The Richest Owner in Sports, the Silent Superstar and the Rotten Apple Tree: A PTFO Investigation

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

Speaker 4 I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 6 I mean, he's got the dream. Like, it's within my beliefs to be paid $28 million and do absolutely fall as well.

Speaker 7 Right after this ad.

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Speaker 25 How many trees died for this episode to happen?

Speaker 26 So this is an extremely relevant question that Amin has just raised.

Speaker 30 These are two stacks of paper sitting in front of us.

Speaker 32 The grand total is 3,487 pages.

Speaker 25 Oh, I thought you were going to say trees.

Speaker 27 But with your help, David Sampson, former president of the Miami Marlins, and the help of Amin El Hassan, former basketball operations executive with the Phoenix Suns, we will both increase our collective expertise about the subject matter we're about to dive into, as well as, yes, the carbon footprint of this episode.

Speaker 5 So you both feel nervous.

Speaker 30 You both have packets of paper in front of you as well.

Speaker 37 Do not turn those over yet.

Speaker 38 This is a very carefully orchestrated thing we're trying to do.

Speaker 35 And it involves, by the way, one of the six richest people in the world, a cardinal sin of sports, an unsolved mystery as well that I've been investigating for seven months.

Speaker 42 Sixth highest in the U.S. or in the world?

Speaker 19 In the world.

Speaker 38 What this episode needs is to begin with a couple of libs.

Speaker 48 What neither of you is, though, are the libs in question.

Speaker 37 Because these two libs I'm talking about are two actual, very prominent members of the Democratic Party named Andre Cherny and Joe Sandberg.

Speaker 31 These are two Harvard graduates

Speaker 54 who successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars with the help of some of the most famous people in the entire world because Andre and Joe co-founded a company that they named Aspiration.

Speaker 57 What should we aspire to?

Speaker 6 What will happen to all we've built?

Speaker 57 First things first, go see what you're fighting for.

Speaker 57 Make a commitment to do your part. Give business to companies that have a plan for the planet our children will inherit.

Speaker 57 And back to that original question:

Speaker 57 what should we aspire to?

Speaker 58 Ultimately,

Speaker 57 zero.

Speaker 47 You're familiar with that man's work?

Speaker 42 Now I am.

Speaker 50 You recognize him? Yeah,

Speaker 25 that's Robert Downey Jr., man.

Speaker 29 Oh, is that the voice?

Speaker 19 The voice and the guy.

Speaker 43 So, actual Robert Downey Jr.

Speaker 25 So, what we've just established, five minutes of the episode, is however much they spent. on getting Robert Downey Jr.

Speaker 25 to voice over and be in the commercial was a waste of money because David Sampson's like, like, who's that?

Speaker 26 David Sampson, who watches movies every day,

Speaker 44 did not realize that, yes, in 2021, Robert Downey Jr.

Speaker 27 was urging everybody to aspire to a carbon footprint of zero.

Speaker 28 But it wasn't just Iron Man, David.

Speaker 63 Andre and Joe, Andre Cherny, and Joe Sandberg basically assembled the celebrity Avengers of climate change to endorse aspiration.

Speaker 66 Leonardo DiCaprio became an investor and advisory board member.

Speaker 46 May have heard of his work. I have.

Speaker 45 Drake invested and gave a statement to the likes of Rolling Stone saying, quote, Aspirations approach to climate change is really inspiring.

Speaker 31 Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford.

Speaker 42 It's a good one. They found her.

Speaker 59 Cindy Crawford's even more famous daughter.

Speaker 40 Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 19 Islam Gerber

Speaker 71 in there. I mean,

Speaker 45 even the former coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, Doc Rivers

Speaker 6 invested.

Speaker 42 I feel like it's one of those episodes, which of these don't belong, like Sesame Street.

Speaker 59 Dude, the Doc Rivers.

Speaker 25 Let me tell you something about Doc Rivers. That guy's a schmoozer.
He knows how to schmooze with the best of them.

Speaker 73 What would it sound like to me if Doc Rivers was doing an ad for Aspiration?

Speaker 19 Hey, I mean, look, we all want a zero-carbon footprint.

Speaker 74 I tell all the guys all the time, we got to reduce Blake.

Speaker 74 It's not Blake's fault.

Speaker 74 The carbon footprint is not Blake's fault.

Speaker 50 And

Speaker 6 Aspiration wound up raising a total of $865 million.

Speaker 31 No way.

Speaker 77 It was valuated as, quote, a green bank at $2.3 billion in 2021 with the goal of going public.

Speaker 25 Okay, I'm going to raise my hand. I know you're building very meticulously, but I'm going to jump the line and ask the question: what the hell do they actually do?

Speaker 19 Like, that's cool.

Speaker 25 I want to save the world. What do they actually do? What are we, these people investing in?

Speaker 42 I mean, it's print stuff.

Speaker 26 It's such a good question.

Speaker 60 A question that they started to answer on various billboards all across America because their slogan, if you ever saw one of these, was this.

Speaker 71 Clean rich

Speaker 27 is the new filthy rich.

Speaker 42 Sorry, I don't mean to laugh at our environment, but this, I can't tell if this is a joke or not.

Speaker 65 Oh, the concept of investing with a conscience, David.

Speaker 32 This was super popular in 2020, 2021, as you may recall.

Speaker 45 The climate change movement, Donald Trump's first administration, it ending.

Speaker 27 these companies started embracing the environment and companies wanted to be known as the good guys.

Speaker 26 This is a company of good guys.

Speaker 43 And Amin asked the relevant question, so what do the good guys here purport to do?

Speaker 54 Well, their business was kind of simple.

Speaker 38 For example, let's say, purely hypothetically, that you had 3,487 pages.

Speaker 55 of documents

Speaker 4 and that added up to a single tree.

Speaker 56 Aspiration, what they did was offer to balance that out by arranging the planting of one tree in your name, replacing the tree that you killed.

Speaker 32 And here, Amine,

Speaker 65 here, Amin is what Aspiration's co-founders, noted Harvard graduates, Andre Cherny and Joe Sandberg, understood.

Speaker 47 That trees, it turns out, are made of what element?

Speaker 46 Carbon.

Speaker 19 Carbon.

Speaker 7 What that means is you could plant trees to zero out not just 3,487 pages of documents, but pretty much any kind of carbon emission you wanted to offset.

Speaker 50 And turns out, lots of sh ⁇ emits carbon.

Speaker 67 Drake's private jet activity.

Speaker 45 Plant some trees.

Speaker 43 Major league baseball stadium operations.

Speaker 50 Guess what?

Speaker 85 The Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park have partnered with financial firm Aspiration to become the first carbon neutral team in the MLB.

Speaker 85 A portion of every Red Sox ticket will be contributed to the Aspiration Aspiration Planet Protection Fund, which will use carbon credits to offset Fenway emissions.

Speaker 87 Aspiration is really in the business of helping both people and businesses fight the climate crisis.

Speaker 1 It's Andre himself on Bloomberg TV in 2022.

Speaker 31 David, and I want to give a quote to you specifically from MLB.com, which you'll appreciate.

Speaker 36 since you're literally the guy who built Marlins Park and sold the sponsorships for the team.

Speaker 41 Quote, for the first time in its history, the Red Sox have affixed a sponsor name on the grass at Fenway Park.

Speaker 50 Through a partnership with Aspiration, their name will now be featured near the fungo circles on the grass between the warning track and the infield.

Speaker 58 End quote.

Speaker 42 I have a tear in my eye because it's such horse hockey. We were a lead-certified ballpark, and all it means is you have to do things way more expensively.

Speaker 25 Gold, silver, were we?

Speaker 42 We were the first to ever retract to a roof gold facility. Wow.
It was really impressive.

Speaker 50 We got to do press conference. I did not know this.

Speaker 19 That's pretty good.

Speaker 25 We got to do everything. For a stadium to be lead gold is that's

Speaker 42 it was just a budget item. We just had to pay construction, basically.
You have to do it in a way that gets you the certification.

Speaker 42 You're with them at all times while you're killing trees and while you're emitting.

Speaker 25 So you're just paying?

Speaker 50 That's that's all it takes.

Speaker 40 That's all it is.

Speaker 74 I thought it was going to tell me, oh, yeah, like the roof is made out of special material that actually generates.

Speaker 19 Ridiculous.

Speaker 43 I should clarify that things have gotten a lot more elaborate since then because what Aspiration kind of figured out was they don't even need to do the planting of the trees themselves.

Speaker 76 Outsource it?

Speaker 31 What they did, I mean, to use a proper term, they brokered these sales of carbon credits.

Speaker 50 They were a brokerage for trees, which they also did, by the way, for Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, which also bought millions of carbon credits, meaning paid for the brokering of the planting of all of these trees.

Speaker 67 And brokering, you may ask yourself, what kind of a margin is this?

Speaker 19 Yeah, that's where I was headed with this.

Speaker 35 On the brokering business, typically, it costs about 10 to 20 cents to plant a tree.

Speaker 19 I'm told.

Speaker 27 Aspiration was charging the Red Sox and Meta and Drake a dollar.

Speaker 60 That's nice.

Speaker 25 That's nice work of you. A little 5x?

Speaker 69 5 to 10x, depending.

Speaker 42 You had me at hello.

Speaker 69 But as for how Andre and Joe got the Red Sox and Meta and Iron Man and Drake and Leonard DiCaprio and also, this is not a joke, Bill and Hillary and the Clinton Foundation to care about meeting not some gold lead certified blah blah blah, but what they trademarked as the Aspiration Standard, TM.

Speaker 27 This is where I should note that Andre Cherny and Joe Sandberg were more than just members of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 32 Andre and Joe aspired

Speaker 91 to be major leaders of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 93 Amin, you live in Phoenix. I do.

Speaker 27 You may vaguely recall Andre Cherney as the former chair of the Arizona Democratic Party.

Speaker 19 Also,

Speaker 26 the youngest White House speechwriter in United States history, whose former boss personally endorsed him in a run for United States Congress.

Speaker 19 Hello, this is President Bill Clinton.

Speaker 94 I'm calling to ask you to join me in supporting Andre Cherney for Congress. I've known Andre since he worked for me in the White House to improve education and create new jobs.

Speaker 94 He's innovative, he's creative, so I trust him to get our economy going, and you should too.

Speaker 36 I should note that Andre lost that congressional race in 2012.

Speaker 37 He then co-founded Aspiration the year after in 2013 with his friend, Joe Sandberg.

Speaker 56 The two of them had met at a Harvard networking event in D.C.

Speaker 19 Of course.

Speaker 35 Way back in 97.

Speaker 73 And I know this, unfortunately, because I read a whole story about this on the Harvard alumni website.

Speaker 49 But as of 2019, Joe Sandberg had gotten rich.

Speaker 36 He had done private equity at Blackstone, was a founding investor in Blue Apron, the meal delivery company.

Speaker 92 He was even the subject of a splashy headline in the LA Times.

Speaker 32 Quote, he made millions as an LA investor.

Speaker 55 Now he may run for president to fight poverty.

Speaker 95 And now, please welcome the co-founder of Aspiration.com and one of the nation's most effective champions of low-income families, multiplying good board member Joseph Sandberg.

Speaker 95 Good evening.

Speaker 21 51 years ago, Dr.

Speaker 94 Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 21 gave a speech of his that's my personal favorite. It's a less well-heralded speech, but I think it's arguably one of the most incisive.

Speaker 97 It's called the Unfulfilled Dream Speech.

Speaker 74 It's not that one that you guys are thinking.

Speaker 50 It's another one. It was a different dream.

Speaker 25 i i find myself to be like listening to the b side of most of the martin luther king albums that i have

Speaker 25 that's where the real stuff was you know if you're a casual i guess you

Speaker 91 but as of march 2025 okay now at this year to six months ago there was another headline this one happened to be from the department of justice And it was written by the U.S.

Speaker 27 Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.

Speaker 98 Quote,

Speaker 99 Joseph Sandberg, co-founder of Aspiration Partners, arrested for conspiring to defraud an investment fund of at least $145 million.

Speaker 84 Oh, God.

Speaker 100 That isn't even

Speaker 36 what Pablo Torrey finds out is here to investigate.

Speaker 67 Because what really happened that brought us to this table is that weeks after Joe Sandberg got arrested, Aspiration filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Speaker 65 What I wanted to do was find Aspiration's bankruptcy filing.

Speaker 19 And I got to now reach over to this file over here to get this.

Speaker 56 Is this it?

Speaker 103 Yes, this is it.

Speaker 104 In this packet,

Speaker 50 there is a clue.

Speaker 34 And this clue was initially quite strange to me as just a sports journalist.

Speaker 45 But I believe that this clue may be of new interest to the DOJ and the FBI as, well, by the way, as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, all of whom have been investigating Aspiration in parallel to me.

Speaker 67 Because for all of the very famous celebrity Avengers who got paid by these politically ambitious bros to sell their genius billion-dollar company to the world, the guy who got Aspiration's most important

Speaker 27 and most revealing endorsement deal by far has never been identified by anyone in public

Speaker 58 until now.

Speaker 25 And what would you like people to know know about you?

Speaker 106 I'm a fun guy.

Speaker 106 Obviously, I love the game of basketball.

Speaker 106 I mean, it's just more questions you have to ask me in order for me to tell you about myself. I just can't give you a whole spiel.

Speaker 106 I don't even know where you're sitting at.

Speaker 25 Wait, you're telling me of all the rich and famous people they paid to be part of this, to legitimize this, right? Iron Man, the guy from the Revenant, right?

Speaker 25 All these people, the guy from the Grassy High,

Speaker 69 Kawai is the, that's the apex?

Speaker 25 That is the highest paid celebrity endorser of this?

Speaker 42 He was an investor, or he was actually a receiver of money.

Speaker 91 Kawhi Leonard received money.

Speaker 1 And in these piles of documents right on this table

Speaker 5 are the receipts.

Speaker 27 So I need your help here, guys, because for anybody who is somehow not familiar with the unique laughter of Kawhi Leonard, the NBA superstar and franchise player for the Los Angeles Clippers, it does feel important to establish what makes him him, right?

Speaker 31 Like what distinguishes him, I mean, from Drake and Iron Man and all of those celebrity Avengers that you referenced.

Speaker 25 Oh, he's the worst personality ever. Like, it's in terms of you want someone outgoing and can sell something and be very vivacious and inspire a good positive energy.
That's not who he is.

Speaker 25 He's a very quiet, reserved guy. He doesn't really tend to go to the spotlight.
Most of his commercials, he doesn't have a speaking role in.

Speaker 103 The more that I hear Amin say the word quiet and talking about Kawhi, I'm like,

Speaker 34 his name is basically the adjective.

Speaker 68 He's super private.

Speaker 36 He is not an in-demand pitch man for the reasons Amin said, but he is also, in fairness, like maybe the best player in the league if he's healthy.

Speaker 43 He's a two-time champion, two-time finals MVP with the Spurs and the Raptors.

Speaker 68 All of that is true.

Speaker 27 But his privacy, I just want to drive this point home because he is so intensely reclusive that it was kind of a big deal when Kawhi agreed to be a guest on Jimmy Kimmel's show.

Speaker 40 This was a couple years back.

Speaker 15 Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 111 I'm so glad to get a chance to talk to you because you are a mysterious man. Do you feel like you are a mysterious man?

Speaker 42 No, not at all. I don't.

Speaker 106 You know, the people around me know who I am.

Speaker 111 You don't look at yourself in the mirror and go, who is this person whose teeth I am brushing right now?

Speaker 50 Not at all, not at all.

Speaker 105 No who I am, man.

Speaker 41 We get so little access to him that one of the most famous stories about Kawhi Leonard, this is a story about one of his catchphrases, went very viral, even though it was completely fake.

Speaker 25 It's one of my favorite stories of all time. Apple time, apple time.

Speaker 19 Apple time,

Speaker 6 apple time.

Speaker 111 You were at a team dinner with the Spurs when you played for the Spurs. Everyone was eating.
You didn't order anything. Instead, you you brought 12 apples to the table, red apples.

Speaker 111 You sat there with a knife and fork and ate each apple and said, it's apple time, apple time.

Speaker 50 Who came up with that story right now? That is not true.

Speaker 74 You must have seen it.

Speaker 19 No. Okay.
No, not at all.

Speaker 112 I do have an apple tree, but I didn't pick my apples and bring them to dinner.

Speaker 19 All right, all right.

Speaker 25 You know what was great about that fake story?

Speaker 19 Yes.

Speaker 98 I love it.

Speaker 25 It wasn't like, Kawhi Leonard went out on a bender? Like, no, that no one would believe that.

Speaker 25 But the fact that the story is so ridiculous, and yet everyone was like, yeah, I could actually see Kwai Leonard being the type of guy who brings 12 apples to dinner, carves them up, and then eats them, and just mumbles to himself, Apple time, apple time.

Speaker 100 Apple time, apple time was also plausible in this way because I think for people around the league, there was just another thing.

Speaker 102 David, stop turning over those papers.

Speaker 50 It's the longest I've gone

Speaker 42 with self-control. Like, let's go.

Speaker 25 I've been trying to read backwards.

Speaker 2 We're walking you up to it because the other thing about Kawhi Leonard is not merely his privacy, which I demand on behalf of those papers, but also that ever since he was a kid in Moreno Valley, California, I mean, he's been famously frugal.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 39 So Sports Illustrated once reported this story about how Wingstop as part of an endorsement deal had given Kawhi these coupons for free wings.

Speaker 56 But one day in 2015, Kawhi, quote, panicked when he lost his coupons. And his camp informed Wing Stop, which, quote, generously replenished his supply.

Speaker 59 This dude was making, what, 90 million plus?

Speaker 25 He was driving the same car, I think, from college for quite a while. I'm sure it's changed now, but there was a lot of people.

Speaker 26 It was called Gas Guzzler. He nicked it.

Speaker 42 Is this a Warren Buffett situation?

Speaker 42 Because I

Speaker 42 like when players are, because I've seen so many bankrupt players in my time. So I view this as a positive for Kawhi.

Speaker 60 Sure.

Speaker 42 So that's, I'm not going to criticize

Speaker 25 legality.

Speaker 25 It's not to be critical, but this is just to illustrate this is the kind of guy we're dealing with.

Speaker 100 So we're not here to critique the 1997 Chevy Tahoe Mina was alluding to or the wing stop coupons that he demands because on the wing stop thing, this is what he told Serge Abaca, who was his teammate at the time with the Raptors, back in 2019.

Speaker 42 You like wing stop?

Speaker 111 I heard that. What kind of wing stop you like?

Speaker 6 I used to. I don't like Wingstop no more.
You used to since when?

Speaker 6 About two years ago. Why?

Speaker 6 Not endorsed no more.

Speaker 26 So you're a businessman, huh? Yeah, business.

Speaker 42 Again, so far, very positive.

Speaker 46 So the biggest power move, of course, that Kawhi Leonard pulled was later that summer.

Speaker 27 That was the summer of 2019.

Speaker 40 He and Sergeibaca, they win the NBA title with the Raptors, and the courtship of prime Kawhi Leonard, the most sought-after free agent in professional basketball, begins.

Speaker 114 Literally, the entire NBA is watching and waiting, trying to figure out what Kawhi is going to do next.

Speaker 115 Kawhi Leonard has made his decision, and it is the LA Clippers. A big reason why this happened was when Leonard pushed Paul George to find a way to get to the Clippers.

Speaker 20 They go out and get Paul George, and now you have these two elite bookend forwards to play together, but they paid a steep price.

Speaker 97 The thunder.

Speaker 116 Thunder will get Shai Gilgias Alexander and Danilo Galinari.

Speaker 97 OKC also gets four unprotected first-round picks, a protected first-rounder, and two pick swaps.

Speaker 25 Whatever happened to Shai Gilgias Alexander?

Speaker 42 I think he became an MVP and changed his name.

Speaker 44 So it is the first thing we should acknowledge, which is that back in 2019, nobody predicted that Shai Gilgias Alexander would win MVP and finals MVP and a title for the Thunder this year in 2025.

Speaker 30 And also, by the way, the Clippers losing SGA, all those picks, getting Kawhi and Paul George, that basically reshaped the modern NBA.

Speaker 82 But the second thing, which is related to that, is that according to multiple NBA executives that I interviewed, lots of not just fans, but executives were shocked, even suspicious, eyebrows fully raised at how the once lowly Clippers had convinced Kawhi to choose them,

Speaker 19 especially over the Lakers, right?

Speaker 68 They were the most furious about all of this.

Speaker 34 All of the rumors, the conspiracies.

Speaker 45 I mean, you may recall that they centered around a mysterious relative who served as Kawhi Leonard's power broker.

Speaker 25 Uncle Dennis.

Speaker 37 Uncle Dennis.

Speaker 25 Runter Brown, the G-League MVP, last season averaging 19.

Speaker 62 He was so important

Speaker 56 that Spurs fans, bitter Spurs fans, had been chanting his name at Kawhi Leonard.

Speaker 26 In this league,

Speaker 117 they were trying to get away from it.

Speaker 90 And so in comes Uncle Dennis Robertson, who, and this is now 2019 according to the Athletic, was the center of these complaints by NBA teams about how the Clippers landed Kawhi Leonard.

Speaker 32 And they were so numerous, let's recall.

Speaker 96 That Adam Silver, the commissioner of the league, finally agreed to investigate them.

Speaker 56 And the main focus was, in fact, whether Uncle Dennis had requested improper benefits from NBA teams in exchange for Kawhi Leonard, these secret sweeteners.

Speaker 32 And the most notable sweetener, as sources told Sam Amick of The Athletic, it was, quote, a guaranteed amount of off-court endorsement money that they could expect if Kawhi Leonard played for their team, end quote.

Speaker 68 And this, David, is a serious violation of NBA rules.

Speaker 6 Why?

Speaker 42 Because there's a salary cap for a reason that's been collectively bargained. And what you have to do for a level playing field is you cannot have any circumvention of that cap.

Speaker 42 So you're not allowed to give players anything. It all counts.
So you can't give them plane tickets. You can't pay the college education of their brothers, sisters, friends.
You can't give them cars.

Speaker 42 You can offer in the contract that's available for public use, like a suite on the road, but they have to pay.

Speaker 19 Or you can pay.

Speaker 25 That's what I'm going to say.

Speaker 25 The tickets is probably the easiest example for people to understand.

Speaker 25 If you've seen NBA players with family members who sit courtside, for instance, let's say John Morant and his father, the team is not offering that for free to John Morant.

Speaker 25 He is paying face value on those tickets for his father every game.

Speaker 35 And just sort of like the philosophy.

Speaker 60 behind the salary cap for people who just aren't familiar with it, this is important because it does what?

Speaker 42 It stops the richest owner in the world from being able to do things that the poorest of the rich owners can't do. So there are certain owners.

Speaker 42 If think about this, if you're an owner who makes private planes for a living and you just give a private plane to your player just for S's and Gs, that's something that a guy who buys a team who runs a corner, you know, family drugstore wouldn't be able to do.

Speaker 36 This is now where we can connect some of the dots officially.

Speaker 37 So Kawhi was only allowed to sign a three-year $103 million max contract, which he did, of course.

Speaker 27 But the big alleged conspiracy, the one that got everybody's eyebrows raised, if you're an executive across the NBA, was that cost-conscious, frugal Kawhi Leonard and his uncle Dennis had apparently found the perfect franchise with an ideal owner who would be happy to give them the illicit sweeteners they demanded.

Speaker 66 And an owner.

Speaker 50 who, as Amin described, just happened to be the richest sports owner in the world with a current net worth of $175 billion,

Speaker 42 making him, yes, the sixth richest person in the world, who also happened to be the hyper-competitive former CEO of Microsoft, which also meant that he was still kind of just getting used to the socialist cap that David described that limited his NBA spending power.

Speaker 3 And Steve Ballmer himself happened to explain all of this to the acquired podcast in June of this year.

Speaker 110 We do have a union.

Speaker 43 That's very different.

Speaker 17 What that means in terms of the complexity through the collective bargaining agreement, it also covers things like what's max salary, what trades can you make, all that. Very different.

Speaker 17 You really are business partners with your, with your competitors.

Speaker 61 That's

Speaker 42 different.

Speaker 17 I mean, you actually get together and talk to them. I never did that when I was at Microsoft.

Speaker 36 And I want to clarify, in fairness to Steve Balmer, that no evidence of illicit payment to Kawhi Leonard was ever found, apparently, right?

Speaker 56 Kawhi re-upped with the Clippers in August of 2021, before the season.

Speaker 2 Then again, last year, another extension.

Speaker 92 And the Athletic ultimately reported about the NBA's investigation: quote: While sources with knowledge of the investigation said no evidence was found indicating that the Clippers had granted any of the lavish requests, the underlying message coming from Commissioner Adam Silver remains.

Speaker 66 He sees salary cap circumvention as a cardinal sin in the NBA and will always keep a watchful eye on that front.

Speaker 33 If any relevant evidence of improper benefits surfaces in the future, the league will reopen the investigation and pursue the charges yet again.

Speaker 72 The threat of suspension for executives was openly discussed, as was the potential for a loss of draft picks or even the voiding of player contracts as the most extreme of measures.

Speaker 66 End quote.

Speaker 41 This is where I should also say that Pablo Torre finds out is independently produced by Metal Arc Media and distributed by the Athletic, which means that the views, research, and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre finds out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of the athletic or its journalists.

Speaker 109 So this is where I just got to set the stage here.

Speaker 79 Because so far we've been telling two parallel stories, much like two parallel towers of papers.

Speaker 4 And what we know is that NBA executives were suspicious of how Steve Ballmer's clippers landed the most valuable free agent on the market, Kawhi Leonard.

Speaker 36 That the NBA did not find that Balmer got Kawhi by sweetening their offer,

Speaker 103 but also that in March 2025, this celebrity-endorsed multi-billion dollar, allegedly fraudulent tree brokerage named Aspiration, which promises to clear your conscience and your emissions, they file for bankruptcy.

Speaker 41 And this is where the clue is.

Speaker 4 So David, if you will now finally flip over

Speaker 40 groping it.

Speaker 19 He was groping that paper out here talking.

Speaker 36 What David's looking at with his glasses on is a bankruptcy filing, and there's a list of creditors, the entities to which Aspiration and all of their alleged fraudulence still owes the most money.

Speaker 60 And what I noticed is what David is noticing right now, which is that on that list of creditors up near the top above the Boston Red Sox is an LLC, a tiny little company that Aspiration owes $7 million.

Speaker 52 And that LLC's name, David, is what?

Speaker 42 KL2 Aspire LLC.

Speaker 65 What I did next was pull the publicly accessible paperwork that KL2 Aspire LLC filed with California's Secretary of State, which happens to be the first document in front of you, Amin.

Speaker 93 Okay.

Speaker 102 And what does it list there under manager or member name?

Speaker 19 Kawhi Leonard.

Speaker 27 Whose NBA jersey number, just to connect all of the dots here, happens to be what?

Speaker 25 Number two.

Speaker 79 So then the question is, the aspire part of KL2 Aspire LLC, right?

Speaker 100 Because, okay, he's getting all this money, millions of dollars.

Speaker 29 What I started doing was scour the internet for any mentions of aspiration.

Speaker 50 Any appearances, tweets, quotes, Instagram posts, anything by Kawhi Leonard endorsing aspiration.

Speaker 32 And this was hard to find, which also might seem weird, right?

Speaker 90 Because every other celebrity Aspiration gave money to was well known.

Speaker 36 There was Drake offering a statement to Rolling Stone.

Speaker 43 There was Doc Rivers, Kawhi's own head coach.

Speaker 26 Robert Downey Jr. was cutting his commercial.

Speaker 108 That was the whole point of paying the A-list Avengers.

Speaker 60 But the grand total number of times that I found Kawhi Leonard ever publicly referencing aspiration was this.

Speaker 58 Ultimately,

Speaker 57 zero.

Speaker 30 Zero.

Speaker 37 Zero times Kawhi Leonard mentioned aspiration.

Speaker 2 And so what I started doing was reaching out to dozens of former aspiration employees.

Speaker 90 And I was looking for any information about KL2 Aspire LLC.

Speaker 27 And what happened was a grand total of seven of them ultimately agreed to interviews, which is also how I have exclusively obtained the next sheaf of papers in front of you both to turn over.

Speaker 34 David, please go first.

Speaker 27 Can you please read what this signed and executed document says?

Speaker 42 This endorsement agreement is effective as of April 1, 2022, the effective date between KL2 Aspire LLC. and Aspiration Partners with a principal place of business in Marina Del Rey, California.

Speaker 25 Whereas Kawhi Leonard, Leonard, is a professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association, NBA, currently on the roster of the Los Angeles Clippers team.

Speaker 25 Whereas company desires that KL2 cause Leonard to provide the services of, to promote, and market company as more particularly set forth herein.

Speaker 42 In consideration of the rights and benefits granted to company hereunder, the company will pay KL2, which is Kawhi, $28 million in cash during the term of this agreement.

Speaker 42 Company will pay KL2 $7 million each year of the term.

Speaker 43 That is Kawhi Leonard's autograph, right next to Andre Cherney, the CEO's autograph, youngest speechwriter in White House history, next to the Clippers franchise player.

Speaker 39 But as for the listed address, I mean,

Speaker 60 for where any and all legal notices for Kawhi Leonard will be sent, what does that say there?

Speaker 25 KL2 Aspire LLC, care of Dennis Robertson.

Speaker 44 And Uncle Dennis is also listed elsewhere in this contract, by the way, as his nephew's designated representative.

Speaker 36 And so this is where I just need to mention that on account of the multiple ongoing federal investigations into Aspiration, all the former employees I talked to were very afraid, understandably, to go on tape.

Speaker 88 But eventually, toward the end of my investigation, I convinced one very important person who worked in the finance department of Aspiration to go on tape, provided we could modulate their voice.

Speaker 24 Which felt fair.

Speaker 25 I love that. I've always wanted to do that.

Speaker 35 Do you remember the first time that you discovered Kawhi Leonard's endorsement agreement with Aspiration?

Speaker 6 Oh, it was within the first 30 days of my employment with the company.

Speaker 6 And I didn't so much as discover it as I was told about it.

Speaker 2 What was your reaction? What were you told?

Speaker 6 My reaction was, what the f?

Speaker 6 And I was told, like, oh, these are the major contracts and the major players you really need to be aware of. And we went through a litany of, you know, really, really top-tier name contracts.

Speaker 6 And then, oh, by the way, we also have a

Speaker 6 marketing

Speaker 6 deal with Kawhi Leonard, like a $28 million organic marketing sponsorship deal with Kawhi, and that if I had any questions about it, essentially don't because it was to circumvent the salary cap lol.

Speaker 6 There was lots of lol when things were shared.

Speaker 2 Among the endorsement agreements that these famous people, these celebrities were signing with Aspiration, where did the size of Kawhi Leonard's agreement, the $28 million over four years,

Speaker 56 where did that rank?

Speaker 6 The single largest sponsorship deal that Aspiration ever made. It completely eclipsed every other agreement.

Speaker 6 Completely eclipsed it. So every other celebrity endorsement combined would not have met even a quarter of Kawhi Leonard's endorsement.

Speaker 47 So that's including Leonard DiCaprio and Drake and Robert Downey Jr.

Speaker 36 and Cindy Crawford and everybody else.

Speaker 6 Kaya Gerber, Patty Gonia, who's a famous environmentally friendly drag queen. God bless her.
her.

Speaker 99 Did you ever see proof of Kawhi Leonard marketing or endorsing Aspiration in any way?

Speaker 6 Never, not once. The single largest payment to an individual for marketing that Aspiration ever made has completely evaded all press.
It's honestly incredible.

Speaker 6 And it was a very strong pain point for our marketing team. And honestly, like altruistically, like their job is to get Aspiration's name out there.

Speaker 6 They don't understand why the largest part of their budget that they've actually blown is not delivering.

Speaker 58 I should say that we here at Pablitoria Finds Out attempted to reach out to Kawhi Leonard through the Clippers, through his agent and through his Uncle Dennis, of course, with interview requests followed by detailed questions.

Speaker 41 But Kawhi's personal team did not respond before our deadline.

Speaker 33 The Clippers, however, provided a statement on behalf of the organization and owner Steve Ballmer, which reads in part,

Speaker 99 Neither Mr.

Speaker 43 Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to aspiration.

Speaker 120 Any contrary assertion is provably false.

Speaker 31 End quote.

Speaker 33 What's even crazier is that as you comb through it, as you were just attempting to do, what becomes clear is that this is how this $28 million deal, this thing that he never did anything for,

Speaker 55 was designed.

Speaker 91 I'm no expert, but the language seems to indicate that he actually

Speaker 3 contractually didn't have to do anything.

Speaker 6 Nothing. He didn't have to do anything.
There was a clause for an out in every single KPI.

Speaker 6 So they weren't actually key performance indicators, KPIs. They were, if you feel as though this is something you, that doesn't align with you,

Speaker 6 or it's too big of an ask, or maybe you don't want to post on social media, maybe you don't want to wear our gear. Just let us know, or you don't have to let us know, you just don't have to do it.

Speaker 79 There's section 3.2, obligations of KL2.

Speaker 38 That is the heading.

Speaker 99 Section 3.2, part 4.

Speaker 38 KL2 may decline to proceed with any action desired by the company under Section 3.2, which is the whole section where everything is, all the stuff that he would have to do, if Leonard believes that such proposed actions are not consistent with his beliefs.

Speaker 65 and then part five, right after that, KL2 shall have the exclusive right to control and approve all content and distribution for commercial, non-commercial, or lawful purpose, bearing the athlete endorsements or approved Leonard IP.

Speaker 6 And no one in aspiration had this veto power. outside of Kawhi Leonard.

Speaker 41 Which is to say that when you look at this, your examination of this indicates that the power dynamic is actually reversed here.

Speaker 6 That That

Speaker 34 the client, Kawhi Leonard, seems to be dictating the terms to the company Aspiration.

Speaker 6 Correct.

Speaker 2 In other words, Kawhi Leonard got from Aspiration a $28 million no-show job.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's amazing. I'm honestly so jealous.

Speaker 6 So jealous. I mean, he's got the dream.
Like, it's within my beliefs to be paid $28 million and do absolutely f ⁇ all as well.

Speaker 42 that's it's incredible it's literally written so he can never be in breach if it's not consistent with his beliefs david he doesn't have to do it i'm sweating a little bit because i want to understand exactly what the deliverables were and to see whether or not there's opportunity for him to actually get the 28 million without ever ever allowing them to do anything with his name associated.

Speaker 2 Allow me to hand you some paper.

Speaker 42 It's so many trees. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Well, one tree.

Speaker 42 He said it was one tree.

Speaker 19 I don't believe it is.

Speaker 79 There's the full endorsement agreement.

Speaker 36 You can look

Speaker 19 right there. Thank you.

Speaker 42 So I've...

Speaker 5 Page 13. I've done a lot of these.

Speaker 77 Oh, that's why you're here.

Speaker 98 Oh.

Speaker 59 David Sampson, architect of many sponsorship endorsement agreements,

Speaker 92 is now looking through.

Speaker 43 with his little glasses.

Speaker 42 So here's something he has to do. If requested by the company, KL2 shall cause Leonard to be available to sign 50 items.

Speaker 25 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 42 The signing deals we do, it's like 1,500 items. And it's not 7 million.

Speaker 40 If requested. 50.

Speaker 42 If requested, it shall cause KL2, meaning Kawhi, shall cause Kawhi to be available and to work with team or Leonard's content creators to provide a minimum of one photo per month to aspiration for their usage during the NBA season.

Speaker 25 What's one photo per month mean?

Speaker 44 Well, the point is he did zero photos.

Speaker 42 Wait, there's more.

Speaker 25 If requested,

Speaker 75 this is better.

Speaker 42 He has to be available, Kawhi does, for $28 million

Speaker 42 to participate in five organic comments, which could be a like or a retweet.

Speaker 98 You may wonder how many likes and retweets did he give?

Speaker 40 Is it zero?

Speaker 19 Of course it's zero.

Speaker 110 Oh my God.

Speaker 82 He did nothing.

Speaker 110 He literally did nothing.

Speaker 43 As As far as we can tell, and my source has confirmed, as well as the other six sources I spoke to have confirmed.

Speaker 25 Did nothing and yet not in breach of contract.

Speaker 25 That's the amazing part.

Speaker 19 That's the dream, right? That's the

Speaker 25 did nothing wrong, basically, according to this contract.

Speaker 42 He does have to do something that's major here.

Speaker 25 What is that?

Speaker 42 That Leonard has to be available and participate with company to create an annual program in support of the company's reforestation program

Speaker 42 with a tie to calculating Leonard's carbon footprint given his annual schedule, events, and travel. Boy, I'd love to see that.

Speaker 44 Well, it's hard because it didn't happen.

Speaker 25 I thought you were going to say that was the one thing he did do.

Speaker 108 As David continues to

Speaker 42 home. I'm also looking at the definitions because I want to make sure here.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 31 I knew that he would, he's like a pig in shit.

Speaker 19 I mean,

Speaker 60 you give me a secret contract that I can pick apart.

Speaker 42 What we heard just before about that any deliverable, it's that such proposed actions are not consistent with his beliefs. He doesn't have to do it.

Speaker 42 And I'm looking in the defined terms, assuming these are beliefs.

Speaker 42 I'm looking for beliefs.

Speaker 28 It is not defined.

Speaker 42 So therefore, there is no actual anything in this contract. Now, I've been reading it only for a couple of minutes.
This is in real time.

Speaker 42 But if you've got a qualifier there, which allows you to get out of any of your obligations with something as ephemeral as not consistent with his beliefs without a definition, because beliefs is a small B.

Speaker 42 I was looking for beliefs with a big B, which would make it a defined term, where you have to say, hey, I don't believe in working on Saturdays, right?

Speaker 42 I don't believe in supporting pig meat because I'm a vegan.

Speaker 42 So you can have that in contracts that you will not endorse something that goes against your beliefs, but it's a small B

Speaker 42 and there's no defined term.

Speaker 47 He might small B believe in not doing anything.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 25 It's against my beliefs to do, to do this.

Speaker 38 David?

Speaker 42 I'm just, I'm trying to come to grips with 2.10B here. And I'm sorry, but this is

Speaker 42 a major provision in the contract that

Speaker 42 I

Speaker 42 am not used to seeing. It's called termination.
It's when would an agreement be terminated? So when can the company, when can they say, you know what, we're not paying you?

Speaker 42 And normally there would be provisions for termination if you're a felon, if you're convicted of a felony, sometimes if you're just arrested for a felony, if you do anything for disparagement, if you bring bad juju upon the company, it can trigger a termination.

Speaker 42 This termination,

Speaker 42 and it's a termination for cause, which is.

Speaker 2 This is in the aspiration endorsement deal.

Speaker 42 This is in his $28 million endorsement deal. Termination for cause, if Leonard is no longer an employee of the team for any reason and the team capital T is defined as the Clippers.
Yes.

Speaker 42 So an endorsement deal deal that a company does with a player is usually, you don't always get the rights to their marks.

Speaker 42 So it's like blank uniforms. And so it doesn't matter

Speaker 42 whether the player is playing for the Clippers or not. But in this agreement, it's a termination for cause.
If he's not an employee of the team,

Speaker 42 for avoidance of doubt, which is what you say in a contract, we want to make sure nobody screws it up.

Speaker 42 If Leonard is still being paid by the capital T team, but is a member of another NBA organization or has retired, either of those instances are a triggering event for termination by the company.

Speaker 25 So an example of that is if Kwai Leonard got bought out by the Clippers and then ends up signing with the Knicks.

Speaker 25 Technically, the Clippers are still paying him the remaining amount, but he is an employee of the New York Knicks now.

Speaker 25 And what that contract is saying very clearly, very bluntly, we're just going to tackle this right now in writing. If that happens, it triggers the termination clause.

Speaker 28 I love that David just found that.

Speaker 42 I can't believe that Kawhi Leonard, that anyone would ask for that or agree to it if it were not.

Speaker 4 It seems to be, perhaps, one of the things in this otherwise very laissez-faire approach to what you got to do that the Clippers found, you might presume, quite important.

Speaker 42 Just be on the Clippers.

Speaker 25 Let's put this as bluntly as possible. so to be clear kawaii can not post anything can never like or retweet anything can not

Speaker 25 sign the balls right cannot do the photo op a reforestation program not show up for any events but but his ass better be a clipper throughout all of that that's the thing that would jeopardize the 28 million.

Speaker 42 I had to reread it before bringing it up to you two because it can't be,

Speaker 50 but it is 2.10.

Speaker 34 And executed under those terms.

Speaker 3 And so what all this led me to do it mean is get back to sports, right?

Speaker 56 Because what I was curious about was, okay, so we have all these documents about the $28 million for the no-show job.

Speaker 61 I want to put that against the timeline of his contract extensions with the Clippers because Kawhi Leonard signed his first extension in August 2021 before that season.

Speaker 75 The month after that, it turns out, Steve Bomber, this is September, broke ground on the Intuit Dome.

Speaker 36 Now, this is, David, the most expensive NBA arena ever constructed, his grand creation.

Speaker 49 And though Kawhi was still out recovering, you might remember the right knee injury.

Speaker 19 Yes.

Speaker 24 He did show up for that.

Speaker 25 That was an actual digging for the stadium?

Speaker 19 It's totally ridiculous.

Speaker 42 All right, guys, get the word. You bring in a bunch of dirt and you just get shovels.

Speaker 42 No, it's not even on the ground. Kawhi looks like he's coming back from the gym.

Speaker 25 It's the combination that always goes.

Speaker 52 Everyone else is wearing like slacks and suits and all that stuff.

Speaker 73 And Kawhi just like popped in hoodie and shorts.

Speaker 33 But speaking of digging, I want to go back to the coverage of the extension that Kawhi signed just weeks before that scene, right?

Speaker 35 Because before those shovels went into the ground, you may recall that he signs this four-year $176.3 million extension.

Speaker 60 And you may recall also that something didn't quite add up at the time.

Speaker 2 According to the ringer, I mean, you may turn over the next page and read the highlighted passage.

Speaker 25 That Kwai Leonard officially returned to the Clippers on Thursday came as no surprise.

Speaker 25 What has provoked some head scratching, though, is the structure of the contract he decided to ink, how perfectly Kwai, even when there's no mystery, there's a little bit of mystery.

Speaker 27 And this was because Kawhi Leonard, as you continue to read through this, essentially did the Clippers what appears to be a favor.

Speaker 36 So here we have this notably frugal superstar who is complaining about the wing stop coupons level frugal, and he did not do what everyone expected him to do, given that, which was sign the shortest or the longest possible deal in order to maximize his earnings.

Speaker 43 Instead, to the surprise of many NBA insiders, Kawhi Leonard very helpfully opted for a middle ground.

Speaker 66 And I just want to acknowledge here that the timing of Kawhi's extension from 2021 does not align super neatly with the paperwork on his $28 million aspiration endorsement deal, David, because that took effect when again?

Speaker 1 When did it say that on that?

Speaker 42 Right in the start, April 1 of 2022.

Speaker 31 But now, Amin, what I would like you to do is turn over the page after that.

Speaker 90 So that's the first type of document you may recall that you ever looked at.

Speaker 43 This is the original registration for KL2 Aspire LLC that got filed with the state of California, establishing an LLC whose name indicates that it was entirely created to take money from aspiration.

Speaker 65 It says Aspire in the title.

Speaker 30 Look at the top of that piece of paper under file date.

Speaker 25 November 22nd, 2021.

Speaker 56 We're now.

Speaker 2 Right there at the end of the summer, beginning of the fall, the beginning of that season, when he signs the extension, when the ground is broken,

Speaker 7 and this LLC, KL2 Aspire LLC, gets registered with the state of California.

Speaker 55 And now we're getting, guys, now we're getting to the thing we have not yet established about the fall of 2021 when it comes to the once unsolvable question of salary cap circumvention in the NBA, which is...

Speaker 66 The direct financial relationship between aspiration on the one hand and Steve Ballmer and his clippers on the other.

Speaker 2 And that is after the break.

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Speaker 91 So I need to start this section by acknowledging that I have interviewed Steve Ballmer before.

Speaker 118 So Steve Ballmer, like Andre Cherney, like Joe Sandberg, and like me,

Speaker 19 went to Harvard. Harvard.

Speaker 27 At Sports Illustrated, this is in 2010.

Speaker 36 I wrote a magazine feature about then Harvard senior Jeremy Lynn and our alma mater's revitalized basketball program.

Speaker 68 And I called Microsoft then CEO Steve Bommer up.

Speaker 30 And he was happy to talk.

Speaker 91 He was very generous with his time.

Speaker 118 He talked about how he loved basketball and he loved it so much that he kept stats for the team when it was horrible.

Speaker 43 And he was an undergrad back in the 70s.

Speaker 65 He was like charting rebounds and assists.

Speaker 33 And since then,

Speaker 90 as you may know, Steve Bommer has been hailed as arguably, quote, the very best investor of the last 20 years, end quote.

Speaker 43 But the people who know Steve Ballmer, what they say is that there is no product Steve Balmer cares about more down to the tiniest little detail than the NBA team he purchased from noted racist Donald Sterling back in 2014.

Speaker 100 And this is evidenced, I mean, by the arena that Ballmer admirably spent billions of his own money designing in his own image.

Speaker 19 I love Intuit, though.

Speaker 17 Since we talked a lot about products, and I've been involved in, you know, I'll say the

Speaker 17 visioning, and I call myself a visionary, but what should this product look like?

Speaker 17 And particularly those that, you know, a number of them, both Windows, but also certainly on the back end products, backend meaning they're not customer visible.

Speaker 17 But I would say Intuit Dome is probably the product for which I have the clearest vision I've ever had.

Speaker 91 I knew what I wanted.

Speaker 17 It evolved some because we went and looked at a bunch of other arenas, but I had a point of view. I know what user I wanted to make happy.

Speaker 17 I wanted to make Intuit Dome

Speaker 17 the best place for the hardcore basketball fan.

Speaker 2 And David, as a guy who designed a building, an arena before, you know what that means.

Speaker 105 Toilets, 1,106 toilets and girls,

Speaker 105 three times the NBA average number of toilets and girls. We do not want people waiting in line.
We want them to get back to their damn seats.

Speaker 25 They have sensors in the seats that measure how loud each section is. And so routinely, they'll come up and say, this was the loudest section in that last segment of play.

Speaker 25 Everyone gets free t-shirts or free stuff.

Speaker 65 The level of microscopic detail that Steve Ballmer cared about, the sensors, the toilets, everything,

Speaker 55 It all is to say that when it came to picking the company whose patch

Speaker 55 would get stitched onto every Clipper's jersey and whose signage would adorn the back of every courtside seat, Steve Balmer hand-picked aspiration to become the first founding partner of the Intuit Dome, the first arena to become 100% carbon neutral from day one, the quote, most sustainable arena in the world, end quote.

Speaker 32 And the Clippers announced this at Media Day in September 2021 with Steve Palmer sitting right next to noted Clippers and Martin Luther King fan, Joe Sandberg.

Speaker 21 There are few people in the business world and in the sports world that I admire as much as Steve Palmer. This is a true visionary and an original thinker.

Speaker 21 And those are rare and few and far between in this day and age. But it's visionaries and original thinkers who change the course of history.

Speaker 21 And we're partnered with Steve and the Clippers to change the course of Los Angeles sports history and all global sports history, which is turning sports into a tool to fight the climate crisis.

Speaker 21 So, aspiration in partnership with the Clippers will be delivering tools to all Clippers fans to make their experience watching the Clippers carbon neutral and even carbon negative, so that your choice of being a Clippers fan isn't just a choice of who you root for, but it's an expression of what you believe.

Speaker 2 Once again, beliefs are quite instrumental here.

Speaker 113 As proclaimed in a headline on NBA.com.

Speaker 25 LA Clippers and aspirations set a new standard for social responsibility in sports.

Speaker 42 Or, as CNBC put it, David, LA Clippers signed 300 million plus arena sponsorship deal with Green Bank aspirations.

Speaker 79 Just listen to Steve Bommer himself while sitting next to Joe Sandberg at Media Day.

Speaker 87 The piece de résistance, as we went through this, is when we had a chance to really sit down and meet the folks from Aspiration.

Speaker 87 To have our first founding partner be a company that focuses in on providing services to

Speaker 87 consumers and businesses to reduce

Speaker 87 or even go negative on their own carbon footprints was a great thing, particularly not only

Speaker 68 agreed to pay the Clippers.

Speaker 43 That staggering amount, more than $300 million

Speaker 60 over

Speaker 110 23 years.

Speaker 42 Now, I assume you don't have that agreement, although you've got 4,000 pages and 25 volumes.

Speaker 84 That should be in there, honestly.

Speaker 42 And I keep turning things over.

Speaker 25 But again, David, let's put this in.

Speaker 42 This is a naming rights deal.

Speaker 25 That's a naming rights deal. But usually, what do you get in a naming rights deal? The name.

Speaker 42 The name. If they have founding partners, you get special places in your ballpark, in your arena, where they're called pillar sponsors.

Speaker 50 Oh, look, they got the patch.

Speaker 67 They were going to get the patch.

Speaker 66 Look at the back of the court side seat behind another Marvel superheroes, Simoo Mu.

Speaker 60 Aspiration's right there.

Speaker 36 And this is where I just got to point out that the tower of documents we have been sort of like gazing at over here, it's actually different from the documents we have already examined.

Speaker 73 These 3,445 unpublished documents that I've obtained from inside of Aspiration, they range from bank statements to signed contracts to fancy pitch decks to internal emails.

Speaker 3 And what they do is they speak to Steve Balmer's personal influence and awareness of the inner workings of this green bank that is now under federal investigation for an allegedly massive fraud.

Speaker 36 So, David, the next sheet of paper you can turn over is an internal email about partnership opportunities in sports and entertainment sent by Joe Sandberg to his fellow co-founder, Andre Cherny, and another aspiration executive on October 29th, 2021.

Speaker 42 Bomer himself is enthusiastic to help and will personally be a reference and advocate where we ask him. So please keep that front of mind.

Speaker 60 And then, I mean, if you will, there's an email on November 1st, 2021 from Steve Balmer, personally connecting the CEO of Intuit with Andre and Joe.

Speaker 25 Since Intuit and Aspiration already have a business relationship and all of us share a passion for the clips and our Intuit Dome project, I thought it might be fun for the four of us to take in a game together sometime soon.

Speaker 73 To which Joe Sandberg replies, that same day, David.

Speaker 42 This is Steve Ballmer from Joe Sandberg. Steve, thank you, and you're right.
Looking forward to our spending time together.

Speaker 42 Andre and I admire Intuit's commitment to sustainability and your smart partnership with the Clippers. Exclamation point.
Go Clippers, exclamation point.

Speaker 37 Less than a month after that exchange.

Speaker 25 Just three months after the signing of the extension.

Speaker 36 Kawhi Leonard and Uncle Dennis registered KL to Aspire LLC.

Speaker 84 Now, less than a month after that, December 2021, it was announced that Steve Bommer, who is again hailed as the very best investor of the last 20 years, joined Oak Tree Capital Management in investing a total of $315 million

Speaker 53 into Aspiration,

Speaker 31 which was subsequently valued at $2.3 billion.

Speaker 60 So

Speaker 51 this is how my source characterized the mood around the company at the time.

Speaker 6 Aspiration was in a great place at that time. Finances, like, listen, let's go have a pizza party every day.
It was looking great.

Speaker 6 But if you peel back the layers of the onion a little bit more, you see that that money was spent

Speaker 6 quite quickly.

Speaker 2 So according to contracts and emails that I obtained, $50 million,

Speaker 51 $50 million of this money came from Bomber's personal LLC.

Speaker 36 And that LLC, by the way, is named Pol Pat.

Speaker 40 Not Pol Pot.

Speaker 19 Not Pol Pot, the brutal Cambodian dictator, but Pol Pat.

Speaker 28 How dare you make that mistake?

Speaker 90 And according to all seven former aspiration employees I spoke to, that enormous infusion of money from Steve Bomber, $50 million, is what allowed the allegedly fraudulent Green Bank to quite eagerly pay Kawhi Leonard $28 million for an alleged no-show job.

Speaker 25 The source says in there that the money was spent very quickly. Some might say this money was spent before it even got there because it was just the clearinghouse.

Speaker 42 Better not say that. Some would say.
Because if you're saying that, then an investigation has to follow.

Speaker 42 And if there is any thread where money is invested into aspiration and then is out the door to Kawhi by the transitive property of flow of funds, it went right from Balmer to Leonard.

Speaker 5 The term that my sources call this arrangement,

Speaker 53 which again, neither Aspiration nor the Clippers nor Kawhi Leonard ever announced, despite the tonnage of announcements that they were making all the time, was quote, sweetener.

Speaker 47 And this is a term that originates from the next email in front of you, I mean, sent by Joe Sandberg amid a much longer argument with one of his business partners, because a very defensive Sandberg was trying to preempt the idea that Balmer, not unlike Kawhi with the Clippers, embraced aspiration for any other alleged reason.

Speaker 25 So this is an email to quite a few people. There's a lot of people on the CC line, but the relevant portion.

Speaker 25 What you're implying is that Ballmer's investment was a sweetener and impure when the math above pretty blatantly contradicts your implication. In conclusion, it really pisses me off.

Speaker 1 So that is Joe Sandberg, who would be arrested by the federal government.

Speaker 118 And I took all of this, all that stuff of that email to my source.

Speaker 6 Joe is the one who brings up a sweetener and Joe is the one who brings up the impurity of the contract.

Speaker 1 The way it reads is that like Joe Sandberg was almost like waiting for someone at some point to accuse him of something.

Speaker 6 He is the first person to bring it to the conversation in writing and not offline either. So in an attempt to cover his tracks, he actually opens up the door to conversation in question.

Speaker 41 It does seem very clear that the people inside of Aspiration loved to email each other.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's a

Speaker 6 stupid idiot.

Speaker 6 Quite frequently.

Speaker 6 Yeah, let's put it in writing. Great idea.

Speaker 28 I should say that we reached out to Joe Sandberg, who declined to comment through an attorney.

Speaker 2 But the thing about the bet that Steve Ballmer made on aspiration,

Speaker 99 the problem came in 2022.

Speaker 121 So, this is when the wheels of Aspiration began to fall off.

Speaker 27 So, they'd acquired all these celebrity endorsements, right?

Speaker 38 But not enough actual business.

Speaker 44 That's unfortunately the story of this company.

Speaker 67 And in October 2022, Aspiration began advertising, even in a pitch deck for investors that I obtained that it had a new customer to help compensate for the lack of business.

Speaker 36 And the new customer was Qatar, the country.

Speaker 42 Qatar, it's always a good way to to fail out.

Speaker 67 According to this pitch deck, had hired Aspiration to zero out the carbon footprint of the 2022 World Cup.

Speaker 40 Yes, of course.

Speaker 5 Of course, according to my seven sources, this was not true.

Speaker 51 So

Speaker 98 the point being

Speaker 47 that they were flailing, the cash was draining out, on the road to bankruptcy.

Speaker 82 And Aspiration, despite all of this, had a top priority in October 2022 internally per my seven sources.

Speaker 31 And that was incredibly clear.

Speaker 6 There were weekly meetings about who was going to get paid what and when.

Speaker 6 And during those weekly meetings, Kawhi Leonard's contract was always set to be paid.

Speaker 81 Even in a time of total financial hardship for the company, why?

Speaker 6 There were multiple reasons we were given. One being that

Speaker 6 Kawhi's uncle was calling.

Speaker 73 Wait, wait,

Speaker 2 this is Uncle Dennis.

Speaker 6 Uncle Dennis. Uncle Dennis was calling, and Uncle Dennis demanded payment.
It was priority one.

Speaker 6 Like, it was something that had to be done, and it was crucial to our relationships with Palmer and the Clippers.

Speaker 99 Let's call it about his coupons.

Speaker 29 Uncle Dennis was like, where is the wing stop?

Speaker 50 Oh, this, this ain't coupons.

Speaker 25 Obviously, the stakes are much, much higher, but it's the same general principle that this is a guy who wouldn't let coupons go. He damn sure ain't gonna let $7 million go.

Speaker 58 Bingo.

Speaker 36 We tried to ask Uncle Dennis himself about this via email and phone. We did not hear back before our deadline.

Speaker 41 Of course, we did request an interview with Steve Ballmer.

Speaker 2 We sent him and his people detailed questions about all of this.

Speaker 56 And we received this statement from the Clippers on behalf of Ballmer and the team, which reads in full, quote,

Speaker 99 Neither Mr. Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to Aspiration.
Any contrary assertion is provably false.

Speaker 36 The team ended its relationship with Aspiration years ago during the 2022-23 season when Aspiration defaulted on its obligations.

Speaker 99 Neither the Clippers nor Mr.

Speaker 36 Ballmer was aware of any improper activity by Aspiration or its co-founder until after the government instituted its investigation.

Speaker 99 The team and Mr. Ballmer stand ready to assist law enforcement in any way they can.

Speaker 60 End quote.

Speaker 51 Now, for what it's worth, I should also say that Aspiration had given a statement last year that the company, quote, has delivered carbon credits to the Clippers over the past several years and based on ongoing obligations will continue to source and deliver credits annually through the last delivery in 2043.

Speaker 67 We take our work in the climate action category seriously, end quote.

Speaker 100 And so, Amin, by the way, here we have something that the NBA

Speaker 43 has been searching for.

Speaker 25 And if I'm in the league, and I'm watching this episode and I'm saying, wait, and they've got the paperwork to back it up, this feels like a paper trail that would lead you to believe that the Clippers, through aspiration, managed to give extra compensation above and beyond what the collective bargaining agreement would allow.

Speaker 42 It's at least a reopener.

Speaker 50 Yeah. With what Adam Silver said.

Speaker 37 Well, again, let's quote it again, David.

Speaker 35 According to Athletic, he sees salary capturing convention as a cardinal sin in the NBA and will always keep a watchful eye on that front.

Speaker 60 If any relevant evidence of improper benefits services in the future, the league will reopen the investigation and pursue the charges yet again.

Speaker 2 The threat of suspension for executives was openly discussed, as was the potential for a loss of draft picks or even the voiding of player contracts as the most extreme of measures.

Speaker 58 End quote.

Speaker 46 The dynamics here also, just to spell it out, you know, this is not just any owner, David.

Speaker 42 The thing we have to think about is the power that Ballmer has within the NBA. He's actually been very good for the league.
He brings credibility to the league. He brings...

Speaker 40 He replaced Donald Sterling.

Speaker 6 Well, but right.

Speaker 42 Anybody could have replaced him.

Speaker 26 But he's now sitting court side with Barack Obama.

Speaker 32 He's the richest owner in all of sports.

Speaker 42 That's what it is. So it's not an Adam Silver issue with Steve Ballmer.

Speaker 42 My biggest interesting point here is what other owners will take from this because they can call on Adam Silver and say, hey, you know, you got to look into this because this is not right.

Speaker 42 Now, it's not like Ballmer's won a bunch of championships. It's not like, has he even been to an NBA finals since he bought the team? Not at all.

Speaker 25 The Clippers have been to the conference finals once in team history, and that was the one that happened in 2021.

Speaker 25 That was the first time they'd ever made it out of the second round, going back to even Buffalo. So this is a team that is synonymous with abject failure.

Speaker 25 That's not the part that people, other NBA owners, other NBA teams are envious about.

Speaker 25 What they're envious about is the massive amounts of money that they're able to throw around doing things like, because guess what, David?

Speaker 25 It's great that they built their arena from scratch, all out pocket.

Speaker 2 Well, it's also like Steve Bommer is the embodiment of why

Speaker 34 you would want a salary cap.

Speaker 117 His spending is uncapped in all these other ways.

Speaker 73 But in this way, when it comes to the stars that are the, again, to pun intend this, the governor, the governor on the governor, which we call NBA owners now, it's, can he get the stars?

Speaker 77 And so here we have a clue.

Speaker 36 in the bankruptcy filing that we followed that was hidden in plain sight that got us to sign and executed paperwork, got us Uncle Dennis to the aspiration logos that were supposed to be on the Clippers jerseys and all over the most sustainable arena in the world.

Speaker 36 And you get these private emails as a result showing Balmer's personal connectedness to aspiration.

Speaker 33 And when it comes to Kawhi, again, it's just funny when the absence of evidence becomes the evidence.

Speaker 64 But that's what an endorsement deal would force us to reckon with, is that that feels like clearly something, even though it's definitionally nothing.

Speaker 6 Nothing. He didn't have to do

Speaker 2 The question to me, and this is the question that has been phrased by the seven sources inside of Aspiration that I talked to, the former employees:

Speaker 2 was this money going on what was framed to me as a round trip?

Speaker 2 Was it starting one place, going all the way around, and surprise, it's doing what the guy who gave the money up wanted it to do to help his own interests?

Speaker 56 And so, this all raises this second related question, which is the more serious and vast question in the real world, right?

Speaker 100 Because

Speaker 89 this question is the one that the DOJ and the FBI and the CFTC and SEC, which are all again looking into this deeply broken company, are thinking.

Speaker 73 As my source put it, characterizing what their coworkers at Aspiration have lately been asking:

Speaker 6 Why is Steve Palmer backing

Speaker 6 a huge historic raise for Aspiration? Like, why? Also, what

Speaker 6 was the main motivation for such a large raise?

Speaker 6 Because from inside Aspiration,

Speaker 6 we see like the glitz and the glam of the celebrities that are posting, but

Speaker 6 from the finance side, accounts receivable were wild.

Speaker 6 Like the actual amount of money that needed to be coming in in order for our revenue to count towards real revenue was astronomical in comparison to what was actually being received.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of these one-off LOIs that existed, letters of intent.

Speaker 6 There's all these one-off deals, but this proof of concept from a business perspective, at least from the finance side, did not make sense to the point where forecasting felt like casting spells.

Speaker 2 When you look at this list, how many of those, and these are all listed as deals, letters of intent, dated as of early 2021, before Bommer had made his big investment.

Speaker 117 How many of those are fake?

Speaker 6 80, 90%.

Speaker 42 They just said that 80 to 90% of the LOIs were fake.

Speaker 2 As of early 2021, listed in the paperwork that Steve Balmer could examine before he decided to invest or not, all of the $50 million that he put in.

Speaker 25 Yeah, this is a little bit more than caps or convention.

Speaker 58 Given this special influence and the way Steve Balmer was investing millions, but also getting paid millions via the Clipper sponsorship with the promise of an even bigger payout, by the way, if Aspiration were a real company that went public successfully to the tune of that $2.3 billion valuation, what did Steve Bommer, the very best investor of the last 20 years, know about everything else going on at Aspiration?

Speaker 55 And when did Steve Bommer know it?

Speaker 42 So Adam Silver on one hand, and then you've got the government on the other. The government doesn't really care about salary caps or convention

Speaker 60 at all.

Speaker 42 NBA owners, NBA, they care deeply. The federal government cares deeply if there's any sort of fraud perpetuated on a common investor.

Speaker 2 And that is a question that the NBA and the federal government would both have some curiosity about.

Speaker 4 What this is, is a story that starts with a clue in a bankruptcy filing, gets us to a giant NBA scandal, and gets us back to the real world where some fingers is actually at stake.

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Speaker 121 So, before I let everybody go here, I just need to take a quick sidebar to update you on a new development in the Department of Justice's investigation into Aspiration.

Speaker 120 A headline from just two weeks ago, August 21st, 2025.

Speaker 120 Quote, Orange County man and Aspiration Partners co-founder agrees to plead guilty to $248 million scheme to defraud investors and lenders, end quote.

Speaker 51 That's two counts of wire fraud.

Speaker 101 But also, that's not all.

Speaker 120 That same day, the Securities and Exchange Commission published a parallel announcement about Joe Sandberg, the Orange County man in question, charging him for, quote, raising more than $300 million from investors based on a fraudulent scheme to generate and mislead investors about fake revenues for environmental sustainability services, end quote.

Speaker 7 Now, notably, neither Steve Balmer, one of Aspiration's biggest and most influential individual investors, nor Andre Cherny, the other co-founder, you know, the one who signed the no-show deal for Balmer's most important player, was named in this round of DOJ or or SEC court filings.

Speaker 41 Although, I should also mention that the SEC concludes its press release by noting that its investigation is ongoing,

Speaker 101 as is ours.

Speaker 120 Which brings me to the last thing that I needed to tell David and Amin in studio.

Speaker 118 Because a bit earlier this summer, on July 4th, something kind of surreal happened while I continued to report this story.

Speaker 47 I happened to encounter the very person whose signature was right next to Kawhi Leonard on that $28 million no-show endorsement deal in the pages of the New York Times.

Speaker 76 The splashy headline this time was, quote, Democrats lay groundwork for a Project 2029.

Speaker 37 I mean, if you will turn over your next piece of paper.

Speaker 25 The title is an unsubtle play on Project 2025, the independently produced right-wing agenda that Mr.

Speaker 25 Trump spent much of last year's campaign distancing himself from and much of his first few months back in power executing.

Speaker 25 They plan to roll out an agenda over the next two years in quarterly installments through Mr. Cherny's publication, Democracy, a Journal of Ideas.

Speaker 25 The goal is to turn it into a book, just like Project 2025, and to rally leading Democratic presidential candidates behind those ideas during the 2028 primary season. Mr.

Speaker 25 Cherny, now the president of the journal he helped helped create, called the assemblage the Avengers of Public Policy.

Speaker 34 Mr.

Speaker 37 Cherny, as in Andre Cherny, co-founder and former CEO of Aspiration, whom I very much wanted to talk to, is back.

Speaker 65 He's in politics.

Speaker 55 And so last month, I tried to connect with him on LinkedIn, and he accepted.

Speaker 50 Oh, no.

Speaker 40 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I tried to start a conversation, inviting Andre to come on, Pablitore finds out, to discuss several things.

Speaker 82 The future of the Democratic Party, which he wants to lead, his experience working with Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers.

Speaker 107 The last time he talked to his co-founder, Joe Sandberg, his friend from, you know, Harvard.

Speaker 36 But I also wanted to ask Andre, why did you resign as the CEO of Aspiration in October 2022, right as all that was really hitting the fan?

Speaker 3 And relatedly, why he ran for U.S.

Speaker 60 Congress a second time in Arizona in 2024, because what I wanted to find out was whether the company he had co-founded to fight climate change had even been planting, as Andre once proclaimed, quote, we're planting more trees than there are in Central Park every day, end quote.

Speaker 51 But I could not.

Speaker 42 No chance.

Speaker 27 He didn't respond.

Speaker 43 And when we reached out to Andre Cherny with detailed questions, Andre did not respond.

Speaker 35 But all this is to say that I did want to pose that question to somebody, this question about the trees.

Speaker 1 And so I did.

Speaker 6 You would have to go in order to confirm that the trees were planted. Usually you have a project manager who's providing those real-time updates.

Speaker 6 Like you would have someone physically representing the project for Aspiration in that project, whether it was daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, at a minimum, someone would be there to confirm.

Speaker 2 How often did Aspiration visit the sites of the tree plantings?

Speaker 6 That's a great question. To my knowledge, out of all of the projects that Aspiration undertook for carbon offsets, there was only one site visit during my tenure.

Speaker 2 So just to be clear, I'm looking at a spreadsheet with a zillion approximately

Speaker 119 projects having to do with forestation and tree plantings. And you're saying there was one.

Speaker 58 There was one site visit during your tenure there.

Speaker 6 Yeah, to one project.

Speaker 48 What does that say to you?

Speaker 6 Either they are not concerned with whether or not the trees are being planted or it's not real, or both.

Speaker 25 The opportunity for Malfeasance seems endless.

Speaker 44 Well, it now returns us, I mean, to the question that we started this episode with, which was: how many trees had to die for me to put these hundreds, thousands of documents on this table in this studio.

Speaker 38 Because, look, I should say, to be very clear, I believe the greenhouse gas problem is extremely real.

Speaker 44 I think that the Trump administration, David, is in fact helping destroy our planet.

Speaker 43 We should be concerned by all of this.

Speaker 36 We've, in fact, had multiple guests on the show before, like NASA scientist Dr.

Speaker 43 Kate Marvel and marine biologist Dr.

Speaker 63 Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, to address this concern, the same concern raised by Robert Downey Jr.

Speaker 57 And back to that original question:

Speaker 57 What should we aspire to?

Speaker 42 I see him now iron man

Speaker 48 aspiring what i aspired to do

Speaker 37 in honor of iron man aspiring man

Speaker 90 was do what aspiration didn't do nearly enough so we here at pablitori finds out decided to hire an avenger of our own

Speaker 36 which you can see on youtube right now to help us zero out the carbon footprint of this ridiculous episode. I mean, do you want to explain what you're seeing here?

Speaker 25 I see someone in an Iron Man suit, and I use that term very loosely, walking in Inglewood, California, right across the street from the Intuit Dome.

Speaker 25 And they have forcibly planted a tree in a pile of dirt right across the street from Intuit Dome.

Speaker 43 She broke ground, I believe, is the proper term.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 25 There's a, what's that?

Speaker 25 A little shovel or whatever they call that thing. And now

Speaker 25 watering. Wow, it's like a cartoon character's watering can.

Speaker 43 With a big thumbs up. Yep.

Speaker 42 That tree is dead on arrival.

Speaker 24 how dare you what this all means is that our iron man has now made as many site visits to actually ensure that a tree got planted as they saw aspiration itself make and you printed all these documents for this episode and you think that one little dead tree one day one day maybe not today to make what is carbon neutral that's not just any tree

Speaker 49 is it a money tree oh man i mean what kind of tree do you think it is i hope it's a money tree I'll go to Englewood right now.

Speaker 19 I don't know.

Speaker 122 I mean,

Speaker 81 that tree

Speaker 2 is an apple tree.

Speaker 19 No!

Speaker 49 Because when it comes to fighting climate change, there is no time,

Speaker 60 after all, like.

Speaker 19 Apple time, apple time. Oh, my God.

Speaker 42 Ladies and gentlemen, popular.

Speaker 25 That's very funny.

Speaker 19 You know what, man?

Speaker 40 Apple time.

Speaker 105 Not even one apple for that tree.

Speaker 50 Not one.

Speaker 2 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark Media production.

Speaker 28 And I'll talk to you next time.

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