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The Forum Leverage
Signing Kawhi Leonard wasn’t an easy sell inside Aspiration Partners. Joe Sanberg didn’t have the authority to approve a $48 million commitment on his own, and when he brought the idea to the executives who did, the reaction was immediate and unanimous: nobody could explain why the company would spend that kind of money on a player with a thin endorsement profile, especially on top of the enormous sponsorship fee it was already paying the Clippers. To get the deal done anyway, Sanberg needed something to hand his own leadership in return. He got it — and when it looked like he might not, he made sure the Clippers understood exactly what was at stake.
A Deal Nobody Inside Aspiration Wanted
When Sanberg relayed his executives’ objections, he told them plainly that the Clippers were the ones asking for this, and that the team would provide additional business back to Aspiration to offset the cost. Internal emails among Aspiration’s CEO, CFO, and general counsel confirm the arrangement in those terms: the Clippers, Sanberg said, were promising to increase what they paid Aspiration each quarter in step with what Aspiration paid Leonard. Once that was verified internally, the objection dissolved — the deal was acceptable to Aspiration’s leadership as long as it was, in their own accounting, cash-flow neutral.
The Number That Came First
The vehicle for that business-back arrangement was a separate sustainability-services agreement between Aspiration and the Forum, the Inglewood arena Ballmer had acquired in 2020 and which Zucker oversaw. Its stated purpose was to “zero out” the Forum’s historical carbon emissions. But the deal didn’t begin with any calculation of what those emissions actually were. The earliest term sheet, from January 2022, carried a heading reading “Business Back Opportunities” with a note to be filled in by the Clippers’ CFO: seven million dollars a year in business back — the exact figure of the cash portion of the Leonard-Aspiration endorsement deal. Sanberg confirmed to investigators that the number was tied directly to what Aspiration expected to pay Leonard, and a February 2022 email in which he described the arrangement to an Aspiration employee makes the sequencing explicit: the dollar figure came first, and the sustainability framing was fitted around it afterward.
The Study That Ran Backward
When investigators pressed Ballmer and Zucker on where the $7 million figure came from, both pointed to a consultant’s study concluding the Forum needed $28 million over four years to offset its emissions. Investigators went and asked the consultant directly. He told them the sequence was the reverse of what the Clippers described: the team had handed him a $28 million budget and asked him to find a way to spend it on emissions reduction, not the other way around. Inside the organization, at least one senior executive had already sensed something was off. Scott Sonnenberg, the Clippers’ chief commercial officer, described the Forum deal in a text to the team’s CFO as something he never wanted and had recognized as troubling from the start, adding separately that he was simply doing what he was told despite the number of warning signs involved.
“Burn It to the Ground”
By late March 2022, Sanberg wanted the Forum Agreement finalized before the end of the first quarter, and negotiations were dragging. On March 30, he made the linkage between the two deals explicit and unmistakable, texting the business agent who had helped structure the Leonard offer that if the Forum Agreement wasn’t fixed immediately, he would tear up the endorsement contract, tell Leonard and Robertson exactly why, and pursue litigation. He said he had already told the Clippers’ chief commercial officer the same thing, and that if the situation wasn’t resolved, “we are burning this whole relationship to the ground.”
The Clippers understood precisely what that meant. Internal messages that same week between the team’s CFO and Ballmer’s chief investment officer describe Sanberg’s threat in specific terms — that he would call Leonard directly and tell him his deal, worth roughly $12 million a year, was dead because of Clippers management. This wasn’t an abstract dispute about arena sustainability. Everyone involved on the Clippers’ side knew a threat against Leonard’s endorsement income was the actual leverage on the table.
Signed Anyway
Ballmer told investigators he was aware of Sanberg’s threat before the Forum Agreement was finalized. He approved its execution the following month regardless. Investigators identify that approval, made with full knowledge of the precondition attached to it, as its own independent act of facilitating Leonard’s endorsement income — not merely tolerating someone else’s circumvention, but personally signing off on the payment that made it possible.
What the Clippers’ own executives said about each other, once investigators started asking questions directly, is where the story turns next.
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