AI Summary
5 min readIn 2023, a tip landed in Pablo Torre's inbox about a company called Aspiration, a tree-planting startup that was supposed to be one of the good guys. It had endorsers like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr., and a $300 million jersey patch deal with the Los Angeles Clippers. When the company went bankrupt and its co-founder was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for fraud, Torre started digging through the public filings. That is where he found a creditor named "KL2 Aspire LLC" — and if you know basketball, K-L-2 looks a lot like Kawhi Leonard's initials and jersey number.
What Torre uncovered over seven months of reporting was not a simple endorsement deal gone wrong. It was a scheme, allegedly orchestrated by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, to pay Kawhi Leonard $48 million — $28 million in cash and $20 million in stock — to do nothing. The money was funneled through Aspiration, but the investigation soon revealed that this was not a one-off. Ballmer had allegedly done the same thing through three other companies: a scoreboard manufacturer, an insurance company called Lockton, and Boingo Wireless, the Clippers' in-arena Wi-Fi provider. In each case, Leonard was paid for work he never performed. The goal was to circumvent the NBA's salary cap — a cardinal rule designed to prevent the richest owners from simply buying championships.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction and Setup** - Hosts welcome Pablo Torre and frame the conversation around his investigation into a massive NBA scandal involving Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard.
- 2 (01:33) **The Tip and the Company: Aspiration** - Torre explains the initial tip about Aspiration, a green company with A-list celebrity endorsers that had a suspicious deal with the LA Clippers.
- 3 (03:02) **The Discovery: KL2 Aspire LLC** - Torre reveals the key finding from bankruptcy filings: a creditor named "KL2 Aspire LLC," linking Kawhi Leonard to the company with no public record of association.
- 4 (04:40) **The Central Question: Why?** - The investigation follows the money to reveal that the payments were a scheme to circumvent the NBA's salary cap and help Ballmer build his dream team.
- 5 (06:00) **The Blurry Line and Ballmer's Violation** - Torre clarifies the strict NBA rules and argues that Ballmer's scheme blew past any plausible deniability, using four different companies to funnel money.
- 6 (08:06) **Pushback and the "Too Dumb" Defense** - Torre addresses the initial skepticism and pushback his story received, including the argument that a billionaire like Ballmer couldn't be this foolish.
- 7 (09:34) **The "One Weird Trick" That Would Have Worked** - The hosts and Torre discuss hypothetical legal ways to circumvent the salary cap, contrasting them with Ballmer's actual, clumsy scheme.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
This is our full interview with Pablo Torre.
We discuss how he uncovered the alleged scheme to funnel $48 million to Kawhi Leonard, why Steve Ballmer risked circumventing the NBA salary cap, how money was routed through companies tied to the Clippers, why the NBA handed Ballmer a historic punishment, whether he could be forced to sell the team, what happens if he goes to war with the NBA, and more.
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