Having worked a lot before on the accounting/tax side with professionals (dentists/doctors/orthodontists), I 100% buy that he didn't notice the money is gone. If you make a lot of money, enough that you don't really need to be concerned with budgeting, and you are not very comfortable with the area most of these people just want to pay someone to make the tax/accounting/numbers go away, and talk to them like once a year about how things are looking.
It isn't that they are dumb, they are obviously very skilled in the areas they are interested in, but they don't really want to think about this stuff, or have to deal with the minutia. And this extends to actually looking at the accounts themselves. Half of the time these people don't even get the statements on their accounts, we have their lawyers and bankers just email or send paper copies of everything to us directly with their consent, since they don't want to deal with it, and it avoids delays and missing info.
So then multiply that by the fact that Ohtani famously does not care about anything beyond baseball, for a professional baseball player, and that he was reliant on the con man as his main translator, and ya, it seems plausible to me.
There was actually a fun Bobby Lee interview a little while back where he talks about the fact he literally does not know how much money he has, he just calls his accountant before making a large purchase and asks can I do this? I have been in the room for the other end of that call many times before, and its a set up that seems common with people who have money who didn't get it by being business people.
The most implausible part to me is that a degenerate gambler, who is sitting in an MLB dugout every day and close to one of the best players in the game - never bet on baseball?
One of my life maxim's is that 90% of what people ascribe to conspiracies can be explained by stupidity, sloth, or both. Early in my career, I worked in the prosecutor's office and I can attest that the math skills among the investigators and my colleagues were mostly lacking. It seems likely to me that Ohtani was out $16M--that should be pretty easy to figure out. The extent of the gambling losses, though, as Nate has pointed out, depend upon the bets being made. I am guessing that the bookie at some point figured out he was never going to get paid.
I have seen many instances of trust and betrayal, and yes, it is not uncommon among relatively well-to-do people. What is unusual in this instance is: a) the amount and b) that it is public. Many inside jobs like this, especially thefts within a family unit, used to go unreported. They would only get discovered when a third party was harmed--like if check bounced or if an agent or advisor did not get paid on a timely basis. The more closed a financial system is, and the one between Ohtani and Mizuhara appears to have been quite closed, the higher is the danger of fraud.
Maybe this helps explain why Ohtani wanted defer so much money. He was like "damn, I'm making a lot of money right now, but my bank account empties pretty fast. I want to make sure I have a large income for decades, so I don't blow it all right now."
It surprises me that the leagues don't require Big4 accounting firms be hired. All the firms have high net worth specialist partners that are particularly watchful over managers and other agents for their clients. I worked in San Diego and we have a Japanese manager come over just to help the Sanyo executives and they make way less money than Ohtani.
If I remember right he was paying 500k a week towards his debt with the bookie. Once he was in too deep the book had a choice to cut him off from any more action risking him deciding to cut the bookie off from paying him his weekly payments or keep letting him get in deeper and giving him the illusion of a hot streak and getting him even or lower in debt. At the amount Mizuhura was in debt I doubt if the bookie even cared if he won or lost his bets as long as he got his 500k every week. I think there were even some texts to that effect between them.
I'm surprised his banker and accountant only spoke English. I used to work for a major international bank, and we made a point of employing bilingual staff for the benefit of our "high value customers" which Ohtani certainly would have qualified as. It's not like Japanese is an obscure language where it's hard to find professionals that speak Japanese, English, and also have a business degree.
Nate, just one thing about rich folks... Never underestimate their disregard for their finances. They are very, very talented at what they do... So good that they really see very little else (or even care to). I mean even quite smart folks were taken for decades by Bernie Madoff, so Ohtani not being aware of this doesn't surprise me in the least. His interpreter was incredibly astute when it came to keeping him in the dark.
Think about that interpretor's job... The amount of actual interpreting would average to probably, what, 30 minutes a day? It's like when I see my cats rolling a jar of their treats to eventually open them. They have all day and all night!
My gut is the government is just messing up the numbers. Probably totalling all the losses together and discounting the wins. Like the opposite of the people who go to Vegas and tell you they won a bunch, ignoring that they lost more often.
One thought I had about Mizuhara - it looks like he largely fabricated his resume up until he was hired by the baseball team during Ohtani's rookie year in Japan as a translator for English-speaking players. Is it possible his plan all along was to do whatever he could to get close to Ohtani to use him as a golden ticket? I would imagine people were already talking about Ohtani as a likely mega-star at the time, and Mizuhara seems like the kind of con artist who would attempt something like this.
I agree with most of the article, but I'd quibble with this, depending on how it is read:
"a level of trust that I’m not sure if it’s healthy to have in anyone except perhaps spouses and other immediate family members (and maybe not even them)."
If you aren't willing to trust your husband or wife with your money, you shouldn't trust her with your heart and your life, either. I'm with you on other immediate family members though. I know my brother would never rob me, but I just wouldn't see the need to give him my bank accounts. If I die, though, he'd be the executor of my estate, so...maybe I am trusting him that much?
Here’s what I don’t get about Nate’s second question: Why does it matter what Bowyer’s records say Mizuhara owes him? It’s not like there are other bettors he needs to pay off with that loss — it’s just pure profit for him, right?
Obviously even illegal bookies will have credit limits to prevent them from being St. Petersburg’d. But it’s clear here that Bowyer wasn’t worried about that, and at some point in the texts he effectively waived Mizuhara’s credit limit as long as the weekly $500k checks kept coming in.
That’s probably when the overall paper balance ballooned to $25M or more — Bowyer was probably not really expecting to collect on all of it, but was happy to let Mizuhara keep pretending to bet if it meant the checks kept coming.
Even if Mizuhara stole $41M, it's plausible for Ohtani not to have noticed.
- The AZ account was opened in 2018. Adding $2M/year to Nate's table gets to $44.5M deposited. That losses approached but didn't exceed this gross amount may not be a coincidence.
- Ohtani's other income & accounts were likely sufficient to cover his lifestyle, including taxes on baseball income.
- He's reported to have historically lived on a $1k/month allowance even while making millions. Even if that's not true, he was probably accumulating significant wealth prior to 2022.
- It's possible that taxes were his largest expense by a mile, but could have been covered by endorsement income. Spending millions requires time (e.g. private jet flights add up, but only if you are taking them frequently) or investing in hard assets, especially ones requiring $s to maintain. There's no indication either applies to Ohtani.
- I wonder if Mizuhara would have been caught if the baseball income spiked before endorsement income.
- The reports sponsorship amounts may be low. FTX paid Brady/Bundchen ~$25M/year, Steph Curry ~$12M per year, and paid Larry David $10M for a single ad. If Ohtani got $10M/year from FTX, the $20/$35M numbers might be right or might be a low estimate.
But it doesn't explain the $16 vs. $41M discrepancy unless the $25 was incurred recently and rapidly, possibly with the bookie having visibility to the account balance to substantiate the line of credit.
One more possible explanation (for at least part of the) gap between $16 and $41 million -- namely, Mizuhara greatly increased the size of the bets (and the payments) near the end of the saga. After all, all we know (I think) that there were nine $500,000 transfers sometime back but that very recently there were $1 million and, then $2 million transfers (with the Bookie expanding the credit line accordingly) while Mizuhara greatly increased the size of the bets near the end in an attempt to recoup his losses. Note, this could also explain the seemingly impossible 12%+ loss rate. A bad run on 50 $2 million bets in the final weeks (say 29-30 losers), could explain a lot.
no serious bookie would extend this type of credit to this particular individual based on his income...seems hard to believe that Ohtani didn't "guarantee" the risk to the bookie...
Having worked a lot before on the accounting/tax side with professionals (dentists/doctors/orthodontists), I 100% buy that he didn't notice the money is gone. If you make a lot of money, enough that you don't really need to be concerned with budgeting, and you are not very comfortable with the area most of these people just want to pay someone to make the tax/accounting/numbers go away, and talk to them like once a year about how things are looking.
It isn't that they are dumb, they are obviously very skilled in the areas they are interested in, but they don't really want to think about this stuff, or have to deal with the minutia. And this extends to actually looking at the accounts themselves. Half of the time these people don't even get the statements on their accounts, we have their lawyers and bankers just email or send paper copies of everything to us directly with their consent, since they don't want to deal with it, and it avoids delays and missing info.
So then multiply that by the fact that Ohtani famously does not care about anything beyond baseball, for a professional baseball player, and that he was reliant on the con man as his main translator, and ya, it seems plausible to me.
There was actually a fun Bobby Lee interview a little while back where he talks about the fact he literally does not know how much money he has, he just calls his accountant before making a large purchase and asks can I do this? I have been in the room for the other end of that call many times before, and its a set up that seems common with people who have money who didn't get it by being business people.
The most implausible part to me is that a degenerate gambler, who is sitting in an MLB dugout every day and close to one of the best players in the game - never bet on baseball?
One of my life maxim's is that 90% of what people ascribe to conspiracies can be explained by stupidity, sloth, or both. Early in my career, I worked in the prosecutor's office and I can attest that the math skills among the investigators and my colleagues were mostly lacking. It seems likely to me that Ohtani was out $16M--that should be pretty easy to figure out. The extent of the gambling losses, though, as Nate has pointed out, depend upon the bets being made. I am guessing that the bookie at some point figured out he was never going to get paid.
I have seen many instances of trust and betrayal, and yes, it is not uncommon among relatively well-to-do people. What is unusual in this instance is: a) the amount and b) that it is public. Many inside jobs like this, especially thefts within a family unit, used to go unreported. They would only get discovered when a third party was harmed--like if check bounced or if an agent or advisor did not get paid on a timely basis. The more closed a financial system is, and the one between Ohtani and Mizuhara appears to have been quite closed, the higher is the danger of fraud.
Maybe this helps explain why Ohtani wanted defer so much money. He was like "damn, I'm making a lot of money right now, but my bank account empties pretty fast. I want to make sure I have a large income for decades, so I don't blow it all right now."
It surprises me that the leagues don't require Big4 accounting firms be hired. All the firms have high net worth specialist partners that are particularly watchful over managers and other agents for their clients. I worked in San Diego and we have a Japanese manager come over just to help the Sanyo executives and they make way less money than Ohtani.
If I remember right he was paying 500k a week towards his debt with the bookie. Once he was in too deep the book had a choice to cut him off from any more action risking him deciding to cut the bookie off from paying him his weekly payments or keep letting him get in deeper and giving him the illusion of a hot streak and getting him even or lower in debt. At the amount Mizuhura was in debt I doubt if the bookie even cared if he won or lost his bets as long as he got his 500k every week. I think there were even some texts to that effect between them.
I'm surprised his banker and accountant only spoke English. I used to work for a major international bank, and we made a point of employing bilingual staff for the benefit of our "high value customers" which Ohtani certainly would have qualified as. It's not like Japanese is an obscure language where it's hard to find professionals that speak Japanese, English, and also have a business degree.
Nate, just one thing about rich folks... Never underestimate their disregard for their finances. They are very, very talented at what they do... So good that they really see very little else (or even care to). I mean even quite smart folks were taken for decades by Bernie Madoff, so Ohtani not being aware of this doesn't surprise me in the least. His interpreter was incredibly astute when it came to keeping him in the dark.
Think about that interpretor's job... The amount of actual interpreting would average to probably, what, 30 minutes a day? It's like when I see my cats rolling a jar of their treats to eventually open them. They have all day and all night!
My gut is the government is just messing up the numbers. Probably totalling all the losses together and discounting the wins. Like the opposite of the people who go to Vegas and tell you they won a bunch, ignoring that they lost more often.
I think Ohtani’s track record of coming to the US 2 years before he should have shows how little he cares about optimizing and tracking his earnings
One thought I had about Mizuhara - it looks like he largely fabricated his resume up until he was hired by the baseball team during Ohtani's rookie year in Japan as a translator for English-speaking players. Is it possible his plan all along was to do whatever he could to get close to Ohtani to use him as a golden ticket? I would imagine people were already talking about Ohtani as a likely mega-star at the time, and Mizuhara seems like the kind of con artist who would attempt something like this.
I agree with most of the article, but I'd quibble with this, depending on how it is read:
"a level of trust that I’m not sure if it’s healthy to have in anyone except perhaps spouses and other immediate family members (and maybe not even them)."
If you aren't willing to trust your husband or wife with your money, you shouldn't trust her with your heart and your life, either. I'm with you on other immediate family members though. I know my brother would never rob me, but I just wouldn't see the need to give him my bank accounts. If I die, though, he'd be the executor of my estate, so...maybe I am trusting him that much?
Here’s what I don’t get about Nate’s second question: Why does it matter what Bowyer’s records say Mizuhara owes him? It’s not like there are other bettors he needs to pay off with that loss — it’s just pure profit for him, right?
Obviously even illegal bookies will have credit limits to prevent them from being St. Petersburg’d. But it’s clear here that Bowyer wasn’t worried about that, and at some point in the texts he effectively waived Mizuhara’s credit limit as long as the weekly $500k checks kept coming in.
That’s probably when the overall paper balance ballooned to $25M or more — Bowyer was probably not really expecting to collect on all of it, but was happy to let Mizuhara keep pretending to bet if it meant the checks kept coming.
Even if Mizuhara stole $41M, it's plausible for Ohtani not to have noticed.
- The AZ account was opened in 2018. Adding $2M/year to Nate's table gets to $44.5M deposited. That losses approached but didn't exceed this gross amount may not be a coincidence.
- Ohtani's other income & accounts were likely sufficient to cover his lifestyle, including taxes on baseball income.
- He's reported to have historically lived on a $1k/month allowance even while making millions. Even if that's not true, he was probably accumulating significant wealth prior to 2022.
- It's possible that taxes were his largest expense by a mile, but could have been covered by endorsement income. Spending millions requires time (e.g. private jet flights add up, but only if you are taking them frequently) or investing in hard assets, especially ones requiring $s to maintain. There's no indication either applies to Ohtani.
- I wonder if Mizuhara would have been caught if the baseball income spiked before endorsement income.
- The reports sponsorship amounts may be low. FTX paid Brady/Bundchen ~$25M/year, Steph Curry ~$12M per year, and paid Larry David $10M for a single ad. If Ohtani got $10M/year from FTX, the $20/$35M numbers might be right or might be a low estimate.
But it doesn't explain the $16 vs. $41M discrepancy unless the $25 was incurred recently and rapidly, possibly with the bookie having visibility to the account balance to substantiate the line of credit.
One more possible explanation (for at least part of the) gap between $16 and $41 million -- namely, Mizuhara greatly increased the size of the bets (and the payments) near the end of the saga. After all, all we know (I think) that there were nine $500,000 transfers sometime back but that very recently there were $1 million and, then $2 million transfers (with the Bookie expanding the credit line accordingly) while Mizuhara greatly increased the size of the bets near the end in an attempt to recoup his losses. Note, this could also explain the seemingly impossible 12%+ loss rate. A bad run on 50 $2 million bets in the final weeks (say 29-30 losers), could explain a lot.
no serious bookie would extend this type of credit to this particular individual based on his income...seems hard to believe that Ohtani didn't "guarantee" the risk to the bookie...