Gone is the wall

Why it's hard to care about Steve Ballmer and Clippers potential salary cap circumvention, and the assumed morality of billionaires.

It’s hard, right now, to care about billionaires.

In the world at large, in daily life, the news we see and hear. The scenes we’re flashed in rapid-fire succession, the deteriorating loop of dialogue that goes with it, the assigned hierarchy of importance to things like human suffering, dignity, ability to live not just unimpeded but live, full stop.

Against this backdrop especially, but also in this moment, we are beginning to turn our big, once cartoonishly heart-shaped eyes from the very wealthy who we have long believed know best, or at least better than most of us.

Lessening is the interest or trust for their perspectives, their way of thinking about the world and what should be done with it when they move through it on a fundamentally different plane than roughly 99% of the people in it. Growing is the realization that much of their aspirations are either individual or so untenably broad that they cease to be meaningfully affecting. They would send the future of humanity to space in some impossibly far off, falsified future before they’d take a look out the window and think wait, but what’s happening right here?

It’s hard, right now, to care about billionaires, and I think that difficulty could be one of the best and more promising silver linings we have.

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Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and Clippers star Kawhi Leonard are currently tied up in a payment scandal unearthed through the recovery and review of dense and otherwise dull bankruptcy papers by Pablo Torre and his team at Pablo Torre Finds Out.

In an episode released earlier this week, Torre shares findings and sources who revealed that Ballmer and Leonard were involved with an endorsement deal for Leonard through a now defunct environmental company, Aspiration. If the allegations (and later reporting by John Karalis) are true then the deal would pay Leonard $48 million in endorsements that effectively circumvented the NBA’s salary cap rules, and potentially influenced his decision to sign with the Clippers during his free agency in 2019.

In his 16-minute sit down with ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne on September 5th, Shelburne asks Steve Ballmer as “one of the richest men in America” whether he smelled or saw anything wrong with Aspiration.

The emphasis of the question is a little bit on Ballmer’s credibility as a business savvy individual, but more so on the reality of his wealth. His wealth, we are predisposed to believe, makes him highly intelligent, unsusceptible to being defrauded or framed or, if he did in fact do a shady deal, being caught.

Why would someone so rich be so dumb, so careless, so… normal?