For about a year, my friend and podcast co-host Justin Voithofer kept telling me I had to listen to a podcast called Pablo Torre Finds Out. I finally did, and now I can’t stop returning to one investigation in particular.

Torre and his small team spent the better part of a year on the Los Angeles Clippers, their wealthy owner Steve Ballmer, and a now-bankrupt company called Aspiration. The trail began with two code names buried in a stack of internal documents from Aspiration’s bankruptcy – “KL2” and “Aspire.” You don’t need to be Edward R. Murrow, Torre noted in an April 2026 interview, to connect “KL2” to an NBA player who wears number 2 named Kawhi Leonard.

What he assembled from more than 3,000 pages of records and numerous sources was a portrait of how money can move in the shadows. Ballmer had put tens of millions into Aspiration, a green bank that the Clippers worked with as they constructed a new arena. Aspiration, in turn, signed the Clippers’ star, Kawhi Leonard, to a $28 million endorsement deal for which former employees say he was never once asked to do anything to actually promote the company.

The implication was plain enough that 11 defrauded investors later folded Ballmer into their lawsuit: that a man worth roughly $145 billion, currently the 14th richest person on earth, had opened a secret channel to pay his own player and circumvent the NBA’s salary cap. In the spring of 2026 the reporting won a Pulitzer Prize. Ballmer denies any wrongdoing and says he was conned. He’s also attacked Torre’s investigative reporting as a “relentless vitriolic public campaign… principally based on anonymized gossip.”

The detail that stays with me is something NBA coaches and executives told Torre off the record – that the league has little appetite to discipline its richest owner, because his fortune is simply too useful to the enterprise. Indeed, as of June 2026, the NBA’s internal investigation is ongoing and, as Torre and his team have acknowledged, they expect little to come from this months-long effort. This is just the latest example of the lack of accountability for the misdeeds of the affluent present everywhere in American life in the 2020s.

I didn’t come to Torre’s show for basketball. I came because I love the craft of investigative journalism, and Torre’s is the real thing – months of work, thousands of documents, sources who risk something to talk, and the patience to follow a thread wherever it may lead. At some point in listening to one of the episodes in the currently 10-part series I had something of an epiphany: that what he was describing dealt with much more than just the NBA or professional sports.  

I have come to believe, in recent years, that we are living through a Second Gilded Age. A handful of tech barons and financiers have assembled fortunes so vast they bend the country to their preferences, reorder its politics, and buy its silences. A president treats the office as his own family business, and members of Congress and the Supreme Court tend quietly to their own enrichment. We hear the word “unprecedented” a great deal lately. The corruption running out of the White House may well be; the untouchable power of the very rich, and the public officials who serve it, is not. We have been here before, and we know how the last age like it ended.

The first Gilded Age rose out of the economic wreckage of the Civil War, when the Industrial Revolution roared into full force and railroads, coal, and steel manufactured America’s original financial titans. I grew up in the country those men built – and broke. In the anthracite fields of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, the Reading Railroad under Franklin Gowen seized control of the mining, hauling, and sale of hard coal, then set about destroying anyone who stood in his company’s way.

Gowen hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the miners’ union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, served as a prosecutor at the conspiracy trials that followed, and saw 20 Irishmen hanged as “Molly Maguires” – ten of them on a single day in June 1877 that the Coal Region still remembers as Black Thursday. As historian Harold Aurand has pointed out, a private corporation had run the investigation, a private police force made the arrests, and company lawyers tried the cases. The state, Aurand wrote, “only provided the courtroom and hangman.”

Gowen’s turn to monopoly became the template for what followed across the United States: an order of monopolies and trusts, run by a small circle of men who grew fabulously rich while breaking unions, killing workers, and corrupting government at every level to defend what they had taken while squeezing the working and middle classes to take still more.

How did it end?

A Progressive Era dawned, and one of the forces that fueled it was a new kind of journalism. In the pages of McClure’s Magazine and its rivals, a generation of reporters accounted for the wrongs of the era, tracing them fact by fact.

Ida Tarbell dismantled the Standard Oil monopoly that had ruined her own father. Lincoln Steffens traced the rot through city halls in The Shame of the Cities. Upton Sinclair walked into Chicago’s slaughterhouses and came back with The Jungle, aiming for the public’s heart and hitting, by his own admission, its stomach. Ida B. Wells, at enormous personal risk, documented the lynchings the rest of the country preferred not to see. Together with many others, they proved this “golden age” was only gilded – a thin layer of gold pressed over exploitation and graft.

Their work produced real consequences: the trusts broken up, the direct election of senators, the first federal food and drug law, and a national reckoning with the child labor that filled the very coal breakers where hundreds of boys picked slate a few miles from my home at the dawn of the 20th century.

Nowhere was the veneer thinner than in my own backyard. When anthracite coal miners struck in 1902, the operators’ spokesman – Reading president George Baer, who held Gowen’s old chair and owed it to J. P. Morgan, the financier who saved the railroad from bankruptcy a decade earlier – answered a William F. Clark’s plea for compromise with a letter that did more for the United Mine Workers than any union organizer could.

The interests of the laboring man, Baer wrote, would be protected not by labor agitators but “by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.” Reprinted in papers from coast to coast, it earned him a nickname – “Divine Right” Baer – and the sentiment so boldly and openly stated horrified ordinary Americans into recognizing exactly what they were dealing with.*Insert my most hated 21st century cliche – “he said the quiet part out loud.”*

The reporters who exposed all this did not choose the name that history knows them as. Theodore Roosevelt gave it to them in 1906, reaching into Pilgrim’s Progress for the figure of the man with the muck-rake, so fixed on the filth at his feet that he never looked up to the crown above him.

Roosevelt meant it as a rebuke, but the era’s investigative journalists wore it as a badge of honor. They wielded it against the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer – the sensational, profitable, fact-optional journalism that distracted the public and helped stampede the country into war and empire at the century’s turn. Working alongside union organizers and reform politicians, the muckrakers helped bust the trusts and bring concentrated power to heel.

Which brings me back to Pablo Torre, and to why a sports podcast should matter to anyone thinking about the current shape of American power and the state of journalism. The institutions that once did this work have, many of them, been captured by the very fortunes they ought to be scrutinizing. The Washington Post now answers to Jeff Bezos. CBS and 60 Minutes answer to a new owner, David Ellison, and to a hand-picked editor, Bari Weiss, who in December shelved a finished segment on the Trump administration’s deportations – a decision one of the program’s own correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi, called corporate censorship in a memo to her colleagues.

But the muck is still getting raked in 2026 – investigative journalism by independent reporters working outside the captured institutions, with the same unglamorous tools the originals used: the document, the inside source, the patient refusal to look away or capitulate to the overweening power of money.

Torre is one. There are many more. An age of barons does not end because the barons tire of winning. It ends when enough people insist on seeing what the thin veneer of gold is hiding, and when enough reporters are willing to scrape it off. We have done it once before and the evidence is piling up that it is time to do it again.

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