The Dungeon and Mark Cuban
EPISODE 300: Accounts payable.
After tweeting 17,053 words in defense of his fellow billionaire NBA owner, Steve Ballmer, Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban finally agreed to visit me.
In person.
Without ChatGPT.
Which PTFO legitimately applauds Mark for doing.
I welcome the strongest available critique of my reporting.
I also think this helps illustrate, if nothing else, the gulf between our worldviews.
YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:
Team Shitting Bricks,
Pablo
The tired voice of what kinds of chicanery is it makes for some tedious listening. A guy gives a guy 50 mil and it’s instantly gone and nobody’s watching? Cuz, marketing 101? No. Everybody’s Leonard in this deal. No no knows nothing and cannot recall, verify, confirm or deny. A small, stinky sidebar to the gaming takeover of games
The first time you talked to Cuban, he made the claim that Balmer couldn't be that stupid, he had to figure that all of this stuff would eventually come out that if not Pablo, then it would have been someone else. That statement is empirically not true.
The reality is that rich guys like Balmer (and Cuban) know that this stuff usually doesn't come out. My wife writes about women's health and shit like this happens all the time, and if she doesn't report on it, no one does. She is a physician, that is her day job, and she will write about things that sometimes later get picked up by the MSM but only after she does the heavy lifting. Main stream journalists are often times just not that smart or just too lazy to do the hard work that goes into this kind of complex reporting (so kudos to you Pablo -great job!)
Balmer isn't stupid. But he also didn't figure Sandberg was as crooked as he was. Just crooked enough to help Balmer circumvent the cap but not so crooked as to end up in a federal investigation. But even then, if Pablo doesn't do the digging through the available material, then no one knows anything. And that is what Balmer was hoping for. That is what all of these folks hope for. That is why they do it, because they usually get away with it. After all, it is just some stupid salary cap. Who is getting hurt here? Just some other rich guy (who isn't quite as rich as Balmer)
What Cuban is doing with CostPlus drugs is absolutely fantastic. I like the guy. But his defense of Balmer is fucked up. Why he is defending Balmer so vociferously I can only guess at with two hypotheses. One, he had done the same thing at some point as owner of the Mavs or two, Balmer has a lot of money invested in CostPlus drugs or Cuban is hoping to get Balmer to invest money in CostPlus drugs.
Pablo, have you looked into whether or not Balmer has made any investments already into CostPlus Drugs? Even if he hasn't yet, once the dust clears, and the NBA does nothing, I wouldn't be surprised if Balmer makes a sizable investment, 6-12 months after the NBA announces the results of their investigation.