When Josh Harris and David Blitzer purchased the Philadelphia 76ers in 2011, David Stern reportedly “placed” Michael Rubin as a late addition to the group.
Rubin had recently sold his company GSI Commerce to eBay for $2.4 billion and he had done business with the NBA since 1999.
“David said, ‘Michael, I thought about this. You need to go in and be a real partner,'” Rubin tells ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne. “I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because if anything goes wrong, you work for f—ing me and I can control you. And so you’re f—ing doing this, because I need someone in this group that I control.'”
Rubin completed his divestment as a limited partner of the Sixers in 2022 as Fanatics entered the gambling space.