Tech
Steve Ballmer blasts founder he backed who pleaded guilty to fraud: ‘I was duped and feel silly’
Silicon Valley tends to tolerate a certain amount of founder exaggeration when pitching investors, often dismissing it as part of selling a vision. But some choices cross the line and can lead to jail time for founders and scandal for their investors.
A case in point is Joseph Sanberg, whose once high-flying fintech startup Aspiration Partners was backed by a roster of tech celebrities, including former Microsoft CEO and current Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. In August 2025, Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and defrauding multiple investors and lenders, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Ahead of sentencing, which is scheduled for Monday, victims were invited to describe their experience with Sanberg to the judge. Ballmer did so, and publicly. Ballmer’s lawyers said in the letter that he has lost money, been vilified, and that the NBA is investigating allegations stemming from the association.
Sanberg co-founded green fintech startup Aspiration Partners, which offered what it called sustainable banking services like credit cards and investment products that avoided fossil fuels. The startup promised to “automatically plant trees with every card purchase.” In 2021, it announced plans to go public via a SPAC merger at a value of $2.3 billion, though that transaction never took place.
The DOJ alleged that Aspiration booked and recognized revenue from entities held by Sanberg, who made the company appear as if it had a steady stream of customers and revenue that it didn’t actually have. The agency further alleged he defrauded investors by showing them a fabricated letter from Aspiration’s audit committee that said the company had $250 million in available cash and equivalents when it had less than $1 million. The DOJ alleged that Sanberg, along with a board member who also pleaded guilty, falsified financial records to obtain $145 million in loans.
When Ballmer shared his letter on X, asking the judge to consider the harm done to him in sentencing, he wrote, “I was duped and feel silly about that. Everyone who believed in Aspiration, including employees, customers and investors, was also duped. Everyone is still tallying the losses.”
The letter says that Ballmer invested a total of $60 million in the company, and lost all of it. Ballmer was not only an investor, but had contracted with Aspiration to provide carbon-offsetting programs for the Clippers and its stadium. Aspiration also became a major Clippers sponsor.
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The billionaire said in the letter that not only did he lose that money, his reputation was negatively affected. He used the letter to deny the reporting of a multi-part series from famed sports podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out that delved into the relationship between the Clippers and Aspiration. The podcast made allegations that Aspiration helped sidestep the salary cap for a star Clippers player. Ballmer’s lawyers called those allegations “misapprehension or intentional disregard of the facts,” in the letter.
Ballmer’s letter also said that as a result of the association with this company, the podcast and other public attention of it, he’s been named in lawsuits. Meanwhile, the NBA said in its own letter regarding Sanberg’s sentencing that it’s investigating the salary cap allegations and Sanberg has been providing evidence, ESPN reported.
While the basketball world is embroiled in all of these downstream developments, the message founders can take from it is clear: If one fabricates financial documents to raise capital, the outcome will very likely be prison.
The Ballmer Group did not respond to our request for comment.
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Tech
Anthropic created a test marketplace for agent-on-agent commerce
In a recent experiment, Anthropic created a classified marketplace where AI agents represented both buyers and sellers, striking real deals for real goods and real money.
The company admitted this test — which it called Project Deal — was only “a pilot experiment with a self-selected participant pool” of 69 Anthropic employees who were given a budget of $100 (paid out via gift cards) to buy stuff from their coworkers.
Nonetheless, Anthropic said it was “struck by how well Project Deal worked,” with 186 deals made, totaling more than $4,000 in value.
The company said it actually ran four separate marketplaces with different models — one that was “real” (where everyone was represented by the company’s most-advanced model, and with deals actually honored after the experiment) and another three for study.
Apparently, when users are represented by more advanced models, they get “objectively better outcomes,” Anthropic said. But users didn’t seem to notice the disparity, raising the possibility of “‘agent quality’ gaps” where “people on the losing end might not realize they’re worse off.”
Also, the initial instructions given to the agents didn’t appear to affect sale likelihood or the negotiated prices.
Tech
Nuclear startup X-energy raises $1B in data center-driven IPO
Nuclear startup X-energy raised $1 billion in its initial public offering yesterday, selling 44.3 million shares for $23 each, a hefty premium above the $16 to $19 per share it was seeking. Initially, the company had hoped to raise around $800 million.
The stock is expected to begin trading on Friday on the Nasdaq Exchange under the ticker XE.
X-energy is building small modular reactors capable of generating electricity or delivering heat to industrial processes. The company has a deal with Dow to provide heat and power to a chemical plant in Texas and another with Amazon to sell as much as 5 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2039. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund led X-energy’s Series C-1 round.
Nuclear startups like X-energy have been buoyed by surging demand for electricity from data centers and other parts of the economy that have been electrifying.
The company says its reactors will generate 80 megawatts of electricity. Each Xe-100 reactor is cooled by helium gas, which flows over billiard ball-sized “pebbles” that are packed with BB-sized TRISO fuel pellets. TRISO fuel, which contains a kernel of uranium wrapped in carbon and silicon, was developed years ago to be safer than existing fuel designs, though it hasn’t been widely used. X-energy says its fuel can withstand higher temperatures, helping to keep the fuel contained and reduce the potential of a meltdown.
Tech
Marked-up Mac minis flood eBay amid shortages driven by AI
Overpriced Mac minis are flooding eBay amid shortages of the sold-out machines, which have become a favored tool for running on-device AI models like OpenClaw.
This week, reports indicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have since extended to other configurations of the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, some outlets noted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and up) are only available to ship starting in June.
As a result, eBay has become a secondary market for these in-demand computers. On the site, various configurations of the M4 Mac mini are available for sale at higher prices than if buying direct from Apple, which is no longer an option.
Apple’s power-efficient Mac minis have become popular devices for testing and running at-home, on-device AI models, beginning with the OpenClaw craze but now extending to OpenClaw alternatives like ZeroClaw, other AI tools from Anthropic and OpenAI, Perplexity Computer, or other specialized local models. Unlike some PCs, Mac minis also run quietly and tend to be more reliable for 24/7 use, compared with laptop computers.
The shortage of the devices also comes alongside an industry-wide memory crunch and plans for a Mac mini refresh, according to Bloomberg. However, refreshes of product lines haven’t led to shortages before.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This perfect storm of supply chain stress and increased demand for AI-friendly machines has inflated the prices of used consumer electronics.
As of Friday morning, M4 base models with the 16GB RAM/256GB SSD configuration were selling at markups like $715-$795 for a new, “open box” model, and as high as $979 for an “excellent” refurbished version. Some “lightly used, pre-owned” Mac minis with this configuration were selling for around $700 — more than $100 more than the price of a new base model.
There was also a single listing for a $925 brand-new M4 Mac mini with the same 16GB RAM and 256GB storage; the listing warned in bright red text: “Last one.”
While you still may be able to score a reasonably priced refurb if you keep a close eye out (or if you win an eBay auction where the bid has started at a lower price point), it seems that the demand for the device is going to keep prices up until Apple’s supply chain refreshes.
And now that the Mac mini is unavailable, Apple has begun to see increased demand for the Mac Studio, too. That computer is also now sold out across several configurations.
As Ars Technica pointed out, you can still get a MacBook Pro with 128GB RAM and larger SSDs within a few weeks, and even the new and popular MacBook Neo is still shipping within two to three weeks. This suggests the real issue is consumer demand for the Mac mini itself.
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