On top of that, the problem with gambling is that both outcomes feed the addiction.
If you win, the dopamine makes you want to gamble even more and win even more.
If you lose, then you need to gamble again, in order for your winnings to help dig you out of the losses hole.
That part makes sense to me. If you have placed your trust in someone enough to give them access to your bank account(s), over those 5 years there isn’t going to be one noticeable $16m drop - there’s money coming in and out of that account, and the general trend of it is far more coming in than out. It seems far-fetched at first, but I could see it happening.
What really surprises me is that he didn’t seem to have any other financial experts managing his money, or at least monitoring things. But athletes continue to not surprise me when it comes to doing (or not doing) really dumb things.
I read an article (maybe even from a link in this thread) that said Ohtani is about as extreme an example of a diamond rat as you could find. He lives for baseball, it’s the only thing he thinks about. Said article indicated how many people were shocked to hear he got married. “How did that happen? When does he go out?”
Apparently one of the minor leagues in Japan required new players to live in dormitories for the first year (or two?). Players couldn’t wait until they could live wherever they wanted to. Except Ohtani. He still lived in the dorms so he could be close to the facilities. Why would he need to live somewhere else? Everything he was interested in was right there.
Anyway, the obvious point being that it seems very plausible that he’s the type that if asked, “How do you manage your finances?” would answer, “I have people who do that. I play baseball.” $16M is an amount unfathomable to us mere mortals, but to a bazillionaire who continues to live a very simple life, it’s change he lost in the couch.
I think he’s clean.
inb4 yakuza conspiracy theories
~Max
This seems to happen with actors and pop artists all the time too.
This is exactly right, I think. People are skeptical that someone, even a millionaire, wouldn’t notice $16M disappearing from the ledger. But the reality is, that’s not what would happen. If I’m a successful athlete and I’m paying casual attention to my wealth, do I recognize there’s a problem if the bottom line goes up by (say) $63M over a twelve-month period instead of going up by $79M? Probably not.
Going by what I read and can’t remember where, as could be expected he has multiple accounts. Most of the accounts are monitored by multiple people (agent, manager, accountant etc). One account Mizuhara convinced the others that Ohtani wanted to keep private. As Ohtani’s closest assistant and friend he maintained access. On top of that he impersonated Ohtani to the bank to get more authority to move funds. It sounds plausible to me. Also Ohtani cooperated fully with authorities including giving access to all of his electronics and phone
Well, then, Ohtani’s ignorance is even more justified.
Let’s make it artificially simple and say Ohtani was earning $50 million in endorsements every single year and made $30 million more in pure salary. Then he made nearly $400 million.
A shortfall of $16 million might go reasonably unnoticed, especially if Ohtani had other investments and his whole portfolio was going up and down in the middle of Covid, etc.
Exactly. It wasn’t 16 mil all at once. It was a million here and a million there. That’s easily how much his portfolio could have varied in a day. Which is irrelevant because he never looked at it. He was reasonably humble and frugal for a guy with his wealth and when he wanted something he just got it.
That all sounds plausible to me. Unbelievably rich young people can be overly trusting and careless about their finances. But for his agent and accountant to be “convinced” that Ohtani wanted this account completely inaccessible to them is something else again; “overly trusting and careless” is exactly what they get paid for not being.
A number of celebrities have had similar problems and ended up having to delay their retirement. Billy Joel and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for example.
There are still some unanswered questions, though, as Nate Silver describes in his latest Substack post, which I don’t think I’m allowed to link to. According to the indictment, Mizuhara lost 40 million dollars to this bookmaker, but only stole 16 from Ohtani. Where did the other 24 million dollars come from? Also, their math indicates that Mizuhara overall lost about 12% of what he wagered, which would be almost impossible to do. Just betting randomly should only give you about a 5% loss.
Nate thinks the likeliest explanation is that the indictment was written by someone who’s not good at math and wasn’t adequately proofread. Which is embarrassing for the Feds, but shouldn’t materially affect the course of the trial; they’ll just amend the complaint. Note that if we assume the indictment is correct about the total money wagered, but that the loss was actually “only” 16M rather than 40M, then the math does work out to right around the expected 5% loss.
Not really, that’s what the casinos want you to believe.
If I go to Ceasar’s sports book with a $1000, and make 100 blind $10 bets. I’d expect the lose about 5%, as you said. So now I have $950, I’m still at Caesar’s, and the next round of games is about to start. 95 $10 bets later, and I’ve lost another 5%. And the slow turtle march to bankruptcy begins…
Dane Cook basically lost everything. His half-brother was his business manager and he was being fed fake statements.
if I remember billy joel in the early 90s went bankrupt because his accountant who was his bro in law stole 30 mil from him over 25 years or so …
that reminds me of a day about a decade or more ago when bill gates still owned and ran MS …they announced the losses they took on the original box game system and the stock went down in the double digits and gates supposedly lost 60 mil that day (it went back up after a few days) and gates had no idea on how much he lost …and said something to the point that once it went public he didn’t pay attention to the stock prices as thas one ulcer he didn’t need
Right, but if you bet $1000, lose $50, then bet the remaining $950 and lose $47.50, you haven’t lost $97.50 of $1000 wagered, you’ve lost $97.50 of $1950 wagered. If you add up the total amounts bet and lost over any reasonably long period of time, it should come out to close to 5%.
That makes sense. I suppose when you’re dealing with an illegal bookie, you’re not being given the most competitive odds available.
And if he knows that you like to bet on, say, a particular team, you’re probably getting worse odds than his other customers get on that team. So the expected ROI is probably less with an illegal bookie than with the sportsbooks. I find it hard to believe that explains all the difference between 5% and 12%, though.
I could see a degenerate gambler trying to hit it big with crazy big parlays. I bet the variance on a series of 12-leg parlays could crank your loss percentage really high until you finally hit on one.
That’s also an excellent point. Parlays are the crack of sports betting.