60 Minutes - 10/13/2024: Pennsylvania Counts, The Vatican's Orphans, Ballmer's Ballgame

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Cecilia Vega travels to the pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania for an in-depth interview with Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a key figure in the election process. From 1950 to 1970, the Vatican sent thousands of Italian children to American Catholics for adoption. The children came on orphan visas — but most of them were not orphans; they were the children of unwed mothers, many of whom were alive. Bill Whitaker speaks with the American adoptees still searching for their Italian families. Jon Wertheim profiles Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft who is now the basketball baron of the LA Clippers. Wertheim goes inside the gleaming Intuit Dome and delves into Ballmer's love of basketball and drive to win a championship.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's move the cheaties votes. We've got about a million votes in there. Let's move them. He seems to be saying that there is cheating going on with mail-in ballots here. There is not. Elections in Pennsylvania have never been more safe and secure

with a voter-verified paper ballot record of every vote that's cast, whether you vote in person on Election Day or you vote by mail. Bella familia, mamma mia. Mary Rilotto grew up in Ohio longing for a large family, only to find out that she had one. A la famiglia.

In Italy, it was years before she could ask her birth mother the most painful question of all. Why was she given away? The church convinced her that it was the best thing for her. And so instead of helping her, it was the best thing for her. And so instead of helping her, it was better for them to make money selling babies. So am I angry at the church? Hell yeah. Among the billionaires who own U.S. pro sports franchises, Steve Ballmer is the wealthiest by far. He bought the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion and has just spent another $2 billion-plus building this place.

Just wait till you hear about the bathrooms. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions.

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With its 19 electoral votes, it is the state where former President Trump and Vice President Harris are spending the most time and money, a combined $436 million, between them and their allies. It's also where the results could take days to count due to a state law that prevents mail-in ballots from being processed early. The anticipated lag, which dragged out Pennsylvania's count in 2020, now has election officials bracing for a repeat of conspiracy theories and violence. At the helm, lifelong Republican Al Schmidt. He stood up to former

President Trump and refused to join attempts to overturn his loss four years ago. As Secretary of State, Schmidt is doing everything he can between now and Election Day to assure residents their votes will count and to take on the lies Trump continues to spread about Pennsylvania. What's the reality? Voter fraud is widespread. Voter fraud never happens. There is no evidence whatsoever that voter fraud takes place in any way that is widespread

at all. If a non-citizen tried to cast a ballot, would you be able to catch it? That's just not something that happens because when it gets identified, there are severe consequences, whether it's prosecution and or deportation from the country. We met Secretary of State Al Schmidt last month in the state capitol in Harrisburg. We have to win Pennsylvania. The night before, former President Trump held a rally just a few hours away where he stoked fears about voting in Pennsylvania. Now we have this stupid stuff where you can vote 45 days early.

I wonder what the hell happens during that 45. Let's move the, see these votes? We've got about a million votes in there. Let's move them. Have you heard what the former president said last night at his rally here in Pennsylvania? No. He seems to be saying that there is cheating going on with mail-in ballots here. There is not. Elections in Pennsylvania have never been more safe and secure with a voter-verified paper ballot record of every vote that's cast, whether you vote in person on Election Day or you vote by mail. Schmidt once had his own doubts about election security. Before becoming Secretary of State, he spent a decade on Philadelphia's Board of Elections,

where he investigated hundreds of claims of voter fraud and changed his mind. Whenever it has occurred, however rarely, it's to affect some very down ticket race that is decided by a handful of votes. It's not to decide who the president of the United States is, or who the governor is, or who a senator is, or anything else like that. As Secretary of State, Schmidt is visiting each of Pennsylvania's 67 counties. Are you registered to vote in Pennsylvania? Your voice matters. Part roadshow, part public relations tour, spreading the gospel of election security. Election day is November 5th. You can vote by mail in advance.

Including a stop at a fair in deep red Columbia County. Nice to meet you. He spent more than 35 minutes trying to convince these local Republicans that they can trust the voting system. Like dead people voting in Philadelphia. You have a public record of when somebody died. You have a public record of when they cast their vote. They have found cases where, quote, dead people have voted. The only cases that I've encountered are when a voter has cast their ballot by mail

and then passed away in between mailing in their vote and their vote being counted. And you can see that. You know, former President Trump's got the rallies and he's got the microphone and he's got the audiences and he can spread his message to thousands if not millions of people. And you're here at the county fair and you've got a stand and you're doing it one to three voters at a time. Yes, you're one at one and a timing it.

You kind of can't compete. But it's also important to have that one onon-one contact, to go to a county fair, to engage with people, to answer their questions. I love you, Philly! Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro told us that choosing Al Schmitt, a lifelong Republican, as his first cabinet pick last year, was intended to send a clear message. Of all the cabinet appointments that you could have made first, why was it Al Schmidt? I made a commitment during my campaign that I was going to appoint a pro-democracy Secretary of State. What were your marching orders to him?

Do your job. Make it so legal, eligible voters have access to the ballot box and that we again have a free and fair, safe and secure election. When you think about secretaries of state, the role, you tend to think that it respectfully is a boring job, a mundane job, an administrative job. How's that working out for you? It is. I mean, elections should be not something to dread. They should be something to celebrate. And voters should feel confident that if they cast their vote, whether it's by mail or in person on election day, that their vote is going to be counted. So in 2020, it took four days to call the election in Pennsylvania. What took so long?

When you have half of your voters vote by mail, like we did in 2020, counting those votes takes time. We saw for ourselves at a ballot intake center in Chester County outside Philadelphia. So this is the actual envelope, and this is where the ballots are returned in. And this is a sample? Correct, yes. Elections Administrator Karen Barsoom showed us how each ballot arrives inside two different envelopes. 94 ballots in one tray.

Processing them is a tedious task, which under Pennsylvania law, cannot start until 7 a.m. on Election Day. So when we do open it, there is another envelope. So hypothetically speaking, if we have 100,000 mail-in ballots, we have to deal with double the amount of envelopes, which is a long process.

And then the ballot comes out. And you can't count it folded like that. Correct. We will need to have a whole different team unfold them, backfold them, to get the creases out as good as we can. How long does it take to process each ballot? Several minutes, it's not like done in a sec.

That window of time between the polls closing and races being called, I think has shown to be a real vulnerability where people seeking to undermine confidence in those results, if they're going to lose, have really exploited. Those four days allowed the big lie to take off. And that's when you start hearing about truckloads of ballots. And that's when you start hearing about, you know, zombie voters.

And that's when all this other stuff really starts pouring in. There have been widespread calls to bring Pennsylvania in line with the majority of other states, where election workers get a head start on opening envelopes and flattening ballots ahead of election day. Why hasn't that changed? You've had four years, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is unique in that we have a divided legislature. We have a Democratic House and a Republican Senate. So getting anything done related to election reform has certainly been a challenge. The message is what? be patient. Our counties are working night and day to count their voters' votes. They're doing so as quickly as they can and with integrity. Our job is to make sure we are constantly just providing the truth to voters to be a reliable source of information.

For Secretary Schmidt, getting out the message can mean late nights answering questions about the electoral process in granular detail. It takes time to count millions of votes. As we saw at this law school in Harrisburg. We're much better prepared today, four years later, than we were. He's teamed up with fellow Republican, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett. The former president has a refrain at his rallies. He says Democrats rigged the election in 2020, and he's not going to let them get away with it this year.

Evidence. Bring it. Any U.S. attorney, any district attorney, bring the evidence and show them. Not what you want. You've got to convince a prosecutor and a court. You've got polls that show some 34 percent of Americans, nearly 70 percent of Republicans, who still to this day believe that Joe Biden didn't win the 2020 election. But I can't change that, because they believe it, because they've heard it so many times. You've said there's a huge amount of people in the middle that can be influenced by the extremes.

Is that who you're trying to educate? Yes. The extremes we're not going to change. But right here, and in a close election, that's very important. We won Pennsylvania twice. We won it twice. We did much better the second time than we did the first time. He continues to say that he won Pennsylvania twice. Donald Trump won in 2016 by about 44,000 votes, and Donald Trump lost in 2020 by about 80,000 votes.

I understand that he's a sore loser. I understand that he wished he would have won in 2020. But attacking this system made up of our neighbors from communities all across Pennsylvania, Republican and Democrat alike, is not the answer. Former President Trump is refusing to commit to accepting the results if he loses. If he does refuse, what happens here in Pennsylvania?

What does that look like? I think it can look, unfortunately, like what it looked like in 2020, If he does refuse, what happens here in Pennsylvania? What does that look like? I think it can look, unfortunately, like what it looked like in 2020, with violence in our communities, with threats to public officials, good public officials like Al Schmidt and the Republican and Democratic clerks of elections. Am I worried about that? Am I concerned about that? Of course I am. 100 years!

In 2020, as the presidential election hung in the balance, all eyes were on the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. Outside, police and protesters surrounded the building. While inside, Al Schmidt oversaw the counting of a record 375,000 mail-in ballots, most of them from Democratic voters. We're winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount of votes. Hours after the polls closed, then-President Trump demanded the counting stop.

We don't want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay? We were working day and night. There was one television that was working, and I happened to be passing it when I heard that speech. So immediately brought together our communications team to begin, through social media platforms, assuring the rest of the world,

whose eyes were on Pennsylvania, that our vote counting was going to continue. But at that point, you've got the president of the United States saying, stop the count. Did you ever feel like you had to stop the count? No, not for a second. After four days, the race in Pennsylvania was finally called for Joe Biden. And with that, he won the White House. Former President Trump went after

Al Schmitt by name on Twitter, and violent threats from Trump's supporters followed. Do you remember the first threat that made you go, I got to take this one seriously? There were threats early on that were pretty generic in nature, but as days went on, they became a lot more specific, providing my address, graphic descriptions of what they would do to my family. They used a picture of your house at one point, I understand. Listed your children's names repeatedly. You had to move your family out of your house for safety?

Yes, they had to relocate for a period, and we had security around the clock for many months. Given all the threats that you faced personally, I've got to ask why you would agree to take this job? Well, everything is on the line. Our entire system of government, our country as it was founded, is on the line. During the 1950s, the Catholic Church in Belgium separated thousands of newborns from their unwed mothers and put them up for adoption, often without the mother's consent. The women were shamed into surrendering their babies by their families and a powerful church. Last month, Pope Francis apologized for those forced adoptions. But Belgians weren't the only victims.

From 1950 to 1970, the Vatican sent 3,500 Italian children to America on something called an orphan visa. The trouble was, most were not orphans. Like their Belgian counterparts, they too were the children of unwed mothers. Many mothers later went searching for their children, only to discover they had been sent across an ocean. Today, thousands of American adoptees are still struggling to piece together their lost lives. It was a day he'll never forget. American adoptee John Campitelli was 28 years old when he was reunited with his Italian birth mother. He'd been searching for her for more than a decade, a mother he'd been told had abandoned him.

My mom said, you know, 28 years have gone by. I've never been able to bake a cake for you for your birthday. She says, I don't care what month it is. I'm going to bake you a cake. We need to celebrate because our prodigal son has finally come home. John Campitelli was born Piero Davi in 1963 in Italy. His mother, Francesca, was unmarried and forced by her family to give him up. He was sent to a Catholic-run institution for the children of unwed mothers.

Shunned and disgraced, Francesca handed her baby to the nuns. Immediately, her name was stripped from the birth records. With the stroke of a pen, Piero Davi became an orphan. Campitelli showed us the church documents that changed his life. It says here, they abandoned him abandoned since birth and their whereabouts are unknown. They knew damn well where my mom was. I mean, she showed her documents when she handed me over. So this is an outright lie. A lie John Campitelli has spent his life unraveling. As soon as he was declared an orphan, he was eligible for adoption and a U.S. visa. He says

his mother told him she had no idea. She had every intention of coming back for him. She said, I never signed a paper anywhere saying that I was willing to give you up. She thought placing you in the institution was temporary? She thought that it would be her right to be able to get me back someday once she got her life together.

She never signed you away? No. She said, I placed you because I couldn't keep you at that point in time because of the family situation. But I never consented to the adoption or to the fact that you would leave Italy and you'd be far from me for the rest of my life. Piero Davi was one of thousands of children born out of wedlock that the Vatican repackaged as orphans. The church arranged the visas, helped by a 1950 U.S. law that broadened the definition of orphan to include a child with one parent but one who couldn't provide care. With that leeway, the orphan program boomed. For Piero's mother and thousands like her, it was devastating to learn the child she'd entrusted to the church had disappeared.

It seems that many of these mothers had no idea that their children were being sent to the United States. Could they do anything about it? No, absolutely not. You can't send a baby to the United States and then tell the adoptive parents that the birth mother wants the child. Author Maria Larino uncovered the Vatican's orphan program in her book, The Price of Children. She pieced the story together from hundreds of documents in the church's own archives in New York. Larino told us the program

hinged on a consent form the mothers were supposed to sign severing all rights to the child. But Larino told us doctors or lawyers sometimes signed the consent without telling the mother. Others were deliberately misled. There were women who were trapped into this situation and tremendous pressure to relinquish their children. There were women who were trapped into this situation and tremendous pressure to relinquish their children.

There were women who were tricked, who signed forms they didn't understand. And in the worst cases, there were women who were told their child had died. Told their child had died. Yes. What do you make of that? Yeah, it's so horrible.

The thinking, I've been told, was that it was an easier psychological closure to tell a birth mother that her child had died than to let her know that her child had been given up for adoption. So representatives of the church were telling these mothers that their children had died when in fact they had not, and they had been sent to the United States? Yes. Lorino told us many more women were told they could get their children back. She found letters from distraught mothers pleading for their return.

Now, these are letters that were found in the archives? That's correct. This is a letter to Reverend Landy, Monsignor Landy. I beg that my children be repatriated. If I cannot again see my children, I will shorten my life. I find myself deceived, and I do not even know how. Monsignor Landy was Andrew Landy, an American priest living in Rome who ran the orphan program. Landy's boss had the ear of the Pope. In 1951, Pope Pius XII personally saw the first children off. Thousands more would follow. How could they be defined as orphans... I know.

...if they still have a mother, or in many cases a father, still alive? Yes, and to talk to the adopted children today, they get very angry to say, I'm not an orphan. You know, I spent years searching for my parents, but it was a linguistic construction. The church charged $475 per child, about $4,500 today. But Larino told us the demand from eager American Catholics grew so fast that Monsignor Landy sent local priests to scour the countryside for more children. The correspondence shows that they traveled throughout Italy looking for cases for children to send. Literally looking for

babies born out of wedlock. Yes. It actually turned into a machine. Yes. Looking for babies to send to the United States. Right. John Campitelli told us he had a loving family in New York. But when he found out he was adopted, he says he became obsessed with finding his birth mother. There were few clues. Even his surname, Davi, was a dead end, invented by the state to cut all ties. Finally, he persuaded an Italian newspaper to publish his story. And then, a breakthrough.

Someone knew his mother. In 1991, he spoke to her for the first time. She said, all right, are you Piero? I said, well, no, I'm John. Oh, no, I'm really P Oh, no, I'm really Piero. Okay, I'm your son. So you were nervous. I was really nervous because it's something that I always wanted to do,

but when the moment comes, you're like... Kind of tongue-tied. Yeah, yeah, I was tongue-tied. I finally get to talk to the person that actually gave birth to me, that held me, that had breastfed me for two or three days in the hospital. So I know that she loved me. What was her voice like to you?

It brought me to tears, I must admit. And we said we were never going to let go of each other from then on. Two months later, he was on a flight to Italy. We had exchanged photographs, but I said, I didn't need a photograph. Because I saw that lady there in front of me, and I said, that's my mom. She looks identical to me.

And after 28 years, I could say that, you know, I just ran over to her and I embraced her. And I said, Mom, finally. And I kissed her. I said, Mom, no one had to tell me who you were. I knew who you were. I just had to look at you. Campitelli moved to Italy and learned Italian to speak to his birth family, but he told us that didn't undo the suffering the church had

caused. I felt that my whole life was based on a lie. They told her that they would take care of me, and that was a lie. They got rid of me. They didn't take care of me. They cut all relationship that I could possibly have with my birth family, and they shipped me overseas. I became a package for them. To this day, the church insists the orphan program was the only chance for a new life for these children. Larino told us Monsignor Landy, who ran the program, died in 1999 without ever expressing any regrets. I think that he believed in the merit of the program,

that they were bringing children to good Catholic homes, and that these children would be raised well in the United States. How does that explanation sit with you now? Terribly. I mean, because this is how women were treated. And this is why I think of them as disposable women. Disposable. Yeah. It's a terrible thing to give up your child. But nobody was thinking about these women then. American adoptee Mary Relato travels often to Italy to see her birth family. She told us she had a happy life growing up in Ohio,

but she says she longed for a large family only to find out she had one. It was 1992 when she first met Anna Maria, her birth mother. The only thing I could do was stare and look at every inch of her for at least an hour. And you're dumbfounded. Not only does she look like me, but she acts like me. I act like her. We're the same weight. It's almost like this is my twin, but older.

I know exactly what I'm going to look like when I get older. So now I pay attention to my health. Mother and daughter say they're still learning about each other. Rolato told us it was years before she could ask the most painful question of all. Why was she given away? I just needed to know her story, her truth. Because no mother gives up their child so willingly without grief. Do you now understand why she gave you up?

Because she didn't have a piece of bread she said to give us. Poverty. She didn't have clothes for us. She was in a desperate situation, you know. So instead of the church helping her maintain a house and feed her children, instead they took her children. Anna Maria is now 83. She agreed to speak with us if we withheld her last name.

Even decades later, the stigma of having children out of wedlock remains. She told us about her other child, Christian, who was sent to a church-run institution when she became ill. But when she went to pick him up, she says the nuns told her he had died. I went into depression, Anna Maria told us. I searched for him everywhere. How did he die?

Where was he buried? Nobody could tell me. Did you believe that your son was dead? Something inside me didn't feel right, but I could do nothing about it. Ciao, Christian. But Christian had not died. He told us he learned the truth about his mother at age 40.

Anna Maria says the church had put him up for adoption without telling her. It was a swindle, she told us. They stole a child that they wanted. So what was it like for you when you found that Christian was in fact alive. I have no words, she told us. There were lots of tears and hugs. The Vatican's orphan program ended in 1970, but the fallout continues, rippling across generations. Mary Relato told us she never should have been sent to America. MARY ROLATO I think the church convinced her that it was the best thing for her. And so

instead of helping her, it was better for them to make money selling babies. That's all I can think of. You know? So am I angry at the church? Hell yeah, I am. I would have a different life, too. And while it might have been difficult, I still would have survived it. Without this kind of grief that I have inside of me now. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More points. More flights.

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Since then, the franchise's value has more than doubled. The Clippers haven't had a losing season. Bomber has seen his net worth soar north of $120 billion. And his full-throated passion for the team? It's diminished not at all. This month, the Clippers christen a new home, the Intuit Dome. The owner is convinced that the arena will help vault the Clippers over the Lakers, that other pro basketball team in L.A.

And eventually, he vows to an NBA title. All right, so the starting five. August is supposed to be a quiet time in the NBA. But quiet is a relative term for Steve Ballmer. Oh! Come on, Clipper Nation! Yeah, I want them to feel the energy of our fans. We want them in their seats. We want people making noise.

We want it to, mm! Ballmer was giving us an early look at the arena he built for the L.A. Clippers. Among the billionaires who own U.S. pro sports franchises, Bomber, now 68, is the wealthiest by far. Never mind buying the team, he also spent more than $2 billion on this new venue. And that's going to help win basketball games. This isn't just about atmosphere and I had a fun time. Will it really help? I can't promise, but everything in my instinct says it will help our team, our basketball team, if our crowd team can really get into it and give them energy. As a fan, I'm thinking, wait a minute.

Give them energy might as well be Bomber's catchphrase. His enthusiasm predates his sports ownership, going back to his days at Microsoft. It's both personal expression and a way to let his team know he's with them. Because it tells them, hey, he will support us. When it's showtime, he'll be there to help support us. I think that is important. I'm sure players have that, like, God, this guy seems a little bit nuts. That's okay. You say you sweat as much owning this team as you did running Microsoft. Help me understand that.

Let me say a little different sweat. I ran Microsoft. I grew up with the place. I helped shape the place. I knew where all the bodies were buried, so did most of the bodies were buried. Every day, it was my butt on the line. So I sweated more at Microsoft, but I don't worry any less at the Clippers. And I don't worry about the revenue and the day-to-day.

You don't? Winning. I do worry about winning. If owners could be called for traveling, well, Bomber has come an impossibly long way from his childhood as a shy, anxious kid in suburban Detroit. His father, a Swiss immigrant, worked a mid-level job at Ford. Bomber went to Harvard, where he managed the football team and struck up a close, faithful friendship with another gawky math type, Bill Gates. Gates dropped out to start a software company. Bomber went in a different direction, sales and marketing.

My first day at Procter & Gamble, I was very, very shy, very nervous. And a guy who became my friend and roommate said, meeting me that first day was like this. Hi, my name's Steve Ballmer. My palms are sweating, but don't worry, I'm okay. Did I get this right? You were selling cake mix? Duncan Hines' brownie mix, blueberry muffin mix, and moist and easy snack cake mix, to be precise, John. Brownie mix was not his calling, so Bomber went to Stanford Business School. In 1980,

he was midway through his first year when... I get a call from Bill that says, Hey, how you doing? You know, hey, what are you... Oh, yeah, you got another year to go. Too bad. He's trying to recruit you. He's trying to recruit me. But software for microcomputers, it was not a thing at the time in any way, shape, or form.

But Gates was convincing, and Bomber left school to join his pal's chaotic startup. Gates was the lead engineer. Bomber steered the business. His salary? $40,000, he says, plus a 9% stake in the company. Understatement. That stake paid off as Microsoft went on to become, well, Microsoft. Together, Gates and Bomber personified the company. Smart, ambitious, maybe a little nerdy, not always user-friendly. We were told these guys had a rapport as college buddies, but they could also fight, they could argue. Sometimes it was like verbal knife fights.

You remember some of those? Oh yeah, Bill and I would definitely have some knockdown, drag out fights, arguments. You have a winning record? My technique became more of just keep on harping, harping, harping on the stuff I thought was important as opposed to try to like knock him down and drive my point across. In 2000, Bomber took over as CEO. Remember the shy kid? Early in his career, Bomber learned to get over his nerves by cranking up Rod Stewart in his car and giving himself loud pep talks. Here he is doing the same for thousands of software engineers. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

Shirt-soaking enthusiasm became his trademark and an Internet meme. Developers, developers, developers, developers! Who was that guy? That's a guy who really wanted to fire people up. To say, hey, we love you. We want you to write software for Windows. We will support you. This is a great opportunity for you. Now, my expression

of that, let's just put it this way, I look back at it now, it's a little embarrassing. I personally feed off energy. And it's not everybody's cup of tea, by the way. I mean, you know, some people are quieter, but it's me. If Microsoft's products mirrored its leaders, function over form, sometimes that was to the company's detriment. Bomber famously failed to take seriously the challenge of Apple's iPhone, laughing at the idea in 2007. I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world,

and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard. Gosh, darn it. You know, the phone, man, the phone. We should have been in the phone. We should have been a leader in the phone. There were a couple things. We've had a lot of our talented engineers tied up elsewhere. Number two, we thought about it as too much like what we had done with Windows. It didn't really, wasn't going to work. We had to have different thinking earlier on. And yet, during Bomber's tenure as CEO, revenue more than tripled.

He hung on to most of his stock and today is consistently ranked among the world's 10 wealthiest billionaires. Not that you'd know it. He has no super yacht, no new wardrobe, no new spouse. He and his wife Connie raised three boys in a four-bedroom outside Seattle where they still live. Through a family philanthropy, they've given away nearly a billion dollars in the last ten months alone and spent millions more on a side project, the nonpartisan USA Facts, which helps Americans make informed political decisions. And friends say this is the kind of guy who still complains about the cost of the hotel minibar. How does wealth like you have of that scale, how does that not fundamentally change you?

Look, I am fundamentally changed. I know I am. I've been catered to as CEO of Microsoft. Forget money. When you're the lead job in a company, particularly when the company's good side, people cater to you. So I get catered to. Can I still have fun in old-style ways? Do I have to be a jerk to people? No. I don't need to do those things. And you know, people say, oh did you always

want to own a basketball team when you were growing up? Of course not. Who the heck ever thinks they're going to get enough money to own a basketball team? The basketball team. Bomber concedes it's his billionaire's extravagance. He's loved Hoop since childhood. And in 2014, just months after Bomber announced his retirement from Microsoft, the Clippers' previous owner, Donald Sterling, was caught on tape in a racist tirade. Following public outcry and a player revolt, Sterling was forced to sell the team. In position for the rebound, so to speak, Bomber bought the lowly Clippers for almost four times the price of the previous NBA team sale. If this was a distressed asset at the time, owner makes racist statements, basically forced

to sell, you didn't pay distressed asset prices, did you? Because it really wasn't a distressed asset in the following sense. It's an NBA team. There's 30 of them. It's in the best market, one of the couple best markets. That's, you could say it's distressed, but you can't find them anywhere else. Lakers are top banana in this town as far as basketball teams. Are you okay with that?

It's a fact. They've won, whatever it is, 17 championships. We've not won one. I get that. But am I okay with it? No, of course not. Do I take it as a fact. They've won, whatever it is, 17 championships. We've not won one. I get that. But am I okay with it? No, of course not. Do I take it as a challenge? Yes. Are we going to get after it? Yes. Every day we get after it. Bomber has pumped money into upgrading the Clippers roster, signing stars like James Harden and Kawhi Leonard, who praise their new boss. But the biggest obstacle to success, Bomber found, the Clippers didn't have a home.

Since the 90s, the team basically rented out the Lakers Arena in downtown L.A. Bomber decided to build southwest of downtown in less fashionable Inglewood. The owner was involved in every, and we mean every, detail. Toilets! 1,160 toilets in Urinalis! Can I show you toilets? Can you show me toilets? I've never... We have 1,400 of them. I really hate it when people wait in line. Waiting in line for toilets, I think, is, it stops people from getting back into the game, people get frustrated. We'll spare you that porcelain tour, but there is a method here.

Get fans in their seats or out of them to watch the damn game. No lines, no cash registers. Everything here is contactless. Not even a sports bar. Even the suites are bare bones. The owner comes to watch basketball, not to schmooze. And fans should, too. Our scoreboard, the halo board, right now we're just showing you some of the things about Terrence Mann.

Part of the philosophy, build it nice. Today's opponents are tomorrow's free agents, but also build the kind of arena that reflects the owner. Tech is deployed throughout, but mostly to encourage bomber-level fandom. We have sensors around the building that can tell down to the individual seat level how loud you are. Now, we're not listening to your conversation, but let's say we say, okay, for this game,

the person who produces the most decibels the most consistently will get a free hamburger the next game. If you cheer live, you're screaming. If you cheer live, we'll say, hey, there he is, the loudest guy. John, we're down there. The owner is convinced the more energy, the more points the Clippers put up.

We don't have any supporters up there right now, but... You gonna shoot? Why don't you shoot that ball? No time to warm up. I need a... What I'm doing to you here is totally unfair. For 60 minutes! He missed!

Let me see if I can make one with your... You have a little game there, man. Oh, pathetic. Bomber is quick to concede his highest level of basketball was ninth grade, no cuts. There you go. There you go. All right, see? That's not a good free throw shooting percentage.

It's different from running Microsoft, a company with revenues that are 20 times higher than the entire NBA. But Bomber says he's having more fun in this job, in part because it's much easier to measure performance. People ask me, what's the difference between business and basketball? Well, if you have a bad quarter, you can say, I'll get him next time. Or you don't know what we got going on in the labs, but it's going to be great. Here, every 24 seconds, you get a scorecard. Did we score? Did we stop them from scoring? Every 24 seconds.

At the end of the game, if you lose it, you can never change it. Every season, when it's done, it's done. Now, the nice thing is you also get to reset every year. And that's, you know, that's pretty cool. Every journey I take leaves a lasting impact. Traveling the world only makes me realize just how much more there is to explore. No one builds a legacy by standing still. Start your journey at Remover.com. On tonight's Last Minute, two scientists we introduced you to in stories on artificial intelligence won Nobel Prizes this past week.

Jeffrey Hinton shared the physics prize for artificial neural networks, which make AI possible. What is a path forward that ensures safety? I don't know. I can't see a path that guarantees safety. We're entering a period of great uncertainty where we're dealing with things we've never dealt with before. And Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, shared the Nobel in chemistry. I've been working on AI for decades now, and I've always believed that it's going to be the most important invention that humanity will ever make.

Hassabis helped invent AI that mapped the structure of virtually all proteins, the building blocks of life. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.