Clippers owner Steve Ballmer made a second investment worth nearly $10MM in the now-bankrupt “green bank” company Aspiration, according to legal filings reviewed by Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic.
The previously unreported investment, which occurred in March 2023 when the company was “hemorrhaging cash, laying off employees and struggling to raise funds,” was corroborated by a former Aspiration executive, Vorkunov reports.
On September 3, Pablo Torre reported on his “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast that Ballmer agreed to invest $50MM in Aspiration in September 2021 (the actual payment occurred in December 2021). Multiple sources tell Vorkunov the Clippers also made a separate $50MM+ investment in Aspiration for “carbon offsetting toward the goal of becoming carbon neutral.”
In April 2022, Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28MM endorsement deal with Aspiration but there’s no evidence he ever performed any work for it.
A subsequent report from Boston Sports Journal, which was confirmed by Torre, indicated that Leonard made a separate side deal with Aspiration to receive an additional $20MM in company stock. That $20MM came directly from co-founder Joe Sanberg, according to Vorkunov.
“I am personally contributing stock to Kawhi to make this partnership possible,” Sanberg wrote members of his leadership team in a May 2022 email obtained by The Athletic. “Aspiration’s CEO judged the deal to be not worth doing. For avoidance of doubt, any and all benefit to Aspiration from the Kawhi deal is being subsidized by my contributing my equity to make this happen.”
Sanberg pled guilty last month to two counts of wire fraud for defrauding investors and lenders of more than $248MM.
Bruce Arthur of The Toronto Star also reported that Leonard’s camp was seeking essentially the same deal he got with Aspiration when he was a free agent in 2019.
Ballmer’s second investment in Aspiration came three months after his college roommate and the Clippers’ lone minority owner, Dennis Wong, invested approximately $2MM in the company after it failed to make a $1.75MM quarterly payment to Leonard, as reported by Torre. Leonard was paid nine days later, on the same day Aspiration laid off 20% of its workforce.
The NBA is investigating whether the Clippers and Leonard circumvented the salary cap through their deals with Aspiration.
Leonard’s contract had certain obligations he was supposed to meet but it also permitted him to refuse to do anything “not consistent with his beliefs,” according to Vorkunov. Former CEO and co-founder Andrei Cherny disputed that Leonard had a “no-show” deal,” Vorkunov adds.
However, Leonard’s contract drew “confusion and frustration” within the company, with one former top executive telling Vorkunov the deal “materialized essentially out of the ether.”
Another former Aspiration executive told Vorkunov that celebrity endorsers Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. both received less than $2MM in their deals.
The NBA will need to come down hard on the Clippers. Reminds me of college football finding out players were getting free stuff but NCAA would come down harder on teams that were not top 10 teams.
Yeah, this is ugly looking and the league ain’t having any of this. I see forfeited picks and a massive fine coming the Clips way.
Does Kawhi get suspended for this as well? I mean, he should be. He obviously made this as part of his contract negotiations.
This nugget escaped me previously: “Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. both received less than $2MM in their deals.”
So two well known and very charismatic actors get $2M each and Claw gets $48M in cash and stock to do absolutely nothing. That makes perfect sense.
I hope the rest of the owners apply intense pressure on Silver to blow this thing up.
First, Ballmer is a full on idiot. Statistically the worst CEO of any major company in history. He’s a billionaire because Bill Gates liked him. This makes it easy to believe he was dumb enough to do this.
Second this is just another in a long line of sleazy activities for Leonard and his family. The NBA needs to publicly – not quietly – crush them both for this.
Can we make all “no-show” jobs illegal already? Why are they legal for anyone? What is the point of them, aside from pure corruption? No-show jobs should be a death penalty crime.
death penalty? lmao
yeah, because apparently no matter what we do in similar scenarios, people aren’t getting the point that you should never do this! the scammers keep scamming, keep finding new ways…what if we started adding the death penalty for corruption??
@daveyj, this would be a good time to tell people you’re just kidding
@aristotle – I’m not kidding? I believe USA should change its laws to prevent and curb corruption. What is wrong with that? If there was a death penalty involved, it would be on the same tier as murder. Corruption murders millions every year. If people were scared to do corruption, then it would stop? Why am I wrong here, ari?
The USA currently allows too much of this crap, and any attempts to stop it just gets exploited and worked around. We need reform to scare people away from doing corruption.
@Turbotime27 why “lmao”? Do you have a no-show job?
Bill Simmons once said he considers his Clippers season tickets an investment. After Pablo Torre torched Bill Belichick and Simmons insulted Pablo’s journalistic morals, Torre crashed his clippers season tickets like a memecoin.
In all seriousness I really enjoy every update we get on the clip show. It’s like a dramatic clown soap opera at intuit arena.
a joke have open bidding for guys it all gets leaked any way