Pablo Torre

And in sports, because he's a basketball fan in sports, because he can't just buy the thing he wants the most, because there are rules around competition that in sports we are we are sincere in our cliches about fair play.

Right.

He has to answer for this stuff.

You know, it was fascinating to see Steve Ballmer, the aforementioned guy who at that point had 150 or so billion dollars.

It was fascinating to see him go to Bristol, Connecticut, to sit down with ESPN the day after this reporting that I published came out.

And he did it because he knows how important the rules are in sports, or at the very least, he knows how much he's supposed to care about the performance of

of caring about the rules.

And so if only, if only in politics, there was that level of sort of like built-in mechanism of public attention.

Now, the question, the follow-up question, of course, is will there be punishment?

And so there is there is the question of should he care about this?

Clearly, yes.

And people will ask about it.

The secondary follow up is now will the institution, which is empowered to punish him in this case, the NBA, which is to say his own employees, in a sense, will they actually do the thing that will provide anything resembling accountability?

Yeah, I think what you're seeing in sports as this metaphor for politics is public demand for accountability being expressed in ways that, frankly, a lot of mainstream institutions are not necessarily encouraging due to various conflicts of interest.

But then the question of, well, who's going to do the punishing?

Who's going to meet that out?

Look, I was...

I was studying, reporting on the outside independent investigation that the NBA has started with Wachtell Lipton, an incredibly well-regarded law firm.

And what the various former employees of this tree planting carbon credits shell company have told me is that they're not being asked by that firm.

At least five of them have not been asked by that firm about Steve Ballmer directly.