Posted on 05/30/2014 9:30:15 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The sale of the Clippers continued on its bizarre journey late Thursday night when representatives of co-owner Shelly Sterling sent out a media release that the Sterling family trust has agreed to sell the team to former Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer for $2 billion.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
As I said there is a don’t make the league look bad clause. He got a big fat wad of bad PR.
It is for him. Remember the size of a pile of money is largely dependent on the size it was taken from. Your handle is the name of a high end scotch, lots of people in the world would look at the price tag on a bottle of Talisker and think that was a ridiculous amount of money for a bottle of booze. I wouldn’t, presumably you wouldn’t, but many others would. Ballmer’s got 20 billion dollars, now he’s spending 1 tenth of that to fulfill is long held desire to own an NBA team. From where you an I sit it’s a lot of money, from where he’s sitting it’s not, it’s just 1/10. Would you spend 10% of your net worth to fulfill a lifelong dream? Closer to this situation if you were bidding against somebody to fulfill a lifelong dream would you increase the bid by 4% of your net worth? It’s a bottle of Talisker for him.
How big a share is Magic Johnson getting?
And I am not sure who made bids.
The plantation will be under new ownership. Hello Seattle.
None of the groups included Magic.
In the recorded call Magic and the slut photo of the two placed on social media is what seemed to inflame him .
He definitely had some hard feelings about Magic,
But if bids for a bottle of Talisker were at $120, I wouldn’t suddenly offer $200 even if I was willing to pay that much.
I get your point. I just think it’s too high a jump, too fast. He could always outbid later on.
But jumping $800 million without having to?
You’d have to have run Microsoft or something to think that was a smart bid...
There’s a lot more bottles of Talisker out there than NBA teams. And he’d missed on 3 previous (I thought it was 2, but I’d missed one). And this whole thing is trying to go fast, they wanted a deal in place before the owners meeting Tuesday, so a prolonged bidding situation would leave the door open for problems like being out of communication. Who knows, Shelly might have even requested final bids only to make the process go faster. It was a smart bid, he got what he wanted without the drama of his previous failed attempts to buy and not really spending much money when compared to his personal fortune.
That’s what the conspiracy minded thought, that the whole event was a play by Magic to lower the value of the team for his group to step in. Looks like the conspiracy minded were wrong on both counts.
In a bidding situation, my money’s on the billionaire who wants something.
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