurance, which was the insurance company on the build out of the Intuit Dome. Mhmm. He apparently did nothing for that.
Speaker 2:And he did it with, and this is a fun one, Boingo Wireless.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which you may know as the wireless provider provider. Of Los Angeles Clippers. And the thing you say to yourself, do I really need to pay for Boy in the Woods? Yeah. I'm
Speaker 1:like, oh, no.
Speaker 2:It's Starlink. Is my personal review of the product.
Speaker 3:Nonetheless So when when your original story when your original story broke, you got a bunch of pushback even from a bunch of people that that are pretty tapped in and knowledgeable. And some of that pushback was just that there's no way that Ballmer would be this dumb. Right? So this Yeah. Like like this story couldn't possibly be true because who would ever do who would ever, like, risk it all in this way.
Speaker 3:Is that is that somewhat accurate?
Speaker 2:I think that's even the most generous defense. I think there are lot of people who are just being told by the Clippers and Ballmer's crisis PR handlers, this weird podcaster is clout chasing. None of this makes sense. Steve would never do this. He's Steve Ballmer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The less, I think, surprising version though, which you just articulated is a common one, which is he can't be this, though. Yeah. And and I dare say that one of the things you learn when you investigate financial impropriety in our great country is that that is something that you should never assume.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:There are many phenomenally successful people who, because they are desperate Yeah. To get the thing they can't just buy, do things that they think will never get found out. Yeah. And the problem in this case across these four companies and across these employees and across my reporting is that he trusted people that he should not have trusted, and also he maybe shouldn't have tried to do it in the first place.
Speaker 1:Isn't there one weird trick that would have made this all work, which is just Ballmer goes to Boingo Wireless and says, yeah. We got this deal. It's expensive, but you'll you will get some Instagram posts. And then Leonard actually follows through on some of the promotions and
Speaker 3:Yeah. That would that have been enough that he was actually
Speaker 1:for CPM, like it could work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If he if he
Speaker 3:had actually carried out the endorsements, would that have been enough? Or was that is still crossing the line?
Speaker 2:There's an so I've debated on my show, literally Mark Cuban, about this whole story before it became obvious what this was, and I appreciate the apology he gave me on Twitter yesterday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Genuinely. Cool. But there's a Shark Tank episode we could do, just like pitching ideas for how to circumvent the salary cap that would have worked. Yeah. And and I think one of them, by the way, just to play that game briefly, it's like telling Kawhi Leonard about crypto.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? There are untraceable flows of money that I am told are reliable at this point in the calendar that you could use. Right? That's just one example. But what they did was actually almost too clever by half.
Speaker 2:What they really did was they created fake jobs for Kawhi Leonard and fake consulting agreements, consulting fees for the companies. Yeah. So they were trying to create separation.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:A familiar term in the investigation of financial propriety, but they're trying to separate where the money was going from a to b to c. The problem was that everybody in the course of doing it, people they trusted, left a trail of paper as well as testimony, as well as a lack of rational explanation as to why this existed if you never were to announce the deals. Mhmm. And Kawhi, and this is the great comedy that is sports in which salaries are capped, but egos are not. Kawhi Leonard.
Speaker 2:Kawhi Leonard said to everybody, I'm not doing a single thing for these off the books payments. I am not doing work for them, but I want them. And Steve Ballmer said, got you. We'll make that work. And because these deals could not be explained as endorsements because he literally never endorsed them Yeah.
Speaker 2:It became this comedy of errors.
Speaker 1:That's very, very odd.
Speaker 3:Alright. Let's get to the punishment. What what's been your reaction to Kawhi got a $700,000 fine.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Doesn't feel very significant at least, you know, compared to the the actual payments and what was received. And then, you have a a one year ban, for for Ballmer, and then but but what what was your reaction to the to the to the verdict from the NBA?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This was the biggest punishment for an owner in the history of, I think, American professional sports. And the NBA took five first round picks, which is the most you could imagine. They took $30,000,000, which is a rounding error, of course, for Ballmer. They made him pay the $50,000,000 legal fee to walk to Lipton, the NBA's outside counsel, which is also a rounding error, but still
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Pretty annoying, I would imagine. But the real thing that I thought was meaningful was that they banned Steve Ballmer from his own building for a year. He loves basketball. He sits courtside. He measured literally the toilets at the Intuit Dome when he was designing the whole building.
Speaker 2:He was a micromanager who knew everything about every piece of the building, and they banned him from being inside his own building, which he funded for $2,000,000,000 privately to his credit. And they also banned his president of business for a year, and they banned his GM, his president of basketball, for six months. And so Kawhi got effectively a slap on the wrist, and that is wild on the merits. Mhmm. The reason they did it briefly is because when Ballmer now is rattling his saber because he is the former CEO of Microsoft who went presented with antitrust findings by the literal federal government, also bought.
Speaker 2:Right? This is unsurprising if you know the trajectory of his life. Yeah. What he has threatened is litigation. And what he has not been able to pursue is arbitration, which is interesting.
Speaker 2:Because arbitration, briefly, in the world of sports court, which is another TV show we should pilot together. In sports court in sports court, you have an arbitrator, a system arbitrator, but that is an arrangement between the player, Kawhi Leonard, and his union, as well as the league. Mhmm. And when Kawhi Leonard got a slap on the wrist, only $700,000, no suspension, no voiding of the contract, no nothing, He agreed to a settlement that was quite favorable, and the question was why? Well, Kawhi Leonard's settlement meant that the arbitration option was legally removed.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:So now they boxed in Ballmer, which is, again, no small thing. My reaction was it's no small thing Yeah. To be at war with a guy with a $145,000,000,000 depending on Microsoft stock and to say you got one move, and it's to enter yet more discovery.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He doesn't wanna To be discovered. Sounds like, yeah, it sounds like a nightmare situation for Ballmer at this point to get, more of the details out. Like, he kind of I I
Speaker 2:There's more. There's more.
Speaker 3:So so your your read on it is he just has to basically accept the consequences and and, you know, get to watch as a fan for the next year. But how much does this set back the the Clippers? Like, how impactful, you know, in many ways, like, he tried to cheat his way, you know, a couple steps forward, but in the process of that, set the team back. Yeah. Like, basically took the team out of probably contention for, I wanna say, a decade.
Speaker 3:Like, what what what player would wanna go to this organization now knowing that they're not gonna get any first round picks for the next five years? Like, it just feels like a really tough situation.
Speaker 2:The next Clippers first rounder that they will be able to select hasn't even sniffed puberty yet. Like, we're just in a timeline that is a nuclear winter kind of feeling if you're a Clipper fan. But I wanna say that at a certain point, perhaps things get so bad that sort of things almost need to reset. And so actually, the thing I'm wondering aloud with you guys is as we contemplate what is Ballmer gonna do next, he has now read in personally with litigation Adam Silver by name in a letter through his lawyers. He is signaling it is wartime, and we just gave you some of the stakes around what that would entail practically.
Speaker 2:But historically, if you're gonna go to war with your sport and with the commissioner and with other owners, by the way, that's the sort of backstage politics of this. Adam doesn't do this as a crusade. He does this because he's read the room of other billionaires who own these 29 other teams. If you're gonna go to war with the other 29 ownership groups and the commissioner and the league and journalism and everything, typically, it stops being as fun for you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Typically. Yeah. And so does Steve Ballmer even wanna consider perhaps selling and taking a punishment that is a humiliation on one level, but also you know what the Lakers just went for, $12,500,000,000. What could you make on the back end if money was a thing you cared about?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Where where how do think?
Speaker 3:What what does this do to the value like, there's no way you could value the the Clippers at least within 10% of the Lakers. Right?
Speaker 2:No. Doing back of the envelope math, they're not they're not getting double digit. They're not getting eight figures. You know, one of the sorry. Excuse me.
Speaker 2:They're not getting 10 figures. What I think is interesting, though, is they're gonna make more than people, I think, are prepared to Intuit based on the fact that Intuit is a pun not even intended, based on how horrific this franchise has been. We're just at a place in sports where the scarcity is so clear that these are detached valuations from revenue. Mhmm. You know, again, there are a couple places in this world where that is true.
Speaker 2:You guys cover a lot of them. Sports, though, is on its own crazy ride that is getting divorced from the reality of things.
Speaker 3:Don't know. I think sports sports and the private markets are pretty naked and tied at this point. Mhmm. And but but I take your point.
Speaker 2:No. And by and by the way, that's the story of the Lakers and Mark Walter, we are also investigating. My point being that they're not gonna get 12 and a half. They're not gonna get 10. But for Ballmer, it's a trade off between what do you really want?
Speaker 2:You have all of the money. What do you want? Do you wanna fight? Do you wanna surrender? Do you wanna walk away with something like your, you know, ego or dignity?
Speaker 2:Whatever. I don't wanna be too over the top here, but, like, he has a calculation that is not a normal calculation to make, because right now it's signaling that he's gonna fight.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Fighting fighting seems like a rough going to war with the with with you seems seems pretty rough. What do do you feel like do you feel like this has probably been happening? Do you think it's possible that that Ballmer knew like, felt confident in doing something like this because it was happening at a larger scale? And if you actually look at a bunch of other teams, it's it's really much more widespread.
Speaker 3:And and if you start looking at a bunch of these endorsement deals, there's there's definitely a a better way to go about, you know. You you said you could have a whole show about getting around the salary cap. And I and I I just have to imagine there's so much money involved. There's so much ego. If you own a team, you wanna you wanna compete.
Speaker 3:You wanna win. And I I would I would guess that there's a bunch of other owners and GMs and things like that that are kind of a little bit nervous now because they may have done something similar or even at a smaller scale. I
Speaker 2:think two things are true. One is, by degree, lots of other examples of salary caps or convention, funneling money to players have happened, will happen, are happening. Mhmm. But the other thing that's true is that in terms of the scale and ambition and the paper trail and the sort of almost just like subplots, Nothing is quite like a story in which a guy who doesn't wanna do anything, who has zero discernible endorsement value even when he does something, has leverage over the richest owner in sports, who is willing to spare no expense almost literally to funnel money through four different companies, one of whom, by the way, is a public company, Daktronics, that has now acknowledged in yesterday's earnings call that their CFO, according to him, is now dealing with an SEC investigation. So there there's also a civil suit happening in LA court against Steve Ballmer personally by 11 aspiration investors about fraud.
Speaker 2:My point is there are lots of other examples about how to circumvent the cap that are, I'm sure, getting no attention, and maybe we'll get to some of them. But in terms of what this one is, the reason it's the biggest punishment is because they found stuff that is singular in terms of all of the webs that it entails. And that is Well, I just but now,
Speaker 3:the the the people that the person that is most incentivized to uncover all these other salary cap circumvention, you know, potential deals that have been happening is actually Steve Ballmer. Because you imagine in his war Mhmm. The only thing that he he's he's like, he's got his back against the wall. He's sitting there thinking, the only thing that I could possibly do to kind of clear my reputation is make it come out that
Speaker 1:Are you thinking are you thinking he's gonna start feeding Pablo tips?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is this gonna be your number one tipster? I I I would gladly welcome Yeah. Fact checkable information from any source. I also welcome the idea that maybe the biggest consequence of my reporting is that Steve Ballmer becomes himself a podcaster.
Speaker 2:Oh. And that would be something that I welcome as well.
Speaker 1:That'd be fantastic.
Speaker 3:Final job. Once you have everything
Speaker 1:Oh, he's got a lot to learn.
Speaker 3:Only you and the mic.
Speaker 2:I will say, based on what I've learned from your show
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That trajectory is also an increasingly common thing
Speaker 3:It is. In a millionaire to do. So perhaps we're
Speaker 2:not so different,
Speaker 3:you and I. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic.
Speaker 3:Honor to have you and Real Congratulations. I'm I mean, what what what what to run. I mean, it's it's it's a strange thing to say congratulations for a story that is ultimately quite sad and Sure. Unfortunate. But, yeah, credit credit to you for journalist
Speaker 1:is on display here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it looks as always, comedy is when bad things happen to other people. So there are Laker fans who think this is the funniest story in the world. I do shed a tear for the Clippers fans who are like Yeah. Really?
Speaker 2:Again? Again? This? Again? Another owner?
Speaker 2:Another owner that we might not anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Last question. Is it possible that he sells the Clippers and overpays for another team just to get right back in the game?
Speaker 2:Look. What he wanted from the beginning, what he was interested in, of course, because of Microsoft and geography, was a Seattle team back again. Now I will advise this just as a podcaster to a potential future podcaster. I am told that one way to be approved to buy a new team is to not go to war with the 29 other ownership groups that will need to approve that. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So just a consideration as he continues to examine contingencies.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Well Makes sense. You so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank you so much. This was a really nice week. We really appreciate Congratulations on on your overall Yeah. Overall run.
Speaker 3:Everything. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Anytime. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have good one. Goodbye.