[Pablo Torre] Steve Balmer paid Kawhi Leonard under the table to avoid salary cap

Seems like the defense that will be used for Wong's $2 million investment is that he did it solely because of his love for his daughter. His daughter loved working at the company and therefore he wanted to help save it. Which is why he made the investment, agreeing to a disclaimer where he acknowledges the risk due to the company having financial issues and being investigated. Totally nothing to do with Kawhi.

Also Silver sounded pretty clear when he said they needed "conclusive proof" for the Clippers to be punished and not just “appearance of impropriety”. Unless there are emails or some other records of Ballmer or clippers employees instructing Aspiration when or how much to pay Kawhi, there might not be enough evidence to meet the criteria.

 

Ppl piggybacking Pablo for clicks. This one is reaching.

Kawhi didn’t play ANY games the year prior, due to major ACL surgery. And there are many, many articles at the beginning of the 2022 season saying how Lue and the medical staff were going to be very cautious especially after the stiffness in his 2nd game. Lue even said they were holding him out after the stiffness when he wanted to play. Like Tari wanted to play, too.

I’m sure the medical staff confirmed the stiffness, either from MRI visible swelling or noticeable movement issue, that they could monitor … I mean, that’s what was being reported.

yeah, maybe he faked a slow return after missing an entire season … and having slow starts to later seasons too. But, I need some Likes on Twitter, so why not just pile on.

 

He doesn’t even need to say that. He could be “honest” and say they wanted to avoid collapse of their patch sponsor to avoid embarrassment and that they still believed in aspirations ability to complete their green projects to make the new Intuit Dome carbon neutral (which was a real and provable priority for Ballmer)…like the project the Red Sox bought from Aspiration too, and Qatar (a PIPE investor of Aspiration) bought for the World Cup. (It was a real priority and not just PR, because Ballmer also put out $220m in funding for climate change projects starting August 2022. That philanthropy foundation is now up to $1b in grants given.)

Not to mention one of Pablo’s aspiration insiders even said they still had hopes for the Spac merger going through.

The merger was starting to get bleak, but their InterPrivate Spac partner was still telling their stockholders in SEC filings that they remained hopeful. You can read them.

Had that merger happened, Aspiration immediately gets $200m of investments held in escrow released, and Stanberg and AlHessiene can start trading their shares … for even more than that, depending upon how well they can pump and dump. They had a major (major) pump and dump expert investment fund with $250m reasons to help them. Oaktree specializes on propping up distressed securities for a smooth landing. They are the ones who invested with Ballmer.

 

Hes a content creator. The plan for success is a pretty common roadmap in general accross multiple content creating fields.

Release info.
React to the reaction.
Release info.
React to the new reaction.

At this point I think he probably has one more info release, or more even. In which he will then react to the reaction.

Content creation in essence. Got to keep the machine going and keep engagement over a longer period of time. He also predicted that Balmer would do a "victim tour", so he is cold-blooded in that aspect.

 

Avoiding collapse equals paying Leonard for his no show work? How did that work out?

 

I agree. I hope we hear what excuses they give the investigators.

I also have a lot of interest in just the Spac merger. It’s somewhat of a hobby for me to know the world of pump and dump trading. I’d really like to see the whole stock purchase agreement Wong had that Pablo showed the first paragraph of. That is, what were the restrictions on his 6+million share of Series C-5 preferred stock? Curious how desperate Aspiration was at that point. We know from SEC filing what the restrictions are on every other Series. Any other series is a one-to-one conversion, which is huge. I expect Wong’s Series C-5 had special restrictions. Because otherwise he got a huge discount price. Maybe Sanberg / AlHusseine were so desperate for capital, they sold Wong some of their own shares.

ftw: one of Pablo’s insiders said they reached out to Wong, in the context of finding new investors.

 

Those two question by Pablo are easily answered … I actually quote-posted a simple response to him, but he won’t see it,

imo, it’s ridiculously easy to answer those questions … to the point I’m very confident that’s what happened.

 

It does make me wonder how many of these "carbon credit" companies really follow through with the activities to give those credits value. The assumption across most of the developed western world is obviously that they do because all the big companies buy tons of the things. I wonder if anybody actually ever checks though until something like this happens?

 

He dropped another "bomb" today. Curious how many more of these "bombs" he has and how long he will be able to keep it going.

 

Why would Balmer bother? He's worth a huge amount of money. It's crazy what sports can do to a person and the chances taken in an attempt to "win it all." Crazy never happens around here, of course.

 

I like the approach, waiting for Clippers / Balmer / ESPN and the like's defense and then release more info. Clearly Balmer and Kawhi are guilty, but they won’t be punished.

 

Haha he’s been releasing even more and just showing receipts after receipts. Written and signed contract and all.

 

Now I wonder if Mark also circumvented salary cap …..hmmm

 

Would you genuinely be surprised if it came out that any of these owners did it? Especially the ones like Cuban and Balmer who really do seem like superfans.

 

I do not even think Kawhi is worth it....yes he is sort of an old superstar but he misses a lot of time and time is money.

The Clippers and Lakers ways are wrong, not going through the draft only gets you retiring superstars.