Clippers owner Steve Ballmer made a second investment worth nearly $10MM in the now-bankrupt “green bank” company Aspiration, according to legal filings reviewed by Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic.
The previously unreported investment, which occurred in March 2023 when the company was “hemorrhaging cash, laying off employees and struggling to raise funds,” was corroborated by a former Aspiration executive, Vorkunov reports.
On September 3, Pablo Torre reported on his “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast that Ballmer agreed to invest $50MM in Aspiration in September 2021 (the actual payment occurred in December 2021). Multiple sources tell Vorkunov the Clippers also made a separate $50MM+ investment in Aspiration for “carbon offsetting toward the goal of becoming carbon neutral.”
In April 2022, Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28MM endorsement deal with Aspiration but there’s no evidence he ever performed any work for it.
A subsequent report from Boston Sports Journal, which was confirmed by Torre, indicated that Leonard made a separate side deal with Aspiration to receive an additional $20MM in company stock. That $20MM came directly from co-founder Joe Sanberg.
“I am personally contributing stock to Kawhi to make this partnership possible,” Sanberg wrote members of his leadership team in a May 2022 email obtained by The Athletic. “Aspiration’s CEO judged the deal to be not worth doing. For avoidance of doubt, any and all benefit to Aspiration from the Kawhi deal is being subsidized by my contributing my equity to make this happen.”
Sanberg pled guilty last month to two counts of wire fraud for defrauding investors and lenders of more than $248MM.
Bruce Arthur of The Toronto Star also reported that Leonard’s camp was seeking essentially the same deal he got with Aspiration when he was a free agent in 2019.
Ballmer’s second investment in Aspiration came three months after his college roommate and the Clippers’ lone minority owner, Dennis Wong, invested approximately $2MM in the company after it failed to make a $1.75MM quarterly payment to Leonard, as reported by Torre. Leonard was paid nine days later, on the same day Aspiration laid off 20% of its workforce.
The NBA is investigating whether the Clippers and Leonard circumvented the salary cap through their deals with Aspiration.
Leonard’s contract had certain obligations he was supposed to meet but it also permitted him to refuse to do anything “not consistent with his beliefs,” according to Vorkunov. Former CEO and co-founder Andrei Cherny disputed that Leonard had a “no-show” deal,” Vorkunov adds.
However, Leonard’s contract drew “confusion and frustration” within the company, with one former top executive telling Vorkunov the deal “materialized essentially out of the ether.”
Another former Aspiration executive told Vorkunov that celebrity endorsers Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. both received less than $2MM in their deals.