Knowing when to head for the exits is how the rich stay rich.

Earlier today, I came across this little article on Y! Finance: 6 years for multimillion-dollar fraud, involved Miami Heat.

To my eye, as an outside observer removed from the sport by a parsec or two, this struck me as a attempt by the NBA to prove that the NFL doesn’t have exclusive dominion over the stupidest fans and players in American pro sports, and that the matter was still very much deserving of further debate.ⁱ So I threw it across the desk of my personal sports insider:

The Outsider: As if the Donald Sterling shmozzle wasn’t embarrassing enough for the NBA: “6 years for multimillion-dollar fraud, involved Miami Heat.”
The Insider: The league was probably pretty happy with the entire Sterling debacle – $2 billion sale drove up the “value” of the rest of the franchises.

TO: pets.com drove up the “value” of every other internet stock in 1998 too… Myspace sold for $1bn to Time Warner and drove up the value of every other social media thingy in much the same way. FB is still riding it.
TI: Similar but not – there are a finite number of NBA franchises and now two more are for sale. Including Prokhorov’s Nets.

TO: Mikhail knows when to head for the exits at the right time. Sorta how you become a billionaire and keep it! The “finite” thing is worthless if it’s an illiquid market. And seeing as how it’s denominated in worthless USD, the market is even poorer.
TI: Also helps to get gifted all the copper in Russia.

TO: Gift nothing. He wasn’t born with the copper in his mouth. He hustled.
TI: Sorry he has nickel – not copper. He also loaned the Russian govt $ in the 90s.

TO: So he hustled for enough money to bail out an entire fucking country and he got “gifted” something ? I’m telling you: straight hustler, this guy.
TI: True enough – he saw an opportunity and seized it.

TO: And the writing is on the wall for the usd. Mikhail can’t wait to buy some 17% Russian bonds. He’s also 6’8″ and not even 50 years old. Jeebus. Oh, and worth ~$11 bn. [googles] “Prokhorov will have spent $200 million to gain 80 percent controlling interest in the team, plus 45 percent of Barclays Center” plus some other bonds and debt, but barely a half billion altogether.ⁱⁱ
TI: Will sell for $1.5+

TO: If he can walk away with even $1.5 bn, it’ll be yet another embarrassing US defeat at the hands of Russia. It will undoubtedly be an American who buys it. No Saudi, no Chinese, no Russian, no Swiss, no one else will touch anything so toxic.
TI: Ya it will be an idiot silicon or hedge fund guy.

TO: What’s the other team for sale?
TI: Atlanta Hawks.

TO: [googles] Good grief… ANOTHER jew being “offensive”
TI: Ya couple layers to that one – owner SELF REPORTED the things he said. As if he wanted to sell the team…

TO: As if… How convenient.
TI: What is the world sensitive to right now? Oh ya! I did that once three years ago! Find those emails!

TO: Just to rile up the self-contradicting #jesuischarlie-ists, force a sale, and make a little profit. The gall! Lol. “The world” indeed.

Getting rich, though it rarely is, can be just blind luck. That’s why everyone plays -EV state lotteries, right?

Now staying rich, on the other hand, as our Russian friend Mikhail Prokhorov illustrates, is the next level in measuring those deterministic causes. After all, money is merely an effect, not a cause; and holding on to wealth, growing it, caching it away from the prying eyes of states and similar hordes of bandits is no small task. Many fail at it, as the corpses of a thousand Bitcoin “early adopters” well demonstrates, which makes multi-generational wealth one of the most impressive feats man can accomplish.

So ya, some arriviste n*ggers thought they could make a quick buck and got scammed, what else is new. At the same time, their bosses are taking their chips off the table while the going is good because to stay ahead you have to stay ahead.

This whole Miami Heat embarrassment is all too reminiscent of retards like Gavin who blab to FT about how they’re selling their stolen bitcoins to buy fiat stocks when stocks are at all-time highs!, which is basically the opposite of reading the writing on the wall.

Because that’s what you do when you have dishonest handlers instead of honest shepherds telling you which way is up.

You miss your exit.

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1. A similar war is currently being waged between Reddit and CoinDesk. It’s a fierce one!↩
2. The deal happened in May 2010. So Prokhorov tripled his investment in call it 5 years. But does he really have triple the purchasing power he did 5 years ago? Art says “no!”↩