Source: https://www.truehoop.com/p/someone-is-lying

Similarly, billionaire Mark Cuban has gotten himself some airtime. He argues that he, Cuban, knew Aspiration was a fraud from the first email he ever received. But curiously he also later argues that it makes sense that Ballmer would not have known that Aspiration was a fraud.

And then there’s Cuban’s core argument: Aspiration benefitted from Kawhi being a Clipper more than the Clippers benefitted from Kawhi being a Clipper. OK, whatever Mark. (One of the top comments on that episode came from Sean Murphy: “I found this episode to be incredibly infuriating. Mark Cuban just was going off of vibes.”) Billionaires get to be heard, whether they have anything important to say or not.

Instead of billionaire bloviating I’m hungry for the Katniss Everdeen vibe of telling it like it is, even when that pisses people off. We are desperate for real media truth telling in the NBA.

I'm a believer that we need to root for beautiful and honest truth telling. We need 100 times more than we have, across all parts of society. The NBA is essentially an organization of billionaires, who are Adam Silver’s bosses.

When stories emerge implicating powerful people, often what happens is that people nick up that narrative while pretending to be on the real hunt for truth. Cuban made a first shoddy attempt at that. It won’t convince me.

47 comments
  1. Wow. A billionaire lied to us? Here, have a minority to direct your anger to instead of punching up.

  2. Cuban: the guy that’s way richer that I’m spending my life defending is actually stupid, your honor

  3. Zero idea why Cuban is dedicated to showing his ass about this when he isn’t involved, and just makes him look stupid and guilty of doing it with Dirk

  4. Cuban must really love Ballmer because I’ve never seen someone so eager to go down with another mans ship.

  5. If he knew it was a fraud from the beginning then why wouldn’t he take 2 seconds to have one of the thousand+ people that work for him alert the authorities?

  6. Cuban gets to stick up for his billionaire friend while also implying that he is smarter than that billionaire friend. That’s right in his Q zone.

  7. I do see some logic in what Cuban is saying.

    Cuban, as a serial entrepreneur has a more keen eye for startup ideas.

    Whereas Balmer made almost all of his fortune with one company, helping to navigate a corporate behemoth to ever greater heights.

    They both ended up in the same billionaires club, but they have different skill sets that got them there.

    That being said, Balmer and the Clippers are guilty AF and so is Cuban (don’t look too closely at Dirks finances in the mid 2010s…)

  8. Cuban just wants Balmer to owe him one. And he is trying to muddy the water so that there can be doubt about a scandal so the story turns into “well there is some doubt”, rather than “the NBA has major issues”.

  9. There are really only two options here. Either 1) Cuban is covering his own tracks to keep someone from investigating similar deals he pulled under the table, or 2) he’s trying really hard to get Ballmer off the hook so the world’s 6th richest man will owe him a favor.

  10. It’s in his best interest to defend Ballmer publicly. You don’t want to go scorched earth on another owner publicly. Owners protect each other publicly until they don’t have.

  11. Call up the etsy witches because it would be hysterical if Mark Cuban ended up in jail on wire fraud because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut on this thing that had nothing to do with him.

  12. Cuban is in a unique position. On one hand, his rampant narcissism forces him to say “oh I knew from the first second, im so smart” and on the other hand the need to try and protect his fellow scumbag billionaires forces him to say “of, of course poor Ballmer didn’t know, he is a victim”…

  13. Rational explanations versus nah it just can’t be true, Steve’s my guy. I wonder which wins?

  14. “Aspiration benefitted from Kawhi being a Clipper more than the Clippers benefitted from Kawhi being a Clipper.”

    That explains why Aspiration never told anybody that they had a deal with Kawhi, of course.

    /s

  15. He clearly made up his mind from the get go and he’s very confident at how clever he is to argue enough of a reasonable doubt on podcast court.

  16. These fools cannot shut the fuck up, even for a moment. All that money and still got perpetual foot-in-mouth syndrome. 

  17. This just seems like Cuban has guilty conscience. He MAY, keyword, have done something similar during his tenure lol

  18. Did ANYONE who listened to him on the podcast believe one word of what he was trying to sell Pablo’s audience? It was almost instant rejection of the premise he was pushing.

  19. I mean just cause Cuban sniffed out doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable that Ballmer didn’t know it was a fraud. A lot of people didn’t know it was a fraud.

  20. This dude loves the attention, and I lowkey believe he’s done some cap shenanigans in the past. Otherwise, why is he even doing any of this? I’d sure like the investigative team to speak with Mr Cuban regarding the Aspiration email and why he thought it was a fraudulent company.

  21. You see, billionaires aren’t like the rest of us. The exist in state of quantum superposition – being both the smartest men alive and also the dumbest at the same time. But the important thing to remember is that they get to choose which state to exist in to maximize their profits in each precise moment. You’ve got to hand it to them, those fucking geniuses/idiots.

  22. Not only do I think Ballmer knew the company was a fraud, I think the fraudulent nature of their business was a feature, not a bug. 

    He found a company that would happily embezzle money for him for a modest transaction fee. Those don’t grow on trees. 

  23. Maybe Cuban is giving us the raw, inside the owners meeting view, in order to prepare us for the slap on the wrist. No clue why he decided to take this view so loudly.

  24.  If this thing goes the way of Wall Street where we find out Balmer did some shady shit, but he’s ‘Too Big to Fail’, I guarantee you, I’M WALKING!

    We see this shit all too often in too many aspects of American culture.

  25. But also argues that Baller is “too smart” to fall for a scam. Baller is both a infallible genius and a convenient idiot

  26. i don’t think Cuban knew Aspiration was a fraud based on the first email, just that the leadership was maybe incompetent or was inexperienced at doing business.

  27. Cuban is doing more to keep this in the spotlight then anything else. Is he covertly sabotaging the Clips?

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