Steve Ballmer Betrayed His Fellow Billionaires, And They Are Not Pleased

For all the fulminations about the million-ton craphammer dropped on the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer for trying to evade the NBA salary cap, almost nobody has yet identified the situation as the entertainment bonanza it is about to become.

Yes, it’s time for another edition of the game show to end all game shows, and maybe also to end everything else: Billionaires Eating Billionaires. You’ve seen it, because it airs reruns on basically every channel. A bunch of insanely wealthy people get in their feelings about another colossally wealthy person who has gone rogue on the herd, and lash out accordingly; the gameplay generally unfolds as a series of lawyergasms across the continent and ends with some competitors going home naked and battered, all of it richly deserved. It’s Turbo Survivor, only with bloody retributions handed out to all the contestants, even the winners, as well as the hosts and production team; even the intrepid team of reporters and researchers who started all this hilarity a year ago will take home a black eye for their trouble.

That last group is Team Torre, named for its front man, Pablo Torre, whose name is on the door of the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. It was that program’s collective team of researchers and newsjackals who found a disgruntled insider willing not only to expose the salary-cap games being played by the Clippers, but to provide the first few documents of proof that ultimately led to Ballmer and the Clippers being publicly pantsed for paying Kawhi Leonard under multiple tables. They will be part of the legal mess about to unfold—the heated letter the Clippers sent to the league after Wednesday’s punishment came down sniffily referred to the malfeasance Torre et al. exposed as “podcast allegations”—and unlike all the other combatants, don’t necessarily have tens of millions of dollars on hand to pay for it. Their sponsors, Meadowlark Media and through them DraftKings, do. So that’ll be a hoot, too.