donemilio21 wrote:TrueLAfan wrote:Part of the problem is that there's this incredibly mistaken idea that Super Wealthy People Are Super Smart About Money. And to be super nice about it, that’s not true a lot of the time. FTX is a perfect example. You don’t hear stories about Curry or Brady or other FTX investors getting blamed. They got ripped off. Their business people made bad decisions—which, rich or poor, people do.
I don’t know what Kawhi did. His Uncle was clearly looking for money and I think he or, by proxy, Kawhi may have taken a shady deal from a company that was ripping people off—even Steve Ballmer. It doesn’t excuse Kawhi and his team, but it makes their actions a whole lot less questionable. They didn’t know about this company
They weren't the only ones. Aspiration got over a quarter of a billion dollars in funding beyond Ballmer’s stake, and then more after that. Renren Chinese Media Conglomerate put in a huge amount. Leonardo DiCaprio is/was on the Board of Directors. David Bonderman, a founder and partner of TPG Capital, made a big investment. So did Frank Yeary, who ran Citigroup’s global mergers and acquisitions group. There are top businessmen. All of them lost big by having stock options in a company that got targeted by the Feds last year and filed Chapter 11 six months ago.
The Kawhi stuff, even if 100% true and bad, is small stuff. First, I think the Ballmer is angle is—nothing. What I’m supposed to get out of this is Ballmer lost a huge chunk of money because it was a way of avoiding cap penalties. Doesn’t make sense. If “This company is shady because of a $28 million deal with Kawhi Leonard!” is how you’re framing this, you’re missing out. Aspiration had a valuation of close to $2 billion in 2021, before the house of cards started to collapse. Kawhi’s deal was .014 of that.
And, yes, Ballmer was a backer, like all those other guys and groups. Did Aspitation offer a deal to Kawhi to get Ballmer’s (much larger) investment? Probably. Did Ballmer have anything beyond his investment to do or say about Kawhi’s deal? Unlikely. (Leonardo DiCaprio may have.) Did Kawhi get a deal for which he did little to nothing beyond being a name on a website? Probably. Is that illegal or uncommon? No. Was the company legit? No. Would Kawhi or Ballmer have known that? No. My .02.
Because Ballmer is very rich people tend to think he must be a genius. He became rich because he happened to know the right people and those people created a product that controlled 90% worlds business software use. Beyond that his tenure at Microsoft was average, company was stagnating and losing market share rapidly and had lots of failed endeavors. He became really rich after he was no longer in charge of Microsoft and the company's revenue, profits and subsequently it stock price skyrocketed. Remember, Ballmer thought Zune would be in everyone's pocket.
Yeah the thing is he was forced out of MS. If he stayed CEO, the stock wouldn't be worth nearly as much. Nadella made all the right bets, like cloud and now AI, which made MSFT stock go way up, which is why Ballmer is the richest owner in the NBA and probably all sports except for the Middle Easter sovereign wealth funds which own several big soccer clubs in England and Europe.
Ballmer basically allowed iPhone and then Android to take over the smart phone market, in which MS had first-mover advantage. He tried to play it off like nobody was going to go for touch screens instead of phones with keyboards. By the time MS tried to catch up with Windows Mobile 7 and 8, it was way too late.
