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?

We assign team owners authority of position, and with that position comes an assumption of intelligence, of care, of a moral compass; but Ballmer’s authority is bought. His authority may have come more cheaply ($2 billion in 2014) than the recent acquisitions by Bill Chisholm (Celtics, $6.1 billion) or Mark Walter (Lakers, $10 billion), but it was still purchased.

With Ballmer in particular there’s an added layer of ethical presumption because he took over the team after Donald Sterling, the Clippers former owner who was exposed for being a racist, bigoted lout and had the team stripped from him by league commissioner Adam Silver (it’s worth noting that the same law firm the league hired to investigate the allegations against Sterling is the same one it has brought on to conduct the investigation into Ballmer, Leonard, and the Clippers involvement with Aspiration).

Ballmer has appeared nothing but enthusiastic for his position, often overtly so. He’s an over-the-top excitable courtside presence at games, he spent the same amount he bought the team for in building their new arena, he’s been relentless at retaining and acquiring talent even if the mix of personalities and abilities has been questionable and above all: he’s not cheap. This, in my experience covering and chatting with front office personnel, is the most important part of building and maintaining a winning team.

So it’s a strange smoking gun, this would-be scandal, because Ballmer has all along appeared the “good” billionaire of the league. Underneath the bluster of scorn and surprise that’s come from fans and media at his potential infraction of salary cap circumvention is, I think, a feeling of betrayal. Of why couldn’t this have come down on a team owner with, say, an active hand in the prison industrial complex (Tom Gores) or who directly aids and abets Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (Miriam Adelson)? Or, if a moral justification isn’t needed, then there’s the crime of capital — though those reasons get murkier.

There is the camp that’s already jumping to cap space calculations, of whether Adam Silver will determine league punishment warrants voiding Leonard’s current contract with the Clippers and which team has the salary space to offer him a new one. This camp already tends to fixate on the capital of bodies, that is, the breakdown of them to their monetary valuation via contracts deemed good, bad, steals, or overpays, all with the finances of the team top of mind (the fear, ostensibly, that the team cannot afford it, that the team, owned by a billionaire, might enter financial ruin this camp could help avoid).

There’s also the camp, in a similar headspace to the above, that views athletes as inherently suspect and considers player autonomy to be careening out of control or the root cause of deterioration in the contemporary game. Who sides with the owner of a team based on a sense of shared values, that is, the value of money and those who hold the most to be the most morally correct, or intelligent, or source of authority.

Straddling these two is the camp that finds itself devotional to the league, to Silver’s past pronouncement that salary cap circumvention is NBA cardinal sin (recently added to the list: players partaking in gambling on games otherwise encouraged by the league at every turn). Like many of blind faith, this camp wants to see the sinner delivered to the representation of their devotion for trial but envisions a televised mea culpa.

Otherwise, I have a hard time squaring what there is to be so personally wronged by, or invested in, to warrant the reactions (aside from media, which, a certain amount is required by the job) I’ve seen. Especially with an entity like the NBA that has shown itself plainly to be motivated in its judgements to optics and money (and optics boil down to money, anyway). I find it difficult to be ferried along by public frenzy or personal compulsion in an instance solely about money — who was scammed of it, who did the scamming, who knew, who didn’t, who will have it taken away — when all parties involved operated on the belief of money as ultimate insulator. A shield, a buffer, an invisible cloak, a vault.

I have no qualms about Leonard taking money from a billionaire, those are the realities of his profession after all. The fact stands that even if much less elaborate and plainly silly as this particular set of circumstances (a fake carbon offset company loosely selling the idea of high-profile celebrities planting trees; the mental image that naturally follows of Kawhi Leonard planting a tree), this likely happens all the time with athletes being offered perks and bonuses to sign with teams.

Whether Ballmer knew and acted with full knowledge, whether Leonard knew and did the same, money was a very effective insulator for all parties involved. Until it wasn’t. Until it inverted and went against capitalism’s natural laws. Laws that say the richest are the fittest, the wealthy the most capable. Laws that, under the strain of an increasingly volatile global economy and the wool being abruptly and crudely pulled from many people’s eyes for what might be the first time, are crumbling.

Beyond hope and observation I don’t have unshakeable proof to that point, but I did find it telling when Mark Cuban joined Torre for a follow up episode to come to Ballmer’s defence.

Before Cuban sold his ownership stake in the Dallas Mavericks he utilized the same would-be shield of wealth to claim ignorance of a corrosive and far-reaching climate of misogyny within the Mavericks organization. He said he was too busy, doing too many other important things better suited to his station (see: rich, powerful, oblivious to the every day) to take stock of the daily operations of the franchise he owned and the people within it. He resorted to the same explanation when pressed by Torre this week, he also offered it as justification for Ballmer.

Ballmer, being like him, just would’ve had too much else going on. Too many other deals to do. He also, being wealthy, would not be so reckless, unthinking, or stupid to make such a blatantly bad decision and if he did, to do it so out in the open.

Cuban fixates on this point, the presumption of infallibility via wealth. He fixates on it so often and bizarrely that he contradicts himself over and over again throughout the interview, so singular is the bedrock dogma that wealth, the crude accumulation of money and assets, offers abiding superiority, security. Eventually, through his own repetitions, the facade begins to crumble. He begins to appear irrational, desperate. Gone is the wall. Without meaning to Cuban created a window.