Key Highlights
- | Lee Benson, Deseret NewsLee BensonMon, January 19, 2026 at 1:48 AM UTC·5 min readA couple of blocks past the arena formerly known as The Fabulous Forum, we pulled the rental car into a parking structure.
- The attendant said, “Fifty bucks, pay as you leave.”My son Eric, who was riding shotgun, said, “Not a bad deal.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementClearly we were not in 1984 anymore. Eric and I, along with two grandsons, Jack and Gil, were on our way to Inglewood’s new arena, the Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, who were playing the Boston Celtics that night. But it wasn’t the Clippers-Celtics game we’d come especially to see.
- It was the Dome. Open now for slightly more than a year, the Intuit Dome is the basketball gym you get when a tech multibillionaire who is also a hoops fiend decides to build a basketball gym. Steve Ballmer, the owner of the Clippers and a former Microsoft CEO, has a net worth estimated at $172 billion.
- That makes him the richest owner in not only the NBA but also the NFL, MLB and every other professional sports league in the world. AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt would be $174 billion, but he spent $2 billion to build the Intuit Dome. As soon as it was finished, Time magazine put the Dome on its list of the World’s Greatest Places.
- It is the crown jewel of sports arenas.