Pablo Torre Explains the Steve Ballmer & Kawhi Leonard Scandal

**John Coogan** (0:00)
Let's bring in Pablo Torre from Pablo Torre finds out to host Investigate Journalist.

**Pablo Torre** (0:06)
What's going on?

**John Coogan** (0:07)
And he's on an absolute terror. What are you doing?

**Jordi Hays** (0:08)
Pablo, 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 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 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.

**Pablo Torre** (0:36)
My 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 you guys' wheelhouse. So happy to be on with you.

**Jordi Hays** (1:02)
Yeah, and I remember I watched some of your content around a year ago when you were originally breaking this story. And I'm surprised that the story at least went away out of the public eye for some time. I'm sure you were still following it. But take us maybe from back a little bit to first uncovering this, and then we'll get all the way to the present.

**Pablo Torre** (1:25)
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. The ESG thing, as you guys may recall during the pandemic, was a real thing. We're going to be good guys, right? Everyone's going to be a good guy now.
And the endorser...

**Jordi Hays** (1:47)
So cynical.

**Pablo Torre** (1:48)
Insanely cynical.

**Jordi Hays** (1:50)
Hey, hey, hey.

**Pablo Torre** (1:52)
I love trees. I love planting trees too. I love what they do to carbon and oxygen, reportedly.
So Aspiration has all these endorsers that are public. There's Robert Downey Jr. There's Leonardo DiCaprio. There's Drake. There's Cindy Crawford, people who grew up in the 90s.
Whoa.
Toronto figures into the story in lots of ways, it turns out. 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 to tell everybody about what they are. And what I get a tip on is, hey, you should look into this company. It's kind of weird.
They just signed a deal, $300 million, to be the Jersey Patch sponsor of Los Angeles Clippers. And they have another endorser that you'd be interested in. And when I look into this, it's not immediately obvious what they're talking about. But when this company goes bankrupt because, and this is going to be in your wheelhouse again, they were going to go public via SPAC. What a time, right? What a time. SPAC, ESG, we're all going to get rich being good guys and no one really needs to ask them any questions. Just trust us. It's going to be fine. And what turns out is this company is co-founded by two people, two big dem donors, classic good guys, went to Harvard. I mean, I resemble the remark. I want to say that this has been also awkward for me. Steve Ballmer, Harvard, all of these guys, all of this, right? Pedigree, all of it. 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. And one of their big creditors was a company called KL2 Aspire LLC. And if you're a basketball fan who is aware of the Clippers, you may realize that KL sounds like Kawhi Leonard too, sounds like his jersey number. KL2 Aspire sounds like a vehicle you've invented to accept money from Aspiration.
And he was owed $7 million outstanding. And the weird part was that this dude had no public record of being associated with Aspiration personally at all. 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 co-founder Joe Sandberg is now, by the way, serving 14 years in federal prison for fraud, you get people who are interested in explaining how crazy their life has been. 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 million, 20 in stock, 28 in cash, to do nothing for a deal that never got announced. And the question was, why? And so you follow the threads and you get to, oh, wait, there's a massive salary capture 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 needed to take away from the Lakers and the Toronto Raptors in order to make his dream of owning a professional basketball team exactly the dream that he imagined.