What's the Concern?

Pablo Torre reported about a year earlier that the Clippers used Aspiration Partners to route millions of dollars to Kawhi Leonard through environmental-services and endorsement deals, allegedly evading the NBA salary maximum. An NBA investigation substantially confirmed Torre’s account and identified additional endorsement deals that appeared to have been created and funded by the Clippers. The team continues to deny the allegations and called the investigation biased.

The report described consulting fees that employees did not recognize as consulting work, including upfront payments to companies that allegedly passed money to Leonard. In one example, a scoreboard vendor was reportedly asked to raise its price and use the increase to pay Leonard. Aspiration also recorded revenue from tree-planting deals involving Colombian celebrities and similar marketing payments from another company founded by Joe Sandberg; the speakers said the celebrities neither paid nor received money, and the deals involved tens of thousands of dollars. They said Aspiration appeared to be preparing for an IPO before its collapse, which Matt Levine dated uncertainly to 2024. The Wachtel report made the scandal look worse, they said, while emphasizing that its findings were allegations and that some employees may not have joined Aspiration to commit fraud. They did not think the report put the NBA at risk of being shut down by the Justice Department.

Emory Digital illustrates the volatility of digital-asset-treasury strategies: in 2025 it moved from electric motorcycles to holding digital assets and acquired about $500 million in Bitcoin, then shifted again to AI infrastructure in 2026. As DAT stocks that had traded above the value of their Bitcoin holdings moved to discounts, activists argued that selling the Bitcoin and liquidating a company could unlock more value than its stock price reflected. Emory Digital was also conducting Bitcoin buybacks. In a separate Empery proxy fight, activist Gabby Glicksburg sought board nominees who would liquidate debt and capture its discount. Empery challenged the nominees’ eligibility, but a Delaware court allowed them to run despite concerns about activist coordination. The activists held Empery debt while shorting the corresponding Bitcoin exposure, aiming to capture the debt discount without taking Bitcoin-price risk. Empery argued the hedge should have been disclosed and misaligned the activists with shareholders. The speakers said that concern may matter less when shareholders are hedge funds pursuing arbitrage: whether a hedge creates misalignment depends on whether investors seek Bitcoin exposure or a spread.

Robinhood offers tokenized versions of public-company stocks, including AMC, to customers outside the United States. Its AMC tokens are backed by AMC shares Robinhood buys, but they are blockchain-based derivative securities, not shares issued by AMC or entries in a shareholder ledger maintained by the company. AMC chief executive Adam Aaron called the offering a “quasi fake market” on Jersey; Vlad Tenove asked, “What’s the concern?” The speakers said the U.S. securities-law implications remain unsettled. They also stressed that tokenization does not necessarily give a company more direct contact with its shareholders. In ordinary brokerage ownership, an investor’s position sits on the broker’s ledger, the broker’s position on DTC’s ledger, and Cede & Co., DTC’s nominee, appears on the company’s shareholder record. DTC says it has custody of about $74 trillion in equities, roughly half of global equity market capitalization and more than half of U.S. stocks. One speaker estimated that about 80% of most companies’ stock is held in Cede & Co.’s name, citing a 1998 report that put the figure at 83% of U.S. stocks while warning that it may be outdated. A blockchain shareholder ledger could create a more direct company-shareholder relationship; Robinhood’s AMC tokens do not.

A paper finds that private-equity portfolio companies backed by sponsors it rates as more aggressive pay higher borrowing yields. Its measures include LLM rankings, whether sponsors conducted liability-management exercises, and a comparison of Apollo with 24 other sponsors. Those exercises are described as quasi-coercive debt exchanges that can shift value among creditors. The paper estimates that Apollo loans carry a premium of about 100 basis points over loans from other sponsors, compared with an average sample spread of 717 basis points. One speaker interpreted the premium as lenders pricing in expected value extraction from creditors, rather than morally penalizing Apollo, and clarified that “league table” was his own label for the paper’s measures.

Apollo disputes the methodology, saying it relies on one or two transactions from years ago, though the speakers said the firm has a reputation for aggressiveness. The paper does not determine whether value extracted from creditors outweighs the estimated annual 100-basis-point borrowing cost; Apollo could still benefit equity investors if it extracts enough value. The speakers also differed over whether an “aggressive” label is undesirable: it may be unwelcome, but in finance it can signal determined return-seeking. That reputation could help Apollo market private-equity funds to limited partners, even as the firm now runs much more debt than equity and is trying to move away from the label.