A federal lawsuit filed over the pending sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves claims there’s nothing stopping prospective new owners Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore from relocating the franchise.

Meyer Orbach, who owns 17% of the Timberwolves and Lynx, filed the complaint against current owner Glen Taylor in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on Wednesday.

Orbach, alleging Taylor is in breach of contract, seeks an injunction to pause the sale from moving forward and damages in excess of $300 million. 

The $1.5 billion sale of the two teams was first reported by Front Office Sports on May 13. ESPN was the first outlet to report the lawsuit had been filed.

In multiple interviews, Taylor said terms of the sale would include a provision to keep the Timberwolves in Minneapolis amid speculation the franchise could relocate to Seattle, Las Vegas, or elsewhere.

• The sales agreement — part of another court filing obtained by Front Office Sports — does not have any such language.
• Rodriguez and Lore “will have unfettered discretion to move the Timberwolves and Lynx outside of Minnesota,” the lawsuit stated.

The sale still needs the approval of the NBA’s Board of Governors, too.

Rodriguez and Lore aren’t scheduled to have full control of the team until December 2023, although the sales agreement states they have the option to purchase Taylor’s remaining stake “at any time” after the close of the sale.

The founder and CEO of Amazon said in February that he would step down before the end of 2021, and his departure date was finally announced Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos will give his title to Andy Jassy on July 5, exactly 27 years after Amazon was incorporated. 

Bezos, with a net worth of $188.2 billion, is usually the world’s richest person. (Bernard Arnault, majority owner of LVMH, briefly took the spot this week.) Amazon and Bezos’ personal investment in sports has picked up in recent months.

• March: Secured rights to 21 Yankees games this season and an 11-year package to exclusively stream NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” for around $1 billion each year.
• April: Bezos participated in an $80 million Series C funding round for Overtime, which has a basketball league that will pay 16-18-year-olds over $100,000 per year.
• May: Secured exclusive streaming rights to 16 WNBA games per season in addition to the Commissioner’s Cup.

On the same day as the Bezos announcement, Amazon revealed its purchase of MGM Studios for $8.45 billion, a mere fraction of the company’s $386 billion in 2020 revenue.

Bezos will remain on the Amazon board and may invest further in sports in the near future. He’s reportedly interested in buying an NFL team, with the Washington Football Team listed as a frontrunner. He has enough money to buy every team in the league.

When Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, he said he gave money to politicians because “when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” 

New allegations say that he tried that tactic to end a congressional inquiry into the New England Patriots’ 2007 Spygate scandal.

Both the son and ghostwriter of the late Sen. Arlen Specter said that Trump approached Specter in 2008, promising cash if Specter dropped the Spygate probe, according to an investigation by ESPN.

Specter’s memoir references the meeting but did not name names.

“He told me it was Trump,” his son, Shanin Specter, confirmed to The Washington Post. The senator died in 2012. The accusation was corroborated by his long-time communications aide and ghostwriter Charles Robbins.

The senator felt that the NFL had swept a serious cheating scandal under the rug when it closed its investigation just four days after the Patriots were caught taping New York Jets coaches during a September 2007 game.

• The NFL took away New England’s first-round pick in the 2008 NFL Draft. 
• Fined the Pats $250,000. 
• Fined coach Bill Belicheck $500,000.

Specter later ended the investigation in June 2008 after failing to drum up support for it among his colleagues.

Spokespeople for Trump and Kraft both denied the allegations. Kraft, whose estimated net worth is $6.9 billion, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee. 

Trump donated $11,000 to Specter over his political career.

Short sellers still think they can win the long game against GameStop, but the meme stock is proving them wrong.

GameStop’s stock grew 35% from the start of the week to midday Wednesday, reaching its highest point since its last major rally in March.

Even though national attention has moved on, the video game seller has remained a hotbed of trader activity and corporate moves.

• Short sellers have not given up on the idea that the stock could still tank. 21% of the company’s publicly available shares are held in short sales. 
• But betting against the retailer isn’t working out: short sellers have lost $442 million on GameStop in May alone.
• The company is staffing up to build an Ethereum-based NFT platform. GameStop set up a website to recruit “engineers, designers, gamers, marketers, and community leaders” to its NFT team.

Activist investor Ryan Cohen has led a makeover of the executive team as the company pivots to e-commerce. The chief financial and customer officers have already left, and CEO George Sherman is set to leave on July 31.

Movie theater company AMC, another favorite of retail investors, has also surged since the start of the week, with its stock increasing as much as 58% midday Wednesday.