Everyone on earth may be interested in sports, but those who aren’t are soon introduced to the typical sports owner type. While there are a small number of unfathomably wealthy people, very little brings out the personality of these ravenous capitalists quite like owning a professional sports franchise. Bill Gates doesn’t fully embrace this world of ego-soaked excess, only excess, but sports owners love to swing the weight of their net worth around.
We see it every single one collective bargaining Negotiation. Team owners are far more interested in using their leverage to win these confrontations than in ensuring a product maximizes entertainment value. These billionaires approach negotiations as if it were the playoffs and it would be their opponent walking out on a 10 degree evening with freezing tears on their cheeks.
Sports owners let us see inside the minds of the people who control most of this country’s wealth, and those unfamiliar with sports owners can see the guy in action with Elon Musk and his latest toy.
Tesla and SpaceX owner bought Twitter. The company announced Monday that it had been sold to Musk for $44 billion. That will translate to $54.20 per share for each of its shareholders, quite a gain since Twitter ended Monday’s announcement up $2.77 to $51.20 per share and last Thursday was worth $47 a share. A little overpaid, but this is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. This is more than an investment, it’s an opportunity for him to smack the world in the face with his impressively long fortune.
Wealthy people buy professional sports franchises for power and influence. Take Tilman Fertitta, for example. The owner of Golden Nugget Casinos and Landry’s Restaurants bought the Houston Rockets in 2017, and in a way only a man respected in the affluent traveler circle can — on credit.
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He was a bit cashless by the time he decided to buy an NBA franchise — a franchise that, unlike the Los Angeles Clippers, was a dud of a team, was thriving. The antonym to winning for most of their existence had sold three years earlier after Hall of Famer racist Donald Sterling could no longer be tolerated. The Clippers still sold for $2 billion. Fertitta had to borrow Hundreds of millions of dollars and sold bonds, along with borrowing $175 million in 2017 to buy the Rockets.
It’s good to be rich. He might not rank in the top 10 richest people in the world, but who hasn’t lost a few zeros on a golden nugget? The author of Shut up and listen! Hard business truths will help you succeed was a satisfactory pick as far as the NBA was concerned. The way Fertitta bought the Rockets is the same way Musk doesn’t buy FC Barcelona or the Dallas Cowboys, but the whole world’s news-breaking tool.
While Musk is the richest person alive, according to Forbes, it’s not as if he can get all that money together in a series of withdrawals. That would require paying taxes, and Pro Publica Let us know early in the year that the best way for the richest to avoid this is by being very cash-strapped. Musk didn’t pay taxes in 2018, and in 2015 and 2017 the world’s richest person paid less than $70,000. It’s not because his money is in the Antilles, he just doesn’t have anywhere near the fat bank account you might think he has. All of that wealth is tied up in investment stocks, you know, the Tesla and SpaceX stocks that he owns alongside his other investments, and those stocks can’t be taxed until they’re sold. Bloomberg’s estimate of Musk’s cash and “somewhat liquid assets” is around $3 billion. How did he do the rest? Recognition.
As of Thursday, he reportedly had $46.5 billion in funding to make the purchase. Twitter said Musk had secured $26.5 billion in funding and the remainder would come from a $21 billion “equity commitment.” In the famous words of Druski: “What do you mean by that?” It was legit enough question to ask for Bloomberg’s Tom Maloney, but hey, that’s the richest man alive.
What would Musk want with the platform that Adam Schefter, Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania use to hold the sports news machine To hum? It’s not like Twitter is Facebook or Instagram, where a person can regularly drool over new pictures of a crush in private without being considered creepy. Twitter is made of words (and reposted viral TikToks). Musk wants the same thing as sports franchise owners, which is to say he owns it.
People are frustrated that their favorite teams are selling beloved players and lack aggression on their hands because many of the owners these days aren’t here for their stupid civic pride. They’re here to get the most out of it and get noticed at the parties behind the bookshelves with Scooby Doo’s secret doors. Mark Cuban became a billionaire after selling broadcast.com on time, but if he stopped there he’d just be another guy wearing t-shirts to business meetings if that was his only claim to fame. Instead, he bought the Dallas Mavericks, a team name that fits his personality perfectly. Now he’s allowed to pull April Fools’ jokes pranks with referees, to quarrel with Skip Bayless and employ two of the most famous athletes in European history.
Musk may not be acquiring the most popular social media network, but he is acquiring arguably the most efficient news feeder. As Woj breaks news, the NBA world reacts. When Donald Trump was allowed to tweet, the whole world got involved. celebrity gossip, political agendas, Bob’s burger gifs — they’re all on Twitter, and now the man who failed to deliver us the “Hyperloop” in almost a decade will be in control. Forget those electric cars you can never afford, he’s about to have his paws on the world’s most immediate source of information. No board of directors, their beliefs about what free speech means are imposed on everyone, whether you use the platform or not.
So get ready folks. You’re about to see why people are complaining so much about James Dolan and whoever is in charge of the Miami Marlins for a particular season and is selling his roster for parts. We’re dealing with the man who named his child X Æ A-12, the man tweeting that at random 69.420 percent of the statistics are wrong for a reaction, and the man who tweeted a picture of Bill Gates’ fat belly with the caption “in case you need to lose a boner fast” This is the person who controls the information you receive and controls a significant portion of the discourse surrounding them. So get ready, world, to feel like a New York Knicks fan for the last 20 years, even if your idea of a knick is shaving too quickly while being late for work.
