So, The Kawhi Thing… (Part One)
First, some thoughts on Mark Cuban
Here we are, yet again responding to a report from Pablo Torre. This summer it was his investigation of the NFL Players Association, and now it’s a series of podcast episodes on Kawhi Leonard. Specifically an arrangement Leonard had with a now-bankrupt company called Aspiration, which seems to have been a phony deal set up by the Los Angeles Clippers to go around the NBA’s salary cap. The details are fascinating, and I would encourage anyone who hasn’t already listened to check out the episode of Pablo Torrie Finds Out related to Leonard’s “no-show” job.
I will get to the substance of the case in a later post, but for now I want to talk about the response from Mark Cuban, who went on Torre’s show after the first report to defend the honor of fellow owner Steve Ballmer.
The mere fact that this conversation exists is pretty remarkable. As Cuban acknowledges in the interview, he has every reason to hope Ballmer is guilty. He still owns a piece of the Dallas Mavericks, one of the Clippers’ competitors in the Western Conference, so any potential penalty assessed on Ballmer is likely to benefit Cuban’s Mavs. And yet apparently he hopped on a three-hour call with Pablo Torre, on short notice, just to insist that Ballmer is innocent.
And, as he acknowledges explicitly in the interview, he has no actual knowledge of the situation! He exchanged a few emails with the Aspiration CEO, and was at league meetings where negotiations with Leonard were discussed, but he has no special insight into Ballmer’s relationship with Kawhi, or the company, or the nature of the contract Leonard signed. His fervent belief in Ballmer’s innocence seems to be based on two things: 1) a faith in Ballmer’s character; 2) a skepticism of “scammers” who fleece rich guys like him.
Let’s go one at a time.
First, there is the faith in Ballmer’s character and intelligence — specifically that he “isn’t that dumb.” A few decades ago, this probably would have taken a more straightforwardly moral tone. That is, there used to be a real taboo against leveling public charges of misconduct, because it violated the assumption that public figures were people of upstanding character. As that faith in public figures has declined, you now frequently hear this more specific defense when powerful people are accused of breaking the rules — the insistence that it couldn’t be true because they are “too smart” to ever be caught doing something so crude and obviously illegal.
Even if we ignore the unstated assumption that all rich and powerful people are necessarily smart, this more narrow claim still doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. We quite frequently see rich and powerful people get caught breaking the rules in stupid and obvious ways. In fact, aggressively pushing against the rules is ALSO cited as evidence of intelligence for rich people. When Donald Trump was accused of cheating on his taxes, he said, “That makes me smart.”
Indeed, many “smart” people break rules in pretty simple ways, calculating that either the odds of getting caught are low enough or the potential penalties are mild enough that it is worth the upside. In fact, Ballmer himself was already caught breaking THIS EXACT RULE ten years ago, when he was fined for giving DeAndre Jordan a Lexus without reporting it as salary.
This all goes back to the culture of elite impunity I wrote about several weeks ago. Powerful people break rules all the time — it’s just that they seldom face serious consequences for doing so. Which of course only makes them inclined to break rules in more flagrant and obvious ways.
So when Mark Cuban brings up Ballmer “knowing what was at stake for him personally, and his team,” it is hard not to laugh. What is really “at stake” for Ballmer? The league can’t send him to prison, and they are unlikely to push him out of the league — they barely pushed out Donald Sterling, even after massive player backlash. Probably the league will issue a report that mostly exonerates Ballmer, and for his negligence they’ll levy a “record-setting fine” that amounts to little more than his Fast Cash setting at the ATM.
Which brings us to the fall guys in this story, the “scammers” at Aspiration that Cuban is eager to blame.
This is where you can really see the solidarity that Cuban feels with Ballmer, as a fellow victim of “scammers.” To be clear, I wouldn’t trust the people behind Aspiration, the company behind Leonard’s no-show job. One of the co-founders, Joe Sanberg, has already pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud in connection to the investigation of the company. But it’s funny to watch Cuban talk about them like they are two-bit hucksters trying to get Steve Ballmer to help out a Nigerian prince.
In fact, both Sanberg and his fellow co-founder Andrei Cherney, are well-credentialed businessmen with degrees from Harvard and powerful connections in the Democratic Party. Sanberg flirted with a presidential run in 2020 and backed Gavin Newsom during the 2021 recall fight. Cherney worked for John Kerry in 2004, then the Center for American Progress, and then ran for office himself in 2012 (he lost). Their company raised $250 million by 2020.
In other words, they are precisely the kind of people who, a few years ago, Cuban might have said were “not dumb enough” to perpetrate an obvious scam that would get their company shut down and one of them arrested. But, of course, the line between “scammers” and respectable businessmen like Ballmer and Cuban is a thin one, despite the latter group working hard to insist that there is a clear and OBVIOUS divide.
Indeed, that is the part that’s so interesting to me. Nobody is MAKING Cuban go on podcasts and tweet incessantly about this story, but he’s doing it because it is very important to him to reassure everyone that there are “scammers” and there are Good Capitalists who are “too smart” to do anything wrong. No matter what competitive advantage the Mavericks might stand to gain by punishing Ballmer, it is more important to Cuban to propagate the ideology of capitalism by defending his fellow billionaire. We should, I suppose, admire his class solidarity…