The world’s 10th-richest man poured a chunk of his $80.7B fortune into a historical punching bag of an NBA franchise, upped its value by $2.65B, and is now building the most expensive arena known to man: a $2B+ palace designed to look like a giant basketball net.It’s one hell of a business story — but the most intriguing part of it all? The toilets. Or, as Los Angeles Clippers owner and ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer exuberantly put it: “Toilets, toilets, toilets.”
Thanks to Ballmer’s porcelain-purchasing obsession, the Intuit Dome will have ~1.2k toilets and urinals when it opens later this year.That’s roughly one fixture per 15 seats, more than 2x the typical NBA arena ratio.
“Funflation,” the rising cost to attend live entertainment events, is real — prices for sports tickets soared 25.1% from 2022 to 2023. The average cost for a family of four to attend an NBA game — buying four cheap seats, a parking spot, two beers, two sodas, and four hot dogs — is a runaway train at $304.64.
The average ticket price for the Clippers’ chief competition, the LA Lakers, is $518.Let’s assume, with 48 minutes of play, 15 minutes for halftime, and an hour’s worth of breaks (i.e., timeouts, fouls, bats getting loose), a fan spends ~123 minutes in the arena.Waiting in bathroom lines for 25 of those minutes eats up 20% of the event.Spending $518, with $103 worth of toilet-waiting time, is not a great value.
