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The league has instituted new rules to keep megabillionaires from using their bottomless pockets to tilt the NBA’s competitive balance. An imbroglio involving the Los Angeles Clippers owner could amplify the issue.

Earlier this week, a handful of the richest people in the world convened at a five-star hotel in midtown Manhattan to discuss typical titans-of-industry fodder: overseas expansion, the future of media, yadda yadda. But there was an elephant in the room: Did a billionaire in their ranks secretly siphon millions of dollars to an NBA star through a now-bankrupt tree-planting startup?

The billionaire on the minds of NBA team owners at the regularly scheduled meeting of the league’s Board of Governors was Steve Ballmer—former Microsoft CEO, current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and one of the world’s ten richest people. At issue was whether Ballmer circumvented the NBA salary cap by funnelling cash to Clippers player Kawhi Leonard by investing in the startup, Aspiration, which aimed to reduce carbon emissions by planting trees. Leonard signed an endorsement deal with the company, but doesn’t appear to have ever done any actual endorsement work for Aspiration, whose co-founder recently pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges.

Last week, the journalist Pablo Torre broke the news of these allegations about Ballmer on his podcast. Then he expanded his reporting this week with new details that a Clippers minority owner, Dennis Wong, allegedly wired nearly $2 million to Aspiration just nine days before the startup sent an overdue check for $1.75 million to Leonard.

Ballmer has denied he violated the NBA’s salary cap rules. Spokespersons for the Clippers did not respond to requests for comment.

If true, the allegations—which the NBA is investigating—go to the very integrity of sports ownership. To participate in that elite club, owners agree to abide by the same spending limits on player salaries. Without such rules, the richest owners in the league could simply buy up all the top players and tip the scales of competition.

That risk is magnified by the ever-widening gap between the wealthiest and least-wealthy, which has more than tripled over the past six years, according to our analysis of Forbes’ estimates of the wealth of team owners. The biggest reason for that growing gulf is Ballmer, who has become so wealthy that he makes other team owners look almost poor by comparison.

Indeed, Ballmer is the richest owner in all of U.S. pro sports, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $152 billion as of Thursday, up from $118 billion just six months ago. That increase is largely due to his sizable stake in Microsoft, which has seen its shares rise 22% this year as it rides the artificial intelligence boom. Ballmer has said that about 80% of his investment portfolio is Microsoft stock.

His net worth is more than four times that of the next-wealthiest NBA ownership group—the Dallas Mavericks’ Adelson-Dumont family ($36.7 billion)—and stratospherically richer than the NBA owner with the smallest purse to still make the Forbes wealthiest people list—the Golden State Warriors’ Peter Guber ($1.5 billion).

Since 2019—the year Leonard signed with the Clippers in free agency—the gap between the wealthiest and least-wealthy NBA owners among those who made the Forbes list has more than tripled to over $150 billion in 2025. Over the same period, NBA valuations have exploded: The Brooklyn Nets sold to Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai in 2019 for $2.35 billion, a then-record for any U.S. sports franchise. This year, the Los Angeles Lakers became the first-ever $10 billion sports club, its valuation in a pending sale to Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter.

While the league has embraced owners from a lot of different backgrounds and wealth levels, they’ve also put new rules in place to keep the deepening pockets of owners from skewing the league’s competitive balance.

The current league’s collective bargaining agreement—the document that governs the salary cap and was signed by owners and the players’ union in 2023—was constructed with more progressive, if somewhat confusing, spending rules. In effect, owners are allowed to spend over the player salary cap to certain thresholds but will incur a range of painful penalties for doing so, including the loss of some draft picks and limitations on player trades.

Speaking on Wednesday about the revelations in Torre’s reporting on the Clippers, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said that “the stakes have gotten much higher, the salaries much higher, the team values are much higher,” he said. He conceded the league could do more to monitor potential conflicts when companies like Aspiration sponsor players who have an existing relationship with the team. “Maybe there needs to be a new level of scrutiny on some of these things,” he added.

Which brings us back to Ballmer, at the center of it all—the lone centibillionaire in the roster of NBA owners. Leagues like the NBA increasingly need to cater to the wealthiest of the wealthy, as they require a network of deep-pocketed individuals to continue to buy in at escalating prices. (Also in the planning stages: a potential NBA league in Europe.)

But if Ballmer or any of his Clippers associates are confirmed to have circumvented the salary cap, Silver may have to confront sanctioning the highest-profile techie in the sports world.

As such, the NBA has tapped white-shoe law firm Wachtell Lipton to helm an independent investigation of Torre’s reporting, a standard practice by sports leagues amid any alleged misconduct. Silver told reporters that as commissioner, his “powers are very broad” to hand down suspensions, fines, or removal of the Clippers’ draft picks, if the investigation yields conclusive proof of cheating.

Heavy emphasis on the “if.” Silver said that the burden of proof is on the league to demonstrate wrongdoing by Ballmer and the Clippers. “We and our investigators look at the totality of the evidence,” he said. “As a matter of fundamental fairness, I would be reluctant to act if there was sort of a mere appearance of impropriety. The goal of a full investigation is to find out if there really was impropriety.”

Ballmer, for his part, told ESPN this week he welcomed the NBA investigation and said he was “conned” by the Aspiration founders, to whom he made a $50 million investment during an early funding round, and to whom he introduced Leonard. Aspiration allegedly later signed Leonard to a $28 million “no-show” endorsement contract.

(The Athletic on Friday reported that a former Aspiration CEO denied that Leonard had a no-show deal and that his contract called on the Clippers player to participate in various Aspiration projects. His contract also allowed Leonard to opt out of those efforts, according to The Athletic.)

Before Aspiration-gate, there had long been a sense within NBA circles that any criticism of the Clippers is essentially punching down: Los Angeles’ second team toils in the shadow of their glittering crosstown rival, the Lakers.

Lately, Ballmer has demonstrated his willingness to lift the Clippers out of their second-class status by spending big in ways that aren’t limited by the collective bargaining agreement. At the start of last season, he presided over the opening of the Intuit Dome, a new state-of-the-art home court for the Clippers that cost $2 billion—and is currently set to host the 2026 All-Star Game. And this spring, he paid to fly a coterie of Clippers fanatics to attend playoff games on the road.

Indeed, if there’s one constituency that doesn’t mind having an uber-rich owner it’s the fans of pro sports teams. For example, fans of the New York Mets—another second banana team in a major U.S. city—have largely embraced their owner, the formerly embattled hedge fund manager Steve Cohen (net worth: $23 billion), as “Uncle Steve,” since he bought the team in 2020.

Ultimately, the outcome of the Aspiration-Clippers investigation will be a test of the guiding principles of U.S. sports ownership, one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.

As Commissioner Silver himself said, the “mere appearance of impropriety” may not be enough for sanctions within this cohort. But if the investigation yields a smoking gun, Silver has a difficult choice to make: discipline the richest owner in sports, or risk undermining the integrity of the league.