In any sanctioned boxing match, there comes a point where the referee will stop the fight if one side is taking too much punishment. It feels like we’ve reached that point with the reporting of Pablo Torre Finds Out, which has so thoroughly explored the methods with which the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the NBA salary cap by signing Kawhi Leonard to a free agent deal in 2019, that there’s no longer any way for the Clips or Steve Ballmer to defend themselves.
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As Torre has dropped damning piece of evidence after damning piece of evidence, Ballmer and the Clippers have repeatedly said that they were defrauded by Aspiration, the tree-planting company that suspiciously had a no-show $48 million contract with Leonard which lines up far too coincidentally with payments made by Ballmer and his longtime friend and Clippers minority owner Dennis Wong.
Many people in NBA circles have given Ballmer the benefit of the doubt, from current and former owners like Mat Ishbia and Mark Cuban, to longtime reporters such as Ramona Shelburne and Brian Windhorst. Torre isn’t interested in feelings though, he’s interested in evidence, and he provided more today in the fifth part of his investigative series.
Torre cataloged the times that Ballmer claimed he was defrauded, and he matched up the timeline of his investment into Aspiration with the timeline of Aspiration’s bankruptcy and the federal investigation that resulted in two of its founders pleading guilty to wire fraud. With Clippers media day just hours away, here’s what he found.
“On media day, I suspect you’re also going to hear a party line about victimization, and fraud and being conned quite a bit,” Torre said. He then had his cohost Amin Elhassan read the statement the Clippers provided in response to PTFO’s investigation, which read in part, “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.”
To Torre, that statement made it clear what he needed to find out to truly get to the bottom of this and prove wrongdoing by the Clippers. “The question then becomes when did the government start its investigation?” he asked. “That’s a crucial time peg here, given what the Clippers are saying to us.”
“And the crucial question I’ve been following this whole time, therefore, is when does it become implausible for a billionaire defrauded by Joe Sanberg in the way that we have heard, to continue to give money to Joe Sanberg?”
Torre went back to his previous reporting that showed that Wong, whom he called “Ballmer’s most intimate Clippers proxy,” putting in just under $2 million in December 2022 when Aspiration was in default. “To me, frankly, is enough,” Torre said. “That feels like the de facto smoking gun right there: the alternate governor of the Clippers becoming the only new investor in that round of fundraising at an amount that made zero sense otherwise.”
Torre then piled on to his point to show that a few months later, after Sanberg sought investment from at least 19 other sources, all of whom turned him down, “Steve Ballmer personally decided to invest another $10 million into this completely f***** company.”
The timing of that investment makes it impossible for Ballmer to claim he had no idea what was going on at Aspiration, because it came just days after Forbes published an article about Aspiration’s shaky financial situation. On the off-chance that Ballmer would argue that he doesn’t care about what Forbes has to say, Torre then produced the coup de grâce, a picture of Ballmer’s smiling face on the cover of Forbes later that month.
Ballmer isn’t some rube; he’s one of the most successful businessmen the world has ever seen, not to mention the NBA’s richest owner. He and his wife told 60 Minutes nearly a year ago that they go through each grant and investment on a case-by-case basis, which essentially eliminates the possibility that he just threw money away without doing any research.
Torre’s final smoking gun is that Ballmer invested in a charity called Golden State Opportunity in December of 2024. What makes that noteworthy is that Golden State Opportunity was founded by Joe Sanberg, the very same Aspiration co-founder whom Ballmer claimed defrauded him earlier.
If Ballmer really does go through each grant as meticulously as he says, then he certainly would have been aware that Golden State Opportunity was Joe Sanberg’s creation, and if he really had been defrauded, he never would have given any more money to anything with Sanberg’s name on it. Ballmer can kiss his plausible deniability goodbye.
What makes the Clippers’ upcoming media day so juicy is that we should get a response or the allegations from Ballmer and possibly even Leonard, but there’s also a strong possibility that Torre will drop even more information. Ballmer has to be very careful with what he says today.
