Let’s remember when Aubrey McClendon, brief co-owner of the Sonics, died, on this day in 2016 (March 2)
Aubrey McClendon, the founder and former CEO of Chesapeake Energy, had a tenuous — but notorious — connection to Seattle. He was part of the ownership group that bought the Sonics from Howard Schultz and ultimately moved the team to Oklahoma City.
While primary owner Clay Bennett was telling everyone (disingenuously) that his intention was to keep the Sonics in Seattle if a new stadium deal could be secured, McClendon was saying the quiet parts out loud, when he told an Oklahoma newspaper, “ We didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle. We hoped to come here.” That got him a $250,000 fine from the NBA.
McClendon, though a CEO of an energy company, was also a bit of a grifter. He is mentioned in one of the Fyre Festival documentaries (the Hulu one), and his daughter was CFO for one of Fyre Festival’s fraudulent founder Billy McFarland’s companies. His business practices began getting scrutiny for likely anti-trust violations (and he was a proud anti-environmentalist, having been quoted as saying “We’re the biggest frackers in the world. We frack all the time. What’s the big deal?).
He was indicted on anti-trust charges on March 1, 2016. It turned out to be the penultimate day of his life. The AP reported at the time:
