Crime gets bigger, focus further narrows, "land or death" keeps tending toward the same extreme. Fuck rich people. Widow pig parrot.
UPDATE/EDIT: In answer to a couple comments, I wrote some more detailed stuff about the way this bullshit works, so I figured I'd put it all here in case it helps explain the ways that people with money get to speak "value" into existence – plus when and why they might be inclined to speak it right back out again.
1
Criminals, dog. They're running the world sucking their own dicks doing backflips. As E40 once said, they're dancing on top of chariots, turning tight ones. Aspiration wants to offer a billy for a number of reasons, not least of which is
#1) so other people see STEVE BALLMER accept it. $300 million, you cute, come back when you get real money. Ballz Tremendo, the Duke of LA, plasters your shit where half of Inglewood used to be? Get ready to stop dealing with Bill Clinton's speechwriter and start fucking with Bill Clinton. These are the EXACT people who would've been on the Lolita Express if this all started a decade earlier.
#2) You ever heard that homespun ol' piece of white trash wisdom, "If you owe the bank ten grand, it's your problem; if you owe the bank ten million, it's their problem"? If you owe Steve Ballmer a billion dollars, Steve Ballmer is gonna do every goddamn thing he can do to make sure that you keep existing and have a billion dollars to give him.
#3) Likewise, if you owe Steve Ballmer a billion dollars, Joe Sanberg's dumb ass does not go to prison (and I have to repeat, if the PLEA DEAL was for $248 million in fraud charges, the prosecution's number had to be at least double that, probably verging upon 1 [one] billy). Steve Ballmer does everything possible to ensure that you stay free, to get him as much of his goddamn money as God Himself can wring out of you, and then when you get within the margins of what SB might recover in a quick simple little suit designed to be settled before it ever sees a courtroom, THEN he might let you hit the dunk tank.
Being in debt to someone that big is a form of INSURANCE, provided you can ever pay it off. If Aspiration had actually been paying Steve Ballmer a billion dollars in quarterly installments of $100 million over 4 years, say, this story would not be happening yet. Steve Ballmer would've screamed at Ramona Shelburne for 20 minutes about how she needs Jesus in her life, and Meadowlark Media NY would be driving Pablo around on a Hannibal Lecter dolly to make sure he kept his fucking mouth shut.
This happens when Ballz and his cohort decide your word isn't worth shit – and when you're pretending, au style Ballz, that you got conned by a couple carbon-tax dickheads, you shouldn't have publicly declared that their word isn't worth shit half a decade ago.
2
I strenuously doubt that we'll ever get an honest timeline for all this that ALSO includes an honest timeline for the investigation of Aspiration, but I would not be at all surprised if the Feds started looking at Aspiration when Steve Ballmer turned down their money. I don't know how public that offer was, but shit gets around, the entire industry is BUILT on shit getting around, and if the FBI hears that one of the richest men in history turned down a free "billion dollars," that would be the moment to start asking what "a billion dollars" means when Aspiration offers it.
For example:
August 2021, on the back of the investment frenzy that Steve Ballmer kicked off, Aspiration announces that it will be merging with InterPrivate III Financial Partners (an SPAC, special-purpose acquisition company – i.e., a shell corporation that can then put Aspiration on the stock market as its holding, which means hugely reduced investigation of Aspiration itself, because you're "not giving them money," you're "giving money to InterPrivate III Financial Partners," which has been thoroughly vetted and legally compliant and would never try to make $2.3 billion out of a fictitious bullshit company, right?).
After the merger is announced, but before it happens, Steve Ballmer gets friends & neighbors at his "financial affiliates" to kick in another $315 million of investment. This shit's going to the goddamn MOON, baby.
Except ... InterPrivate III Financial Partners, the SPAC, realizes that maybe it wants to know just a little more about Aspiration before acquiring it for more than $2 billion and trading it on the stock market as one of their own "products"? Maybe? Just a little.
Zoom forward roughly a year. The SPAC is STILL looking into Aspiration. The merger hasn't finished. The Kawhi Leonard no-show deal, however, is done and scheduled to make its first quarterly payment of $1.75 million in June 2022 ... which it misses by a month. And then, precisely then, is when our innocent hero and Not Guilty King, Andrei Cherny, decides he'd like to step down to pursue other opportunities. He's out by August and replaced by October.
This means that one of the two guys who founded the extremely legal enterprise Aspiration is foregoing his cut of a $2.3 billion merger, with the not-so-secret implication "(because I don't think it's ever coming, and I don't want to go to jail)." Normally you'd see this kind of asshole getting some sweeteners on his way out the door; here, I'm not sure if Sanberg & co. would've been more concerned with wanting to kill Cherny or with paying him to shut up.
Combine the next act in the 100% non-criminal career of Andrei Cherny with Steve Ballmer saying "Please don't give me a billion dollars" – THAT, broadly speaking, is when people like the SEC, FBI, IRS, et al., generally say "What the fuck is going on here?," if they're actually doing their jobs.
THUS: if you're fucking around with the fuckarounds in this kind of circle, it is good for you to have very famously rich people accept your IOUs. It is good to owe money to the right people, because the right people will make sure you MAKE the money you owe them, and once they've demonstrated that your fraud has the capacity to make said money, they'll generally say, "What the hell, how'd you like to owe me twice that much money?" They have established that whatever the fuck you actually do, or don't do, their investments will return, with both literal interest and with a whole new set of connections and "opportunities" via whichever Ballz-Tier Gods just did to make you profitable.
So when the same guy essentially creates your company's value, keeps throwing other people's money at it ahead of its $2.3 billion payday – which technically never comes, but that's a whole other thing, what "never really" means in finance – takes your $300 million for a beautiful sustainable arena to destroy Inglewood ... and then says, "Nah, I'm good on the billion dollars," that is a lying motherfucker. That motherfucker is acting like you're real on one hand, for his own gain, but acting like he KNOWS you're a scam on the other, to keep himself from counting on a billion imaginary dollars and from being indicted when your stupid ass gets caught.
3
For all that people love to ogle broke athletes and movie stars – the cardinal American sin of learning to hate better-paid employees instead of properly hating your employer – the mechanisms of all this finance bullshit can get pretty similar, which is why fetishists of Great Men of Wall Street Lore have so many Feuds and Reconciliations and Superteams and shit to occupy their deeply unhealthy minds. You make up money and try to get someone else to take it seriously, and then you try to be legally immune and/or on another continent when someone, somewhere, the 19th person in the Fell For It Again Award queue (because the sucker you got to take it seriously? He isn't a "sucker," he sold it, for triple what he paid, to someone else, who ALSO knew it wasn't real, or just didn't need to care) tries to cash it out and is told "This isn't worth anything."
Which is a very important lesson that very few people learn – we think of money on paper as a representation of real money. It is not. It IS money. When a bank puts a loan on its ledger, it is creating money, not moving around representations of money. Paper money creates and grows and multiplies. Its bacterial analogies are not to be ignored. It IS MONEY. The Fun Bucks with which we poor jerkoffs are sent off to amuse ourselves, for most real purposes, could be destroyed, and some people have argued for years that they SHOULD be destroyed – and so perhaps they shall be, thanks to the integration of every possible place to hide your number-money via platforms like PayPal, and the endless stream of commercials involving a relatable Afro-Latina pixie and/or square-jawed Korean dreamboat tap-tap-tapping their way downstream, never entering a PIN from now till death, playing ... lemme plug in The Triangulator here ... playing, depending on target demographic, either Tegan & Sara, Billie Eilish, or Black Eyed Peas on airpods, just loud enough to cover the sonic transformation of their gentle downstream day trip into the slowly-, but not that slowly-, mounting sibilance of the waterfall ahead (and yes, this is partially a riff on a very particular page of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, but it's also a hybrid riff on a very particular page of MY first-published novel, which is why I needed The Triangulator, and likewise why I got the job as Chief Radio Voice for the Terrordome) – thanks to all above and more, we have probably already created the last generation of middle-class-and-upward people to use tangible money for anything but $20 birthday cards from grandma.
(Has anyone ever bought a Black Eyed Peas album? I'm so old that I remember when they were on some Lyrical & Conscious shit, long dreads cascading down ballet-white turtlenecks, but since then, has someone paid money for a physical or digital container of their music?
I recently learned that will.i.am claims to have seen the first plane hit the Towers on 9/11, on a live TV broadcast he was watching in San Francisco, which is verifiably 100% not true.)
As long as money stays on paper (or, now, within the digital equivalent of "on paper," which should probably not be mistaken for representation either, even if the transient properties of paper thus jettisoned have not yet become clear), the axe may never NEED to fall. It can stay true/false forever within its own vile pseudokosmos. The executioners show up when someone in the chain is so saturnine as to equate the paper money to another asset and can't make the conversion, OR, not infrequently, when you as primary issuer of paper-money-asset make an enemy who'd like to see you die – thus the utility of killing your competition by purchasing, or feigning the purchase of, a certain amount of equity in something you'd like to destroy, cos if we're working in the land of serious fuckers who fuck you seriously, THAT will set off a whole round of due-diligence investigation, as with the SPAC that wanted to buy Aspiration until the moment they could actually see what Aspiration was, from the inside.
And here, standing alone, red and bulbous, we find Ballz the Estrangèd. He considered Aspiration real enough to give it $50 million, and to rile up his associates for $315 million more – I very heavily suspect as a means of creating fake equity for the SPAC merger, to make it look like Aspiration just happened to be sitting on an extra $315 million of its own, ha, well, easy to misplace, you know, we do make so very much cocksuckin' money around here – and real enough to take $300 million in return, and spackle Aspiration patches on the Clippers' theoretical new jerseys ... but he also considered it NOT real enough to accept a bid of $1.1 billion for the right to change a single word.
That is not a course of action which comports with getting, in his own words, "conned." That, rather, is the kind of thing you'd do if you were very, very well acquainted with asshole chicanery like this, and you'd developed a preternaturally keen sense of the ratio between whatever's backing up a lie (in this case, nearly nothing) and just how far ($300 million) that lie can be pushed.