Two billion dollars is a lot of money, even in the disproportionately highfalutin world of professional sports franchises, but that’s what former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer paid to buy the LA Clippers in the wake of the Donald Sterling mess. You might think that being forced to sell amid a tsunami of bad PR would have netted the Sterling Family Trust a bunch of bargain-basement offers. Not so. Instead they got a figure that casts the LA Clippers—the Clippers, for God’s sake—as the seventh most valuable sports franchise on Earth (according to Forbes), ahead of the rest of the NBA and the entire NFL (apart from the Cowboys), and just a shade behind the LA Dodgers. All that’s left is for the Clippers to win a league title, which they haven’t done… ever.
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