What is Aspiration, the company behind the Kawhi Leonard deal?

LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and the team are under investigation by the NBA following a report that Kawhi Leonard allegedly accepted a $28 million endorsement from a company called Aspiration as a way to circumvent the league’s salary cap.

Ballmer, who had previously invested $50 million in Aspiration, has denied he had knowledge of the deal or that he directed the company to strike one.

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Here’s what we know about the now-defunct Aspiration at the center of the accusations.

What was Aspiration and who were its founders?

Harvard alumni Joe Sanberg, an entrepreneur, and Andrei Cherny, a lawyer who worked as a speechwriter for the Clinton administration, co-founded Aspiration Partners in 2013. The company’s mission was to provide “socially-conscious and sustainable banking services and investment products,” according to their archived website from 2019. Their slogan: “Do Well. Do Good.”

Sanberg served on Aspiration’s board of directors and held about 30% of its shares as of September 2021, according to court filings. He was also an early investor in start-ups including Blue Apron. Cherny was Aspiration’s chief executive officer for nearly a decade.

What was Aspiration’s business model?

Think of Aspiration as a digital bank, but environmentally conscious. According to its website, the company claimed to be unlike other banks because customer deposits would “never fund fossil fuel projects like pipelines, oil rigs and coalmines.”

The company’s products included savings accounts and debit cards with cash back from a select number of businesses who were “doing the right thing,” plus an option to plant a tree with every purchase roundup. The company also offered access to investment funds that are “100% fossil fuel free.”

Who were the big-name investors in Aspiration?

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings show that Aspiration drew backers including Robert Downey Jr., Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, now-Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers and Cindy Crawford and her daughter, Kaia Gerber.

Their corporate partners included the likes of Meta, Microsoft and eventually the LA Clippers.

How are Ballmer, Leonard and the LA Clippers connected to Aspiration?

Last week, podcaster and journalist Pablo Torre reported, citing internal documents, that Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration through his personal LLC on Sept. 14, 2021. Ballmer, one of the richest owners in sports and a philanthropist, is known to contribute to climate initiatives.

Also in September 2021, the LA Clippers signed a $300 million deal with Aspiration, making the company the “first founding partner” of the Intuit Dome. The multiyear partnership included a “Planet Protection Fund,” which would allow fans to “offset their own carbon impact whenever they purchase a ticket to cheer on the Clippers,” according to a statement about the partnership at the time.

“Aspiration becoming our first Founding Partner supports the stake we are planting in the ground to make Intuit Dome the most sustainable arena in the world,” Ballmer said in the statement.

In an interview with ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne last week, Ballmer said Aspiration asked him to introduce it to Leonard, which he said happened in November 2021.

According to Torre’s report, Leonard agreed to a four-year, $28 million endorsement deal from Aspiration through his LLC KL2 Aspire in April 2022, nine months after he re-signed with the Clippers. An unnamed employee who purportedly worked for Aspiration told Torre that the payment to Leonard “was to circumvent the salary cap.”

This week Torre, citing more documents, reported that Clippers minority owner Dennis Wong also invested nearly $2 million in Aspiration through a personal LLC in 2022, nine days before Leonard was paid $1.75 million by the company.

According to a report in The Athletic on Friday, which cited legal documents, Ballmer invested an additional $10 million into Aspiration in March 2023 in a funding round that included other previous company investors.

How is the NBA reacting?

The NBA is investigating whether Ballmer and the Clippers violated league rules. Commissioner Adam Silver, speaking at his annual news conference at the conclusion of the league’s board of governors meetings in New York this week, said that the “burden is on the league” to prove wrongdoing and that the league needs to look “at the totality of the evidence” rather than just “mere appearance.”

“Just by the way those words read, I think as a matter of fundamental fairness, I would be reluctant to act if there was sort of a mere appearance of impropriety. … I think that the goal of a full investigation is to find out if there really was impropriety. Also, in a public-facing sport, the public at times reaches conclusions that later turn out to be completely false. I’d want anybody else in the situation Mr. Ballmer is in now, or Kawhi Leonard for that matter, to be treated the same way I would want to be treated if people were making allegations against me.”

Sources told ESPN that while there will be a thorough investigation of the matter by New York-based law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, there is no set deadline to find a conclusion.

What happened to Aspiration?

Cherny, co-founder and CEO, departed the company in 2022. In a statement posted on his X account Friday, Cherny said Leonard’s contract was not a “no-show” deal and had “three pages of extensive obligations.” He said he signed the contract in 2022 following “numerous internal conversations about the various things Aspiration was planning to do with Leonard.”

“I can’t speak to what was done or not done after I left — or why,” Cherney said in the statement.

When contacted by ESPN Friday, Cherny said that he had no further comment beyond the statement.

Aspiration filed for bankruptcy in March, with a reported debt of $170 million. When it filed for bankruptcy, the company said it owed the Clippers $30 million, the most out of all its creditors. Aspiration said at the time it owed Leonard’s LLC $7 million.

Last month, Aspiration co-founder Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors said Sanberg defrauded investors and lenders out of $248 million by fraudulently obtaining loans, falsifying bank and brokerage statements and concealing that he was the source of some revenue booked by the company.

Each of the charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Ballmer told ESPN he was “embarrassed” that he didn’t detect trouble in reviewing Aspiration’s financial statements and business plans.

“These were guys who committed fraud. Look, they conned me. They conned me,” he said. “I made an investment in these guys thinking it was on the up-and-up, and they conned me at this stage. I have no ability to predict why they might have done anything they did, let alone the specific contract with Kawhi.”