Name: This Is How Steve Ballmer Became an NBA Team Owner
Uploaded: 2016-03-10
Duration: 2 min 19 s
Description: It took him three tries before he got it done.

I like basketball and I've liked basketball for a long time. When I retired, within a week, I went to visit the commissioner of the NBA and the commissioner of the NFL. Two sports I was interested in. Nothing much every came out of football and that's probably okay. I mean there's a lot of tough challenges right now in the football world. Despite the fact that football is doing very well from a business perspective. When I went to see commissioner of the NBA I said yeah, [ INAUDIBLE ] bring a team to Seattle. How are we gonna do that? Because we had a failed bid to bring Sacramento to Seattle. He said look, it's hard. We have no plans to expand, and we're gonna try to give cities the chance to keep their teams. I said shoot, I better go to Milwaukee, cuz it was the only team for sale at the time. So I got on a plane, flew to Milwaukee, [ LAUGH ] Drove around the city, went to a game. I was late to the bidding process cuz I said I'm not interested in Milwaukee, I'm gonna bring things to Seattle. So I get back in the game but not really cuz the sale team had already progressed. So I had no idea where this is gonna go and looking around, figuring out how to troll for some team for sale. I did ask the commissioner, what about the LA teams, cuz if you live in Seattle you start counting what's closest. Well Sacramento, Portland, Sac had already gone, Portland was Paul Allen, the Warrior's weren't for sale that was clear, Utah is never gonna be for sale pretty much. So I looked on the map and I said, and I like LA, and it's warm, When it's sunny in the wintertime. And you're motivated by where you can get home after the game. And I get home after the game, absolutely. And commissioner said, no I don't think those teams will ever sell. I said, yeah, but Donald Sterling's getting older. He said, I still don't think it'll ever sell. And then boom, it became available. This was already my third time now running numbers on NBA teams. So I was down in the learning curve, I knew about what I was willing to pay. [ LAUGH ] And the only problem was to figure out who the heck was really gonna be selling the team. It wasn't done with what I call traditional investment banker stuff. [ LAUGH ] The investment banker came into the process at about the last week. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

This Is How Steve Ballmer Became an NBA Team Owner

It took him three tries before he got it done.