Donald Sterling Is Going To Make An Obscene Amount Of Money By Being Forced To Sell The Clippers
AP
Donald Sterling bought the Los Angeles Clippers for a reported $12.5 million in 1981.It's plausible that he could sell it for $1.25 billion, 100-times the amount of bought it for, if NBA commissioner Adam Silver gets his way and forces Sterling to give up the team.
It would require a three-fourths majority vote by the other 29 NBA voters to force Sterling to sell. Silver implied at his press conference on Tuesday that he has the votes. If the owners agree to oust Sterling, Silver and the league will be the ones in charge of the sale, not Sterling, according to Grantland's Zach Lowe.
It's an unprecedented embarrassment for Sterling in every way. He'll go down at the owner who was so racist that the league took away his team.
But he's also going to get even richer.
Forbes values the Clippers at $575 million, but NBA insiders think that's low. As ESPN's Bill Simmons noted earlier this month, it's hard to put a value on NBA franchises because there are so few of them.
Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo reports that prospective owners are already lining up and there's going to be a bidding war that "exceeds $1 billion."