{"id":147960,"date":"2025-09-16T18:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T18:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/147960\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T18:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T18:12:10","slug":"i-was-personally-defrauded-by-aspiration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/147960\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I was personally defrauded\u2019 by Aspiration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">Clippers owner Steve Ballmer said he was \u201cpersonally defrauded\u201d in his dealings with the company Aspiration that have led to an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2025\/09\/10\/silver-tells-bog-to-withhold-all-judgement-against-ballmer-as-clippers-investigation-begins\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2025\/09\/10\/silver-tells-bog-to-withhold-all-judgement-against-ballmer-as-clippers-investigation-begins\/\">NBA investigation<\/a> surrounding the team and its star F Kawhi Leonard.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">Ballmer, speaking Tuesday at Sports Business Journal\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sbj-drive.com\/2025\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.sbj-drive.com\/2025\/\">AXS DRIVE<\/a> event in L.A., added that he welcomes the NBA investigation and believes, \u201cThis too shall pass.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">\u201cThis is not a fun thing to be through,\u201d Ballmer told SBJ Publisher &amp; Executive Editor Abe Madkour. \u201cI was personally defrauded through our interactions with the company and some of the staff. The fraud sort of extended broadly. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">\u201cThrough that, we had many relationships with the company &#8212; sponsor, activation, [it] was through carbon credits, all a bunch of complicated stuff. But the important thing is, our relationship with the company and our player\u2019s relationship with the company were independent, which is important under the rules of the NBA. I feel quite confident in that, that we abided [by] the rules. So, I welcome the investigation that the NBA is doing. It\u2019s a great way, from our perspective, to get the facts out there.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">NBA Commissioner Adam Silver <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2025\/09\/10\/silver-tells-bog-to-withhold-all-judgement-against-ballmer-as-clippers-investigation-begins\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2025\/09\/10\/silver-tells-bog-to-withhold-all-judgement-against-ballmer-as-clippers-investigation-begins\/\">urged owners to be patient with the league\u2019s investigation<\/a> during last week\u2019s Board of Governors meeting. Ballmer previously denied knowing that Aspiration reportedly provided Leonard with a multi-million-dollar no-show job, plus $20M in stock, shortly after he signed as a free agent four years ago.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">\u201cLet\u2019s all withhold judgment, let\u2019s do this investigation and then we will come back to you in terms of our findings,\u201d Silver said at a press conference after last week\u2019s BOG meeting.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">\u201cThere\u2019s nothing fun about being highlighted in this way,\u201d Ballmer said on stage Tuesday. \u201cIt\u2019s a whole lot more fun to be highlighted for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2025\/05\/22\/ballmer-praises-the-wall-at-intuit-dome-sba-win\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2025\/05\/22\/ballmer-praises-the-wall-at-intuit-dome-sba-win\/\">building a great arena<\/a>. But this too shall pass. And like I said, I feel very good about what we did, and we welcome the NBA taking a look at it and hopefully agreeing with us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Clippers owner Steve Ballmer said he was \u201cpersonally defrauded\u201d in his dealings with the company Aspiration that have&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-147960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}