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.
![fans per toilet at sporting venues](https://20627419.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hub/20627419/hubfs/The%20Hustle/Assets/Images/993058488-19-News-Brief_2024-02-01T232954.198Z.webp?width=595&height=400&name=993058488-19-News-Brief_2024-02-01T232954.198Z.webp)
“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.