--:-- Pablo Torre: Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
--:-- David Samson: [Laughs] I mean, he's got the dream. Like, it's within my beliefs to be paid $28 million and do absolutely f*** all as well.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Right after this ad.
--:-- [Ad break: Garden Ears PSA]
--:-- Pablo Torre: How many trees died for this episode to happen? This is an extremely relevant question that Amin has just raised. These are two stacks of paper sitting in front of us. The grand total is 3,487 pages.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Oh, I thought you were going to say trees.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But with your help, David Samson, former president of the Miami Marlins, and the help of Amin El-Hassan, former basketball operations executive with the Phoenix Suns, we will both increase our collective expertise about the subject matter we're about to dive into as well as, yes, the carbon footprint of this episode.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: I feel nervous.
--:-- Pablo Torre: You both have packets of paper in front of you as well. Do not turn those over yet. This is a very carefully orchestrated thing we're trying to do. And it involves, by the way, one of the six richest people in the world, a cardinal sin of sports, an unsolved mystery as well that I've been investigating for seven months.
--:-- David Samson: Sixth highest in the U.S. or in the world?
--:-- Pablo Torre: In the world. What this episode needs is to begin with a couple of libs. What neither of you is, though, are the libs in question. Because these two libs I'm talking about are two actual, very prominent members of the Democratic Party named Andre Czerny and Joe Sandberg. These are two Harvard graduates.
--:-- David Samson: Harvard. Crappy school.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Who successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars with the help of some of the most famous people in the entire world because Andre and Joe co-founded a company that they named Aspiration.
--:-- [Audio clip plays: "What should we aspire to? What will happen to all we've built? First things first, go see what you're fighting for. Make a commitment to do your part. Give business to companies that have a plan for the planet our children will inherit. And back to that original question, what should we aspire to? Ultimately, zero."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: You familiar with that man's work?
--:-- David Samson: Now I am.
--:-- Pablo Torre: You recognize him?
--:-- David Samson: Yeah, that's Robert Downey Jr., man.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, is that the voice? The voice and the guy. So, actual Robert Downey Jr. So what we've just established, five minutes of the episode, is how much they spent on getting Robert Downey Jr. to voice over and be in the commercial was a waste of money because David Samson was like, who's that? David Samson, who watches movies every day of his life, did not realize that, yes, in 2021, Robert Downey Jr. was urging everybody to aspire to a carbon footprint of zero.
--:-- But it wasn't just Iron Man, David. Andre and Joe, Andre Czerny and Joe Sandberg, basically assembled the celebrity Avengers of climate change to endorse Aspiration. Leonardo DiCaprio became an investor and advisory board member. You may have heard of his work.
--:-- David Samson: I have.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Drake invested and gave a statement to the likes of Rolling Stone, saying, quote, "Aspiration's approach to climate change is really inspiring." Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford.
--:-- David Samson: That's a good one. They found her.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Cindy Crawford's even more famous daughter.
--:-- David Samson: Yeah, that's wild.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Kaya Gerber. Yeah. In there, I mean, even the former coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, Doc Rivers.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Well, you know.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Invested. I feel like it's one of those episodes, which of these don't belong? Like Sesame Street?
--:-- David Samson: Dude. What's Doc Rivers doing in there?
--:-- Pablo Torre: Let me tell you something about Doc Rivers. That guy's a schmoozer. He knows how to schmooze with the best of them.
--:-- David Samson: What would it sound like, I mean, if Doc Rivers was doing an ad for Aspiration?
--:-- [David Samson impersonating Doc Rivers: "Hey, I mean, look, we all want, like, a zero carbon footprint. I tell all the guys all the time, we got to reduce. Like, it's not Blake's fault. The carbon footprint is not Blake's fault."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: And scene. Aspiration wound up raising a total of $865 million.
--:-- David Samson: No way.
--:-- Pablo Torre: It was evaluated as, quote, a green bank at $2.3 billion in 2021 with the goal of going public.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Okay, I'm going to raise my hand. I know you're building very meticulously, but I'm going to jump the line and ask the question, what the hell do they actually do? Like, that's cool. I want to save the world. What do they actually do? What are these people investing in?
--:-- Pablo Torre: I mean, it's such a good question, a question that they started to answer on various billboards all across America because their slogan, if you ever saw one of these, was this: "Clean rich is the new filthy rich."
--:-- David Samson: Sorry, I don't mean to laugh at our environment, but this, I can't tell if this is a joke or not.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, the concept of investing with a conscience, David. This was super popular in 2020, 2021, as you may recall, the climate change movement, Donald Trump's first administration, it ending. These companies started embracing the environment and companies wanted to be known as the good guys. This is a company of good guys. And Amin asked the relevant question, so what do the good guys here purport to do? Well, their business was kind of simple. For example, let's say, purely hypothetically, that you had 3,487 pages of documents. Give or take. And that added up to a single tree. Aspiration. What they did was offer to balance that out by arranging the planting of one tree in your name, replacing the tree that you killed. And here, Amin...
--:-- Amin Elhassan: So old.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Here, Amin, is what Aspiration's co-founders, noted Harvard graduates, Andre Czerny and Joe Sandberg, understood, that trees, it turns out, are made of what element?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Carbon?
--:-- Pablo Torre: Carbon. What that means is that you can plant trees to zero out not just 3,487 pages of documents, but pretty much any kind of carbon emission you wanted to offset. And it turns out, lots of s*** emits carbon. Drake's private jet activity. Plant some trees. Major League Baseball Stadium operations. Guess what?
--:-- [Audio clip: "The Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park have partnered with financial firm Aspiration to become the first carbon neutral team in the MLB. A portion of every Red Sox ticket will be contributed to the Aspiration Planet Protection Fund, which will use carbon credits to offset Fenway emissions."]
--:-- [Audio clip: "Aspiration is really in the business of helping both people and businesses fight the climate crisis."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: It's Andre himself on Bloomberg TV in 2022. David, and I want to give a quote to you specifically from MLB.com, which you'll appreciate since you're literally the guy who built Marlins Park and sold the sponsorships for the team. Quote, "For the first time in its history, the Red Sox have affixed a sponsor name on the grass at Fenway Park. Through a partnership with Aspiration, their name will now be featured near the fungo circles on the grass between the warning track and the infield." End quote.
--:-- David Samson: I have a tear in my eye because it's such horse hockey. We were a LEED-certified ballpark, and all it means is you have to do things way more expensively.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Gold, silver?
--:-- David Samson: We were the first ever retractable roof gold facility.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Wow. It was really impressive.
--:-- David Samson: We got to do a press conference.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I did not know this. That's pretty good.
--:-- David Samson: We got to do everything. For a stadium to be LEED gold, that's... It was just a budget item. We just had to pay instruction, basically. You have to do it in a way that gets you the certification. You're with them at all times while you're killing trees and while you're emitting... So you're just paying? That's all it takes?
--:-- Pablo Torre: That's all it is.
--:-- David Samson: I thought it was like you were going to tell me, oh, yeah, like the roof is made out of a special material that actually generates...
--:-- Pablo Torre: Don't be ridiculous. I should clarify that things have gotten a lot more elaborate since then because what Aspiration kind of figured out was they don't even need to do the planting of the trees themselves.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Outsource it?
--:-- Pablo Torre: What they did, I mean, to use a proper term, they brokered these sales of carbon credits. They were a brokerage for trees, which they also did, by the way, for Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, which also bought millions of carbon credits, meaning paid for the brokering of the planting of all of these trees. And brokering, you may ask yourself, what kind of a margin is this?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Yeah, that's what's headed with this.
--:-- Pablo Torre: On the brokering business, typically, it costs about 10 to 20 cents to plant a tree, I'm told. Aspiration was charging the Red Sox and Meta and Drake a dollar.
--:-- David Samson: Whew, that's nice.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: That's nice work if you can get it.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Little 5X?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: 5 to 10X, depending.
--:-- David Samson: You had me at hello.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But as for how Andre and Joe got the Red Sox and Meta and Iron Man and Drake and Leonardo DiCaprio, and also, this is not a joke, Bill and Hillary and the Clinton Foundation to care about meeting not some gold LEED certified blah blah blah, but what they trademarked as the "Aspiration Standard," TM, this is where I should note that Andre Czerny and Joe Sandberg were more than just members of the Democratic Party. Andre and Joe aspired to be major leaders of the Democratic Party. I mean, you live in Phoenix.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: I do.
--:-- Pablo Torre: You may vaguely recall Andre Czerny as the former chair of the Arizona Democratic Party. Also.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: What a time.
--:-- Pablo Torre: The youngest White House speechwriter in United States history, whose former boss personally endorsed him in a run for United States Congress.
--:-- [Audio clip: "Hello, this is President Bill Clinton. I'm calling to ask you to join me in supporting Andre Cherney for Congress. I've known Andre since he worked for me in the White House to improve education and create new jobs. He's innovative. He's creative. So I trust him to get our economy going, and you should too."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: I should note that Andre lost that congressional race in 2012. He then co-founded Aspiration the year after in 2013 with his friend, Joe Sandberg. The two of them had met at a Harvard networking event in D.C.
--:-- David Samson: Of course.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Way back in '97. And I know this, unfortunately, because I read a whole story about this on the Harvard alumni website. And as of 2019, Joe Sandberg had gotten rich. He'd done private equity at Blackstone, was a founding investor in Blue Apron, the meal delivery company. He was even the subject of a splashy headline in the L.A. Times. Quote, "He made millions as an L.A. investor. Now he may run for president to fight poverty."
--:-- [Audio clip: "And now, please welcome the co-founder of Aspiration.com and one of the nation's most effective champions of low-income families, multiplying good board member, Joseph Sandberg."]
--:-- [Audio clip of Joe Sandberg: "What do you mean? 51 years ago Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech of his that's my personal favorite. It's a less well heralded speech but I think it's arguably one of the most incisive. It's called the 'Unfulfilled Dream' speech. It's not that one that you guys are thinking. It was another one. It was a different dream. I find myself to be like listening to the B-side of most of the Martin Luther King albums that I have. That's where the real stuff was."]
--:-- David Samson: Pure casual. It's just you.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But as of March 2025, okay, now, this year, just six months ago, there was another headline. This one happened to be from the Department of Justice. And it was written by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California. Quote, "Joseph Sandberg, co-founder of Aspiration Partners, arrested for conspiring to defraud an investment fund of at least $145 million."
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Oh, God.
--:-- Pablo Torre: That isn't even what Pablo Torre Finds Out is here to investigate. Because what really happened that brought us to this table is that weeks after Joe Sandberg got arrested, Aspiration filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
--:-- David Samson: Sucker.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What I wanted to do was find Aspiration's bankruptcy filing. And I gotta now reach over to this file over here to get this.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Is this it?
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes, this is it. In this packet, there is a clue. And this clue was initially quite strange to me as just a sports journalist. But I believe that this clue may be of new interest to the DOJ and the FBI as well, by the way, as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, all of whom have been investigating Aspiration in parallel to me. Because for all of the very famous celebrity Avengers who got paid by these politically ambitious bros to sell their genius billion-dollar company to the world, the guy who got Aspiration's most important and most revealing endorsement deal by far has never been identified by anyone in public until now. Dun, dun, dun.
--:-- [Audio clip: "And what would you like people to know about you? I'm a fun guy. Obviously, I love the game of basketball. I mean, it's just more questions you have to ask me in order for me to tell you about myself. I just can't give you a whole spiel. I don't even know where you're sitting at."]
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Wait, you're telling me, of all the rich and famous people they paid, to be part of this, to legitimize this, right? Iron Man, the guy from The Revenant, right? All these people, the guy from Degrassi High. Kawhi is the, that's the apex?
--:-- Pablo Torre: That is the highest paid celebrity endorser of this?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: He was an investor or he was actually a receiver of money.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Kawhi Leonard received money. And in these piles of documents right on this table are the receipts. So we need your help here, guys, because for anybody who is somehow not familiar with the unique laughter of Kawhi Leonard, the NBA superstar and franchise player for the Los Angeles Clippers, it does feel important to establish what makes him him, right? Like what distinguishes him, I mean, from Drake and Iron Man and all of those celebrity Avengers that you referenced.
--:-- David Samson: Oh, he's the worst personality ever. Like, in terms of you want someone outgoing and can sell something and be very vivacious and inspire a good positive energy. That's not who he is. He's a very quiet, reserved guy. He doesn't really tend to go to the spotlight. Most of his commercials, he doesn't have a speaking role in.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: The more that I hear Amin say the word quiet, and talking about Kawhi, I'm like, his name is basically the adjective. He's super private. He is not an in-demand pitchman for the reasons Amin said.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But he is also, in fairness, like, maybe the best player in the league if he's healthy. He's a two-time champion, two-time finals MVP, with the Spurs and the Raptors, all that is true. But his privacy, I just want to drive this point home because he is so intensely reclusive that it was kind of a big deal when Kawhi agreed to be a guest on Jimmy Kimmel's show. This was a couple years back.
--:-- [Audio clip: "How's it going? Thank you, thank you. I'm so glad to get a chance to talk to you because you are a mysterious man. Do you feel like you are a mysterious man? No, not at all. I don't. You know, the people around me know who I am. You don't look at yourself in the mirror and go, who is this person whose teeth I am brushing right now? Not at all, not at all. I know who I am."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: We get so little access to him that one of the most famous stories about Kawhi Leonard, this is a story about one of his catchphrases, went very viral, even though it was completely fake.
--:-- David Samson: One of my favorite stories of all time. Apple time, apple time.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Apple time, apple time.
--:-- David Samson: You were at a team dinner with the Spurs when you played for the Spurs. Everyone was eating. You didn't order anything. Instead, you brought 12 apples to the table, red apples. You sat there with a knife and fork and ate each apple and said "it's apple time, apple time." Who came up with that story?
--:-- [Audio clip: "Right now that is not true. No, I do have an apple tree but I didn't pick my apples and bring them to dinner."]
--:-- David Samson: Alright, you know what was great about that fake story? Yes, I love it. It wasn't like Kawhi Leonard went out on a bender. No one would believe that. But the fact that the story is so ridiculous and yet everyone was like, yeah, I could actually see Kawhi Leonard being the type of guy who brings 12 apples to dinner, carves them up and eats them and just mumbles to himself, "apple time, apple time."
--:-- Pablo Torre: "Apple time, apple time" was also plausible in this way because I think for people around the league, there was just another thing. David, stop turning over those papers.
--:-- David Samson: It's the longest I've gone with self-control. Like, let's go. I've been trying to read backwards.
--:-- Pablo Torre: We're walking you up to it because the other thing about Kawhi Leonard is not merely his privacy, which I demand on behalf of those papers, but also that ever since he was a kid in Moreno Valley, California, I mean, he's been famously frugal.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Yes.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So Sports Illustrated once reported this story about how Wingstop, as part of an endorsement deal, had given Kawhi these coupons for free wings. But one day in 2015, Kawhi, quote, "panicked" when he lost his coupons and his camp informed Wingstop, which, quote, "generously replenished his supply." This dude was making, what, $90 million plus?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: He was driving the same car, I think, from college for quite a while. I'm sure it's changed now, but there was deep into— It was called "Gas Guzzler," he nicknamed that.
--:-- David Samson: Is this a Warren Buffett situation? Because I like when players are, because I've seen so many bankrupt players in my time. So I view this as a positive for Kawhi. Sure. So I'm not going to criticize frugality.
--:-- Pablo Torre: It's not to be critical, but this is just to illustrate. This is the kind of guy we're dealing with. So we're not here to critique the 1997 Chevy Tahoe Amin was alluding to, or the Wingstop coupon that he demands. Because on the Wingstop thing, this is what he told Serge Ibaka, who was his teammate at the time with the Raptors, back in 2019.
--:-- [Audio clip: "You like Wingstop? I heard it. What kind of Wingstop you like? I used to. I don't like Wingstop no more. You used to since when? About two years ago. Why? Not endorsed no more. So you're a businessman, huh? Yeah, business."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: Again, so far, very positive. So the biggest power move, of course, that Kawhi Leonard pulled was later that summer. That was the summer of 2019. He and Serge Ibaka, they win the NBA title with the Raptors, and the courtship of prime Kawhi Leonard, the most sought-after free agent in professional basketball, begins. Literally the entire NBA is watching and waiting, trying to figure out what Kawhi is going to do next.
--:-- [Audio clip: "Kawhi Leonard has made his decision and it is the LA Clippers."]
--:-- [Audio clip: "A big reason why this happened was when Leonard pushed Paul George to find a way to get to the Clippers. They go out and get Paul George, and now you have these two elite bookend forwards to play together, but they paid a steep price. The Thunder will get Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Danilo Gallinari. OKC also gets four unprotected first-round picks, a protected first-rounder, and two pick swaps."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: Whatever happened to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander?
--:-- David Samson: I think he became an MVP and changed his name.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So it is the first thing we should acknowledge, which is that back in 2019, nobody predicted that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander would win MVP and finals MVP and a title for the Thunder this year in 2025. And also, by the way, the Clippers losing SGA, all those picks, getting Kawhi and Paul George, that basically reshaped the modern NBA. But the second thing, which is related to that, is that according to multiple NBA executives that I interviewed, lots of not just fans, but executives were shocked, even suspicious, eyebrows fully raised, at how the once lowly Clippers had convinced Kawhi to choose them. Especially over the Lakers, right? They were the most furious about all of this. All of the rumors, the conspiracies. I mean, you may recall that they centered around a mysterious relative who served as Kawhi Leonard's power broker.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Uncle Dennis.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Uncle Dennis.
--:-- [Audio clip: "Rental Brown, the G League MVP, last season averaging 19 points."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: He was so important that Spurs fans, bitter Spurs fans, had been chanting his name at Kawhi Leonard. And so in comes Uncle Dennis Robertson, who, and this is now 2019, according to The Athletic, was the center of these complaints by NBA teams about how the Clippers landed Kawhi Leonard. And they were so numerous, let's recall, that Adam Silver, the commissioner of the league, finally agreed to investigate them. And the main focus was, in fact, whether Uncle Dennis had requested improper benefits from NBA teams in exchange for Kawhi Leonard, these secret sweeteners. And the most notable sweetener, as sources told Sam Amick of The Athletic, it was, quote, "a guaranteed amount of off-court endorsement money that they could expect if Kawhi Leonard played for their team." End quote. And this, David, is a serious violation of NBA rules.
--:-- David Samson: Why? Because there's a salary cap for a reason that's been collectively bargained. And what you have to do for a level playing field is you cannot have any circumvention of that cap. So you're not allowed to give players anything. It all counts. So you can't give them plane tickets. You can't pay the college education of their brothers, sisters, friends. You can't give them cars. You can offer in the contract that's available for public use, like a suite on the road, but they have to pay or you can appreciate it comes out. The tickets is probably the easiest example for people to understand. If you've seen NBA players with family members who sit courtside, for instance, let's say Ja Morant and his father, the team is not offering that for free to Ja Morant. He is paying face value on those tickets for his father every game.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And just sort of like the philosophy behind the salary cap for people who just aren't familiar with it. This is important because it does what?
--:-- David Samson: It stops the richest owner in the world from being able to do things that the poorest of the rich owners can't do. So there are certain owners, if think about this, if you're an owner who makes private planes for a living and you just give a private plane to your player just for S's and G's, that's something that a guy who buys a team who runs a corner family drugstore wouldn't be able to do.
--:-- Pablo Torre: This is now where we can connect some of the dots. Officially. So Kawhi was only allowed to sign a three-year, $103 million max contract, which he did, of course. But the big alleged conspiracy, the one that got everybody's eyebrows raised, if you're an executive across the NBA, was that cost-conscious, frugal Kawhi Leonard and his uncle Dennis had apparently found the perfect franchise with an ideal owner who would be happy to give them the illicit sweeteners they demanded, and an owner who, as Amin described, just happened to be the richest sports owner in the world with a current net worth of $175 billion, making him, yes, the sixth richest person in the world, who also happened to be the hyper-competitive former CEO of Microsoft, which also meant that he was still kind of just getting used to the socialist cap that David described that limited his NBA spending power. And Steve Ballmer himself happened to explain all of this to the Acquired podcast in June of this year.
--:-- [Audio clip of Steve Ballmer: "We do have a union. That's very different. What that means in terms of the complexity through the collective bargaining agreement, it also covers things like what's max salary, what trades can you make, all that. Very different. You really are business partners with your competitors. That's different. I mean, you actually get together and talk to them. I never did that when I was at Microsoft."]
--:-- Pablo Torre: And I want to clarify, in fairness to Steve Ballmer, that no evidence of illicit payment to Kawhi Leonard was ever found, apparently, right? Kawhi re-upped with the Clippers in August of 2021, before the season, then again last year, another extension. And The Athletic ultimately reported about the NBA's investigation, quote, "While sources with knowledge of the investigation said no evidence was found, indicating that the Clippers had granted any of the lavish requests, the underlying message coming from Commissioner Adam Silver remains. He sees salary cap circumvention as a cardinal sin in the NBA and will always keep a watchful eye on that front. If any relevant evidence of improper benefits surfaces in the future, the league will reopen the investigation and pursue the charges yet again. The threat of suspension for executives was openly discussed, as was the potential for a loss of draft picks or even the voiding of player contracts as the most extreme of measures." End quote.
--:-- This is where I should also say that Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic, which means that the views, research, and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.
--:-- So this is where I just got to set the stage here because so far we've been telling two parallel stories, much like two parallel towers of papers. And what we know is that NBA executives were suspicious of how Steve Ballmer's Clippers landed the most valuable free agent on the market, Kawhi Leonard, that the NBA did not find that Ballmer got Kawhi by sweetening their offer. But also that in March 2025, this celebrity-endorsed, multi-billion-dollar, allegedly fraudulent tree brokerage named Aspiration, which promises to clear your conscience and your emissions, they file for bankruptcy. And this is where the clue is.
--:-- So, David, if you will now finally flip over that paper.
--:-- David Samson: [Laughs]
--:-- Pablo Torre: He was groping it. He was groping that paper while you were talking. What David's looking at with his glasses on is a bankruptcy filing, and there's a list of creditors, the entities to which Aspiration and all of their alleged fraudulence still owes the most money. And what I noticed is what David is noticing right now, which is that on that list of creditors, up near the top, above the Boston Red Sox, is an LLC. A tiny little company that Aspiration owes $7 million. And that LLC's name, David, is what?
--:-- David Samson: A KL2 Aspire LLC.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What I did next was pull the publicly accessible paperwork that KL2 Aspire LLC filed with California's Secretary of State, which happens to be the first document in front of you, I mean.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Okay.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And what does it list there under manager or member name?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Kawhi Leonard.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Whose NBA jersey number, just to connect all of the dots here, happens to be what?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Number two.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So then the question is, the "Aspire" part of KL2 Aspire LLC, right? Because, okay, he's getting all his money, millions of dollars. What I started doing was scour the internet for any mentions of Aspiration. Any appearances, tweets, quotes, Instagram posts, anything by Kawhi Leonard endorsing Aspiration. And this was hard to find, which also might seem weird, right? Because every other celebrity Aspiration gave money to was well known. There was Drake offering a statement to Rolling Stone. There was Doc Rivers, Kawhi's own head coach. Robert Downey Jr. was cutting his commercial. That was the whole point of paying the A-list Avengers. But the grand total number of times that I found Kawhi Leonard ever publicly referencing Aspiration was this.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Ultimately, zero.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Zero. Zero times Kawhi Leonard mentioned Aspiration. And so what I started doing was reaching out to dozens of former Aspiration employees. And I was looking for any information about KL2 Aspire LLC. And what happened was a grand total of seven of them ultimately agreed to interviews, which is also how I have exclusively obtained the next sheaf of papers in front of you both to turn over. David, please go first. Can you please read what this signed and executed document says?
--:-- David Samson: "This endorsement agreement is effective as of April 1, 2022, the effective date between KL2 Aspire LLC and Aspiration Partners with a principal place of business in Marina Del Rey, California. Whereas Kawhi Leonard, Leonard, is a professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association, NBA, currently on the roster of the Los Angeles Clippers team. Whereas company desires that KL2 cause Leonard to provide the services of, to promote, and market company as more particularly set forth herein. In consideration of the rights and benefits granted to company hereunder, the company will pay KL2, which is Kawhi, $28 million in cash during the term of this agreement. Company will pay KL2 $7 million each year of the term."
--:-- Pablo Torre: That is Kawhi Leonard's autograph, right next to Andre Czerny, the CEO's autograph. Youngest speechwriter in White House history, next to the Clippers franchise player. But as for the listed address, Amin, for where any and all legal notices for Kawhi Leonard will be sent, what does that say there?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: KL2 Aspire LLC, care of Dennis Robertson.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Robertson. And Uncle Dennis is also listed elsewhere in this contract, by the way, as his nephew's designated representative. And so this is where I just need to mention that on account of the multiple ongoing federal investigations into Aspiration, all the former employees I talked to were very afraid, understandably, to go on tape. But eventually, toward the end of my investigation, I convinced one very important person who worked in the finance department of Aspiration to go on tape, provided we could modulate their voice.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: I love that. I've always wanted to do that.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Do you remember the first time that you discovered Kawhi Leonard's endorsement agreement with Aspiration?
--:-- Former Aspiration Employee [voice modulated]: Oh, it was within the first 30 days of my employment with the company. And I didn't so much as discover it as I was told about it.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What was your reaction? What were you told?
--:-- Former Aspiration Employee [voice modulated]: My reaction was, "What the f***?"
--:-- Former Aspiration Employee [voice modulated]: And I was told, like, oh, these are the major contracts and the major players you really need to be aware of. And we went through a litany of really, really top-tier name contracts. And then, oh, by the way, we also have a marketing deal with Kawhi Leonard. A $28 million organic marketing sponsorship deal with Kawhi. And that if I had any questions about it, essentially don't, because it was to circumvent the salary cap, LOL. There was lots of LOL when things were shared.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Among the endorsement agreements that these famous people, these celebrities, were signing with Aspiration, where did the size of Kawhi Leonard's agreement — the $28 million over four years — where did that rank?
--:-- Former Aspiration Employee [voice modulated]: The single largest sponsorship deal that Aspiration ever made. It completely eclipsed every other agreement. Completely eclipsed it. So every other celebrity endorsement combined would not have met even a quarter of Kawhi Leonard's endorsement. So that's including Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake and Robert Downey Jr. and Cindy Crawford and everybody else. Kaia Gerber, Patty Gonia, who's a famous environmentally friendly drag queen. God bless her.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Did you ever see proof of Kawhi Leonard marketing or endorsing Aspiration in any way?
--:-- Former Aspiration Employee [voice modulated]: Never. Not once. The single largest payment to an individual for marketing that Aspiration ever made has completely evaded all press. It's honestly incredible. And it was a very strong pain point for our marketing team. And honestly, altruistically, their job is to get Aspiration's name out there. They don't understand why the largest part of their budget that they've actually blown is not delivering.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I should say that we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out attempted to reach out to Kawhi Leonard through the Clippers, through his agent, and through his uncle Dennis, of course, with interview requests followed by detailed questions. But Kawhi's personal team did not respond before our deadline. The Clippers, however, provided a statement on behalf of the organization and owner Steve Ballmer which reads in part, quote, "Neither Mr. Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to Aspiration. Any contrary assertion is provably false." End quote.
--:-- What's even crazier is that as you comb through it, as you were just attempting to do, what becomes clear is that this is how this $28 million deal — this thing that he never did anything for — was designed. I'm no expert, but the language seems to indicate that he actually, contractually, didn't have to do anything. Nothing. He didn't have to do anything. There was a clause for an out in every single KPI. So they weren't actually key performance indicators. KPIs, they were: if you feel as though this is something that doesn't align with you, or it's too big of an ask, or maybe you don't want to post on social media, maybe you don't want to wear our gear, just let us know. Or you don't have to let us know. You just don't have to do it.
--:-- There's Section 3.2, Obligations of KL2. That is the heading. Section 3.2, part 4: "KL2 may decline to proceed with any action desired by the company under Section 3.2" — which is the whole section where everything is, all the stuff that he would have to do — "if Leonard believes that such proposed actions are not consistent with his beliefs." And then part five, right after that: "KL2 shall have the exclusive right to control and approve all content and distribution for commercial, non-commercial, or lawful purpose, bearing the athlete endorsements or approved Leonard IP." And no one in Aspiration had this veto power outside of Kawhi Leonard.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Which is to say that when you look at this, your examination of this indicates that the power dynamic is actually reversed here.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Exactly. The client, Kawhi Leonard, seems to be dictating the terms to the company, Aspiration.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Correct.
--:-- Pablo Torre: In other words, Kawhi Leonard got from Aspiration a $28 million no-show job.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Yeah, it's amazing. I'm honestly so jealous. So jealous. I mean, he's got the dream. Like, it's within my beliefs to be paid $28 million and do absolutely f*** all as well. It's incredible.
--:-- David Samson: It's literally written so he can never be in breach. If it's not consistent with his beliefs, David, he doesn't have to do it. I'm sweating a little bit because I want to understand exactly what the deliverables were and to see whether or not there's opportunity for him to actually get the $28 million without ever, ever allowing them to do anything with his name associated.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Allow me to hand you some paper.
--:-- David Samson: It's so many trees.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yeah. Well, one tree. He said it was one tree. I don't believe it.
--:-- David Samson: There's the full endorsement agreement. You may look right there.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Thank you.
--:-- David Samson: So I've done a lot of these.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, that's why you're here. David Samson, architect of many sponsorship endorsement agreements, is now looking through with his little glasses.
--:-- David Samson: So here's something he has to do. "If requested by the company, KL2 shall cause Leonard to be available to sign 50 items." Jesus Christ. The signing deals we do, it's like 1,500 items. And it's not $7 million. "If requested." 50. "If requested, it shall cause KL2" — meaning Kawhi — "shall cause Kawhi to be available and to work with team or Leonard's content creators to provide a minimum of one photo per month to Aspiration for their usage during the NBA season."
--:-- Pablo Torre: What's one photo per month mean?
--:-- David Samson: Well, the point is he did zero photos per month.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Wait, there's more. "If requested."
--:-- David Samson: Okay. This is better. He has to be available, Kawhi does, for $28 million, to participate in five organic comments, which could be a like or a retweet.
--:-- Pablo Torre: You may wonder how many likes and retweets did he give.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Is it zero?
--:-- Pablo Torre: Of course it's zero!
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Oh my God! He did f***ing nothing! He literally did nothing. As far as we can tell.
--:-- Pablo Torre: As far as we can tell. And my source has confirmed. As well as the other six sources I spoke to have confirmed. Did nothing, and yet not in breach of contract. That's the amazing part. The dream, right?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: That's like, I did nothing wrong.
--:-- David Samson: Basically, according to this contract, he does have to do something that's major here. What is that? "Leonard has to be available and participate with company to create an annual program in support of the company's reforestation program with a tie to calculating Leonard's carbon footprint given his annual schedule, events, and travel."
--:-- Pablo Torre: Boy, I'd love to see that.
--:-- David Samson: Well, it's hard because it didn't happen.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I thought you were going to say that was the one thing he did do.
--:-- David Samson: As David continues to comb through this. Well, I'm also looking at the definitions because I want to make sure here.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: I knew that he would. He's like a pig in s*** right now. I mean, this wallowing. You give me a secret contract that I can pick apart?
--:-- David Samson: What we heard just before about that any deliverable — it's that "such proposed actions are not consistent with his beliefs." He doesn't have to do it. And I'm looking in the defined terms, assuming these are all the defined terms. I'm looking for "beliefs." It is not defined. So therefore, there is no actual anything in this contract. Now, I've been reading it only for a couple of minutes. This is in real time. But if you've got a qualifier there which allows you to get out of any of your obligations with something as ephemeral as "not consistent with his beliefs" without a definition — because "beliefs" is a small b. I was looking for "Beliefs" with a big B, which would make it a defined term, where you have to say, "Hey, I don't believe in working on Saturdays," or "I don't believe in supporting pig meat because I'm a vegan." So you can have that in contracts — that you will not endorse something that goes against your beliefs. But it's a small b, and there's no defined term.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: He might small-b believe in not doing anything.
--:-- David Samson: Yeah. It's against my beliefs to do this, David.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I just, I'm trying to come to grips with two here. And I'm sorry, but this is a major provision in the contract that I'm not used to seeing. It's called "Termination." When would an agreement be terminated? So when can the company say, "You know what, we're not paying you?" And normally there would be provisions for termination if you're a felon, if you're convicted of a felony, sometimes if you're just arrested for a felony. If you do anything for disparagement, if you bring bad juju upon the company, it can trigger a termination. This termination — and it's a termination for cause — this is in the Aspiration endorsement deal. This is in his $28 million endorsement deal. Termination for cause: "If Leonard is no longer an employee of the team for any reason." And the team, capital T, is defined as the Clippers.
--:-- David Samson: Yes. So an endorsement deal that a company does with a player is usually — you don't always get the rights to their marks. Right. So it's like blank uniforms. Yep. And so it doesn't matter whether the player is playing for the Clippers or not. But in this agreement, it's a termination for cause if he's not an employee of the team. "For avoidance of doubt," which is what you say in a contract — we want to make sure nobody screws it up — "If Leonard is still being paid by the capital T team, but is a member of another NBA organization or has retired, either of those instances are a triggering event for termination by the company."
--:-- Pablo Torre: So an example of that is if Kawhi Leonard got bought out by the Clippers and then ends up signing with the Knicks. Technically, the Clippers are still paying him the remaining amount, but he is an employee of the New York Knicks now. And what that contract is saying, very clearly, very bluntly — we're just going to tackle this right now in writing — if that happens, it triggers a termination clause.
--:-- David Samson: I love that David just found that.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I can't believe that Kawhi Leonard, that anyone would ask for that or agree to it if it were not. It seems to be, perhaps, one of the things in this otherwise very laissez-faire approach to what you've got to do that the Clippers found, you might presume, quite important. Just be on the Clippers.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Let's put this as bluntly as possible. So, to be clear, Kawhi can not post anything, can never like or retweet anything, can not sign the balls, right? Cannot do the photo op. The reforestation program. Not show up for any events. But? But his ass better be a Clipper throughout all of that. That's the thing that would jeopardize the $28 million.
--:-- David Samson: I had to reread it before bringing it up to you too because it can't be. But it is. 2.10 B. It is signed and executed under those terms.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And so what all this led me to do is get back to sports, right? Because what I was curious about was, okay, so we have all these documents about the $28 million for the no-show job. I want to put that against the timeline of his contract extensions with the Clippers. Because Kawhi Leonard signed his first extension in August 2021, before that season. The month after that, it turns out, Steve Ballmer — this is September — broke ground on the Intuit Dome. Now, this is, David, the most expensive NBA arena ever constructed, his grand creation. And though Kawhi was still out recovering — you might remember the right knee injury?
--:-- Pablo Torre: He did show up for that. [Audio clip plays: "10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1."] That wasn't actual digging for the stadium?
--:-- David Samson: It's totally ridiculous. [Audio clip: "All right, guys, get to work."] You bring in a bunch of dirt and you just get shovels.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, that's not the actual ground?
--:-- David Samson: No, it's not even on the ground. Kawhi looks like he's coming back from the gym. It's the combination that always bothers me. Everyone else is wearing slacks and suits and all that stuff. And Kawhi just popped in hoodie and shorts.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But speaking of digging, I want to go back to the coverage of the extension that Kawhi signed just weeks before that scene. Right? Because before those shovels went into the ground, you may recall that he signs this four-year, $176.3 million extension. And you may recall also that something didn't quite add up at the time. According to The Ringer — I mean, you may turn over the next page and read the highlighted passage. "That Kawhi Leonard officially returned to the Clippers on Thursday came as no surprise. What has provoked some head-scratching, though, is the structure of the contract. He decided to ink — how perfectly Kawhi — even when there's no mystery, there's a little bit of mystery." And this was because Kawhi Leonard, as you continue to read through this, essentially did the Clippers what appears to be a favor. So here we have this notably frugal superstar — who is complain-about-the-Wingstop-coupons level frugal — and he did not do what everyone expected him to do, given that, which was sign the shortest or the longest possible deal in order to maximize his earnings. Instead, to the surprise of many NBA insiders, Kawhi Leonard very helpfully opted for a middle ground.
--:-- And I just want to acknowledge here that the timing of Kawhi's extension from 2021 does not align super neatly with the paperwork on his $28 million Aspiration endorsement deal, David, because that took effect when again?
--:-- David Samson: When did it say that on that? Right in the start. April 1 of 2022.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But now, Amin, what I would like you to do is turn over the page after that. So that's the first type of document you may recall that you ever looked at. This is the original registration for KL2 Aspire LLC that got filed with the state of California, establishing an LLC whose name indicates that it was entirely created to take money from Aspiration. It says f***ing "Aspire" in the title. Look at the top of that piece of paper under "File Date." November 22nd, 2021. We're now right there at the end of the summer, beginning of the fall, the beginning of that season, when he signs the extension, when the ground is broken. And this LLC, KL2 Aspire LLC, gets registered with the state of California. And now we're getting, guys, now we're getting to the thing we have not yet established about the fall of 2021 when it comes to the once unsolvable question of salary cap circumvention in the NBA, which is the direct financial relationship between Aspiration on the one hand and Steve Ballmer and his Clippers on the other. And that is after the break.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So I need to start this section by acknowledging that I have interviewed Steve Ballmer before. So Steve Ballmer, like Andre Czerny, like Joe Sandberg, and like me, went to Harvard. Harvard. At Sports Illustrated, this was in 2010, I wrote a magazine feature about then-Harvard senior Jeremy Lin and our alma mater's revitalized basketball program, and I called Microsoft then-CEO Steve Ballmer up. And he was happy to talk. He was very generous with his time. He talked about how he loved basketball, and he loved it so much that he kept stats for the team when it was horrible and he was an undergrad back in the 70s. He was like charting rebounds and assists. And since then, as you may know, Steve Ballmer has been hailed as arguably "the very best investor of the last 20 years," end quote. But the people who know Steve Ballmer, what they say is that there is no product Steve Ballmer cares about more, down to the tiniest little detail, than the NBA team he purchased from noted racist Donald Sterling back in 2014.
--:-- This was evidenced, I mean, by the arena that Ballmer admirably spent billions of his own money designing in his own image. [Audio clip of Steve Ballmer plays:] "I love Intuit Dome. Since we talked a lot about products and I've been involved in — I'll say the visioning — and I call myself a visionary — but what should this product look like? And particularly those, you know, a number of them, both Windows, but also certainly on the backend products. Backend meaning they're not customer visible. But I would say Intuit Dome's probably the product for which I had the clearest vision I've ever had. I knew what I wanted. It evolved some because we went and looked at a bunch of other arenas, but I had a point of view. I know what user I wanted to make happy. I wanted to make Intuit Dome the best place for the hardcore basketball fan."
--:-- Pablo Torre: And David, as a guy who designed a building, an arena before, you know what that means.
--:-- David Samson: Toilets!
--:-- Pablo Torre: 1,160 toilets and urinals. Three times the NBA average number of toilets and urinals. "We do not want people waiting in line. We want them to get back to their damn seats." They have sensors in the seats that measure how loud each section is. And so routinely they'll come up and say, "This was the loudest section in that last segment of play. Everyone gets free t-shirts or free stuff." The level of microscopic detail that Steve Ballmer cared about — the sensors, the toilets, everything — it all is to say that when it came to picking the company whose patch would get stitched onto every Clippers jersey and whose signage would adorn the back of every courtside seat, Steve Ballmer handpicked Aspiration to become the first founding partner of the Intuit Dome, the first arena to become 100% carbon neutral from day one, the "most sustainable arena in the world," end quote.
--:-- And the Clippers announced this at Media Day in September 2021 with Steve Ballmer sitting right next to noted Clippers and Martin Luther King fan, Joe Sandberg. [Audio clip of Joe Sandberg plays:] "There are a few people in the business world and in the sports world that I admire as much as Steve Ballmer. This is a true visionary and an original thinker. And those are rare and few and far between in this day and age. But it's visionaries and original thinkers who change the course of history. And we're partnered with Steve and the Clippers to change the course of Los Angeles sports history and all global sports history, which is turning sports into a tool to fight the climate crisis. So Aspiration, in partnership with the Clippers, will be delivering tools to all Clippers fans to make their experience watching the Clippers carbon neutral and even carbon negative, so that your choice of being a Clippers fan isn't just a choice of who you root for, but it's an expression of what you believe."
--:-- Pablo Torre: Once again, "beliefs" are quite instrumental here. As proclaimed in a headline on NBA.com, "LA Clippers and Aspiration set a new standard for social responsibility in sports." Or as CNBC put it, David, "LA Clippers signed $300 million-plus arena sponsorship deal with Green Bank Aspiration." Just listen to Steve Ballmer himself while sitting next to Joe Sandberg at media day. [Audio clip of Steve Ballmer plays:] "The piece de resistance as we went through this is when we had a chance to really sit down and meet the folks from Aspiration. To have our first founding partner be a company that focuses in on providing services to consumers and businesses to reduce or even go negative on their own carbon footprints was a great thing."
--:-- Pablo Torre: Aspiration agreed to pay the Clippers that staggering amount, more than $300 million, over 23 years. Now, I assume you don't have that agreement, although you've got 4,000 pages and 25,000 trees. That might be in there, honestly. And I keep turning things over. Again, David, let's put this in perspective. That's a naming rights deal. That's a naming rights deal, but usually what do you get in a naming rights deal?
--:-- David Samson: The name.
--:-- Pablo Torre: The name. If they have founding partners, you get special places in your ballpark, in your arena, where they're called pillar sponsors.
--:-- David Samson: Oh, but they got the patch. They were going to get the patch.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Look at the back of the courtside seat behind another Marvel superhero, Simu Liu. Aspiration's right there. And this is where I just got to point out that the tower of documents we have been sort of like gazing at over here — it's actually different from the documents we have already examined. These 3,445 unpublished documents that I've obtained from inside of Aspiration — they range from bank statements to signed contracts to fancy pitch decks to internal emails. And what they do is they speak to Steve Ballmer's personal influence and awareness of the inner workings of this green bank that is now under federal investigation for an allegedly massive fraud.
--:-- So, David, the next sheet of paper you can turn over is an internal email about partnership opportunities in sports and entertainment sent by Joe Sandberg to his fellow co-founder, Andre Czerny, and another Aspiration executive on October 29th, 2021. "Ballmer himself is enthusiastic to help and will personally be a reference and advocate where we ask him. So please keep that front of mind." And then, I mean, if you will, there is an email on November 1st, 2021 from Steve Ballmer, personally connecting the CEO of Intuit with Andre and Joe. "Since Intuit and Aspiration already have a business relationship and all of us share a passion for the clips and our Intuit Dome project, I thought it might be fun for the four of us to take in a game together sometime soon." To which Joe Sandberg replies, that same day, David?
--:-- David Samson: This is Steve Ballmer from Joe Sandberg.
--:-- Pablo Torre: "Steve, thank you and you're right. Looking forward to our spending time together. Andre and I admire Intuit's commitment to sustainability and your smart partnership with the Clippers! Exclamation point. Go Clippers! Exclamation point." Less than a month after that exchange. Just three months after the signing of the extension. Kawhi Leonard and Uncle Dennis register KL2 Aspire LLC. Now, less than a month after that, December 2021, it was announced that Steve Ballmer, who is again hailed as the very best investor of the last 20 years, joined Oaktree Capital Management in investing a total of $315 million into Aspiration, which was subsequently valued at $2.3 billion.
--:-- So this is how my source characterized the mood around the company at the time. "Aspiration was at a great place at that time. Finance is like, listen, let's go have a pizza party every day. It was looking great. But if you peel back the layers of the onion a little bit more, you see that that money was spent quite quickly." So according to contracts and emails that I obtained, $50 million — 50 million of this money — came from Ballmer's personal LLC. And that LLC, by the way, is named Polpat.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Not Pol Pot, the brutal Cambodian dictator.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But Polpat. How dare you make that mistake? And according to all seven former Aspiration employees I spoke to, that enormous infusion of money from Steve Ballmer — $50 million — is what allowed the allegedly fraudulent Green Bank to quite eagerly pay Kawhi Leonard $28 million for an alleged no-show job.
--:-- The source says in there that the money was spent very quickly. Some might say the money was spent before he even got there because it was just a clearinghouse. Better not say that. Some would say. Because if you're saying that, then an investigation has to follow. And if there is any thread where money is invested into Aspiration and then is out the door to Kawhi, by the transitive property of flow of funds, it went right from Ballmer to Leonard.
--:-- The term that my sources call this arrangement — which again, neither Aspiration, nor the Clippers, nor Kawhi Leonard ever announced, despite the tonnage of announcements that they were making all the time — was "sweetener." And this is a term that originates from the next email in front of you, Amin, sent by Joe Sandberg amid a much longer argument with one of his business partners. Because a very defensive Sandberg was trying to preempt the idea that Ballmer, not unlike Kawhi with the Clippers, embraced Aspiration for any other alleged reason. So this is an email to quite a few people. There's a lot of people on the CC line, but the relevant portion: "What you're implying is that Ballmer's investment was a sweetener, an impure when the math above pretty blatantly contradicts your implication. In conclusion, it really pisses me off."
--:-- So that is Joe Sandberg, who would be arrested by the federal government. And I took all of this, all that stuff in that email, to my source. Joe is the one who brings up a "sweetener," and Joe is the one who brings up the impurity of the contract. The way it reads is that Joe Sandberg was almost waiting for someone at some point to accuse him of something. He is the first person to bring it to the conversation in writing, and not offline either.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: So in an attempt to cover his tracks, he actually opens up the door to the conversation in question.
--:-- Pablo Torre: It does seem very clear that the people inside of Aspiration loved to email each other.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Yeah. That's a stupid f***ing idiot. Quite frankly. Yeah, let's put it in writing. Great idea.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I should say that we reached out to Joe Sandberg, who declined to comment through an attorney. But the thing about the bet that Steve Ballmer made on Aspiration — the problem came in 2022. So this is when the wheels of Aspiration began to fall off. So they'd acquired all these celebrity endorsements, right? But not enough actual business. That's unfortunately the story of this company. And in October 2022, Aspiration began advertising — even in a pitch deck for investors that I obtained — that it had a new customer to help compensate for the lack of business. The new customer was Qatar. The country. Qatar.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: It's always a good way to sit that out.
--:-- Pablo Torre: According to this pitch deck, Qatar had hired Aspiration to zero out the carbon footprint of the 2022 World Cup.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Yes, of course.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Of course. According to my seven sources, this was not true. So the point being that they were flailing, the cash was draining out, on the road to bankruptcy. And Aspiration, despite all of this, had a top priority in October 2022 internally, per my seven sources. And that was incredibly clear. There were weekly meetings about who was going to get paid what and when. And during those weekly meetings, Kawhi Leonard's contract was always set to be paid. Even in a time of total financial hardship for the company, why?
--:-- There were multiple reasons we were given. One being that Kawhi's uncle was calling.
--:-- David Samson: Wait, wait, this is Uncle Dennis.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Uncle Dennis. Uncle Dennis was calling and Uncle Dennis demanded payment. It was priority one. Like, it was something that had to be done. And it was crucial to our relationships with Ballmer and the Clippers.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: He's calling about his coupons.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Uncle Dennis was like, "Where's the Wingstop?"
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, this ain't coupons. Obviously, the stakes are much, much higher. But it's the same general principle: this is a guy who wouldn't let coupons go. He damn sure ain't gonna let $7 million go.
--:-- David Samson: Bingo.
--:-- Pablo Torre: We tried to ask Uncle Dennis himself about this via email and phone. We did not hear back before our deadline. Of course, we did request an interview with Steve Ballmer. We sent him and his people detailed questions about all of this. And we received this statement from the Clippers on behalf of Ballmer and the team, which reads in full: "Neither Mr. Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to Aspiration. Any contrary assertion is provably false. The team ended its relationship with Aspiration years ago during the 2022-23 season when Aspiration defaulted on its obligations. Neither the Clippers nor Mr. Ballmer was aware of any improper activity by Aspiration or its co-founder until after the government instituted its investigation. The team and Mr. Ballmer stand ready to assist law enforcement in any way they can."
--:-- For what it's worth, I should also say that Aspiration had given a statement last year that the company "has delivered carbon credits to the Clippers over the past several years and based on ongoing obligations will continue to source and deliver credits annually through the last delivery in 2043. We take our work in the climate action category seriously."
--:-- So, Amin, by the way, here we have something that the NBA has been searching for. If I'm the league and I'm watching this episode and I'm saying, wait — and they've got the paperwork to back it up — this feels like a paper trail that would lead you to believe that the Clippers, through Aspiration, managed to give extra compensation above and beyond what the collective bargaining agreement would allow. It's at least a re-opener.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Yeah. With what Adam Silver said.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Well, again, let's quote it again, David. According to The Athletic, he sees salary cap circumvention as a cardinal sin in the NBA and will always keep a watchful eye on that front. If any relevant evidence of improper benefits surfaces in the future, the league will reopen the investigation and pursue the charges yet again. The threat of suspension for executives was openly discussed, as was the potential for a loss of draft picks or even the voiding of player contracts as the most extreme of measures.
--:-- The dynamics here also, just to spell it out — this is not just any owner, David. The thing we have to think about is the power that Ballmer has within the NBA. He's actually been very good for the league. He brings credibility to the league.
--:-- David Samson: He replaced Donald Sterling.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Well, right. Anybody could have replaced him and looked better. But he's now sitting courtside with Barack Obama. He's the richest owner in all of sports. That's what it is. So it's not an Adam Silver issue with Steve Ballmer. My biggest interesting point here is what other owners will take from this, because they can call on Adam Silver and say, "Hey, you've got to look into this because this is not right."
--:-- Now, it's not like Ballmer's won a bunch of championships. Has he even been to an NBA Finals since he bought the team?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Not at all. The Clippers have been to the conference finals once in team history, and that was the one that happened in 2021. That was the first time they'd ever made it out of the second round, going back to even Buffalo. So this is a team that is synonymous with abject failure.
--:-- Pablo Torre: That's not the part that other NBA owners, other NBA teams are envious about. What they're envious about is the massive amounts of money that they're able to throw around doing things like — because guess what, David? It's great that they built their arena from scratch, all out of pocket.
--:-- David Samson: Well, it's also like Steve Ballmer is the embodiment of why you would want a salary cap.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes. His spending is uncapped in all these other ways. But in this way, when it comes to the stars that are the — again, to pun intend this, the governor on the governor, which we call NBA owners now — it's: can he get the stars? And so here we have a clue in the bankruptcy filing that we followed that was hidden in plain sight, that got us to signed and executed paperwork, got us to Uncle Dennis, to the Aspiration logos that were supposed to be on the Clippers jerseys and all over the most sustainable arena in the world. And you get these private emails as a result showing Ballmer's personal connectedness to Aspiration. And when it comes to Kawhi, again, it's just funny when the absence of evidence becomes the evidence.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: No, that's... But that's what an endorsement deal would force us to reckon with, is that that feels like clearly something, even though it's definitionally nothing.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Nothing. He didn't have to do anything. The question to me, and this is the question that has been phrased by the seven sources inside of Aspiration that I talked to, the former employees: Was this money going on what was framed to me as a round trip? Was it starting one place, going all the way around, and surprise, it's doing what the guy who gave the money up wanted it to do to help his own interests?
--:-- And so this all raises this second related question, which is the more serious and vast question in the real world. Because this question is the one that the DOJ and the FBI and the CFTC and SEC, which are all, again, looking into this deeply broken company, are thinking. As my source put it, characterizing what their coworkers at Aspiration have lately been asking: Why is Steve Ballmer backing a huge historic raise for Aspiration? Like, why? Also, what was the main motivation for such a large raise? Because from inside Aspiration, we see the glitz and the glam of the celebrities that are posting. But from the finance side, accounts receivable were wild. The actual amount of money that needed to be coming in in order for our revenue to count towards real revenue was astronomical in comparison to what was actually being received. There's a lot of these one-off LOIs that existed — letters of intent. There's all these one-off deals. But this proof of concept from a business perspective, at least from the finance side, did not make sense to the point where forecasting felt like casting spells.
--:-- When you look at this list, how many of those — and these are all listed as deals, letters of intent, dated as of early 2021, before Ballmer had made his big investment — how many of those are fake?
--:-- Amin Elhassan: 80, 90 percent.
--:-- Pablo Torre: They just said that 80 to 90 percent of the LOIs were fake? As of early 2021, listed in the paperwork that Steve Ballmer could examine before he decided to invest or not all of the $50 million that he put in.
--:-- Yeah, this is a little bit more than cap circumvention. Given this special influence and the way Steve Ballmer was investing millions, but also getting paid millions via the Clipper sponsorship, with the promise of an even bigger payout, by the way, if Aspiration were a real company that went public successfully to the tune of that $2.3 billion valuation — what did Steve Ballmer, the very best investor of the last 20 years, know about everything else going on at Aspiration? And when did Steve Ballmer know it?
--:-- So Adam Silver on one hand, and then you've got the government on the other. The government doesn't really care about salary cap circumvention at all. NBA owners, the NBA, they care deeply. The federal government cares deeply if there's any sort of fraud perpetuated on a common investor. And that is a question that the NBA and the federal government would both have some curiosity about.
--:-- What this is, is a story that starts with a clue in a bankruptcy filing, gets us to a giant NBA scandal, and gets us back to the real world where some fucking shit is actually at stake.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So before I let everybody go here, I just need to take a quick sidebar to update you on a new development in the Department of Justice's investigation into Aspiration. A headline from just two weeks ago, August 21st, 2025: "Orange County man and Aspiration Partners co-founder agrees to plead guilty to $248 million scheme to defraud investors and lenders." That's two counts of wire fraud. But also, that's not all. That same day, the Securities and Exchange Commission published a parallel announcement about Joe Sandberg, the Orange County man in question, charging him for "raising more than $300 million from investors based on a fraudulent scheme to generate and mislead investors about fake revenues for environmental sustainability services."
--:-- Now, notably, neither Steve Ballmer, one of Aspiration's biggest and most influential individual investors, nor Andre Cherny, the other co-founder — the one who signed the no-show deal for Ballmer's most important player — was named in this round of DOJ or SEC court filings. Although, I should also mention that the SEC concludes its press release by noting that its investigation is ongoing. As is ours.
--:-- Which brings me to the last thing that I needed to tell David and Amin in studio. Because a bit earlier this summer, on July 4th, something kind of surreal happened while I continued to report this story. I happened to encounter the very person whose signature was right next to Kawhi Leonard's on that $28 million no-show endorsement deal in the pages of the New York Times. The splashy headline this time was: "Democrats lay groundwork for a Project 2029." If you will turn over your next piece of paper. The title is an unsubtle play on Project 2025, the independently produced right wing agenda that Mr. Trump spent much of last year's campaign distancing himself from and much of his first few months back in power executing. They plan to roll out an agenda over the next two years in quarterly installments through Mr. Cherny's publication, Democracy, a Journal of Ideas. The goal is to turn it into a book, just like Project 2025, and to rally leading Democratic presidential candidates behind those ideas during the 2028 primary season. Mr. Cherny, now the president of the journal he helped create, called the assemblage "the Avengers of Public Policy."
--:-- Mr. Cherny — as in Andre Cherny, co-founder and former CEO of Aspiration, whom I very much wanted to talk to — is back. He's in politics. And so last month, I tried to connect with him on LinkedIn, and he accepted.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Oh, no.
--:-- David Samson: Oh, my God.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I tried to start a conversation, inviting Andre to come on Pablo Torre Finds Out to discuss several things. The future of the Democratic Party, which he wants to lead. His experience working with Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers. The last time he talked to his co-founder, Joe Sandberg, his friend from Harvard. But I also wanted to ask: Andre, why did you resign as the CEO of Aspiration in October 2022? Right as all that was really hitting the fan. And relatedly, why he ran for U.S. Congress a second time in Arizona in 2024. Because what I wanted to find out was whether the company he had co-founded to fight climate change had even been planting, as Andre once proclaimed, "We're planting more trees than there are in Central Park every day."
--:-- But I could not. No chance. He didn't respond. And when we reached out to Andre Cherny with detailed questions, Andre did not respond.
--:-- But all this is to say that I did want to pose that question to somebody, this question about the trees. And so, I did.
--:-- [Transition to interview audio]
--:-- Interviewer: You would have to go in order to confirm that the trees were planted. Usually you have a project manager who's providing those real-time updates. You would have someone physically representing the project for Aspiration in that project. Whether it was daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, at a minimum, someone would be there to confirm.
--:-- Pablo Torre: How often did Aspiration visit the sites of the tree plantings?
--:-- Source: That's a great question. And to my knowledge, out of all of the projects that Aspiration undertook for carbon offsets, there was only one site visit during my tenure.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Wait, so just to be clear, I'm looking at a spreadsheet with a zillion projects having to do with forestation and tree plantings. And you're saying there was one site visit during your tenure there?
--:-- Source: Yeah, to one project.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What does that say to you?
--:-- Source: Either they're not concerned with whether or not the trees are being planted, or it's not real. Or both. The opportunity for malfeasance seems endless.
--:-- [End interview audio]
--:-- Pablo Torre: Well, it now returns us, Amin, to the question that we started this episode with, which was: how many trees had to die for me to put these hundreds, thousands of documents on this table in this studio? Because look, I should say, to be very clear, I believe the greenhouse gas problem is extremely real. I think that the Trump administration, David, is in fact helping destroy our planet. We should be concerned by all of this. We've in fact had multiple guests on the show before, like NASA scientist Dr. Kate Marvel and marine biologist Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, to address this concern — the same concern raised by Robert Downey Jr.
--:-- And back to that original question: what should we aspire to? I see him now, Iron Man. Aspiring. What I aspired to do, in honor of Iron Man — Aspiring Man — was do what Aspiration didn't do nearly enough. So we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out decided to hire an Avenger of our own, which you can see on YouTube right now, to help us zero out the carbon footprint of this ridiculous episode.
--:-- I mean, do you want to explain what you're seeing here?
--:-- David Samson: I see someone in an Iron Man suit — and I use that term very loosely — walking in Inglewood, California, right across the street from the Intuit Dome. And they have forcibly planted a tree in a pile of dirt right across the street from Intuit Dome.
--:-- Pablo Torre: We broke ground, I believe, is the proper term.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Yeah.
--:-- David Samson: There's a... what's that, a little shovel or whatever they call that thing.
--:-- Pablo Torre: A watering can.
--:-- David Samson: Watering. Wow, it's like a cartoon character's watering can. With a big thumbs up.
--:-- David Samson: That tree is dead on arrival.
--:-- Pablo Torre: How dare you? What this all means is that our Iron Man has now made as many site visits to actually ensure that a tree got planted as Aspiration itself made.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: And you printed all these documents for this episode and you think that one little dead tree...
--:-- Pablo Torre: One day. One day, Dave. Maybe not today. To make this carbon neutral.
--:-- David Samson: That's not just any tree. Is it a money tree?
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, man.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: I mean, what kind of tree do you think it is?
--:-- David Samson: I hope it's a money tree. I'll go to Inglewood right now.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I don't know. I mean, that tree is an apple tree.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Because when it comes to fighting climate change, there is no time, after all. Like Apple time. Apple time.
--:-- Amin Elhassan: Oh my god.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Ladies and gentlemen, Pablo Torre Finds Out. Look, you know what, man? Apple time. It will not be one apple for that tree. Not one.
--:-- This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. I'll talk to you next time.
--:-- David Samson: We'll see you next time.
--:-- [Outro music fades in]
--:-- [Ad break for Gardeneers]
