DECEMBER 31, 20 19was the MVP of McDonald’s High School All-American
Game. By 18, College Player of the Year at the University of
Texas. By 19, NBA Rookie of the Year. And so on, all the way
to league MVP recognition and several runs at the crown
with the Thunder and then his 2016 decision to join the
team he couldn’t beat—signing a $54 million contract with
the Warriors. The move would forever alter his brand and
his business.
Durant fi rst took an interest in the money game when
he was weighing competing endorsement off ers from Nike
and Under Armour in 2014: “I learned a lot about the busi-
ness side through that. It really broke things down for me.”
Oklahoma City off ered slim options. “There’s oil and real
estate,” Durant says, “but that was a real old boys’ club,
and it was hard to break into.” With one foot still in the oil
patch, Durant and Kleiman waded into the tech world, lob-
bying to invest in the delivery startup Postmates and the ro-
bo-investor Acorns.
In the Bay Area as a Golden State Warrior, though, he had
VIP access to the world’s hottest startups. “All the founders
and investors come [to Warriors games], and you get to in-
teract with and meet them,” Durant says. “They look like
normal people, but they are changing the world so fast and
have so much power.”
Durant soon struck up friendships with the likes of Lau-
rene Powell Jobs, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz,
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, and executives from
Google and Apple. In the Silicon Valley startup scene, at
once square and status-obsessed, Durant money was sexy,
attracting press, street cred and customers. Soon came in-vestments in Coinbase, Robinhood, Caff eine TV, Imper-
fect Food, Lime scooters and more. “He learned about what
it takes to start companies and invest in companies,” says
Eddy Cue, the head of Apple’s vast internet software and
services division, who fi rst met Durant for dinner and end-
ed up talking with him until 3 a.m. “When you’re winning,
everyone’s interested in learning what makes you tick, and
Kevin was smart to take full advantage of meeting people.”S
o will this playbook work in New York,
America’s other business capital, a place
that’s more diversifi ed and less starstruck?
To Durant’s credit, as he did around San
Francisco, he’s embracing the local ethos—
including the city loft, from which he can walk to Thirty
Five’s soon-to-open 4,500-square-foot Chelsea headquar-
ters. “New York will be the culmination of the diff erent
communities Kevin’s touched, and it will take our company
to the next level,” says Kleiman, who met Durant originally
through a mutual friend, the musician Wale, at a Jay-Z con-
cert at Madison Square Garden.
If the Bay Area was about Durant latching onto deals,
New York is about owning his own media. There’s Swagger, a
scripted series based on Durant’s early life backed by the Hol-
lywood titan Brian Grazer; it’ll be distributed on Apple’s new
streaming service (thanks in part to his friendship with Cue,
the Apple executive). Lower-budget series and shorts live
on his YouTube channel, which now approaches 800,000
subscribers. Durant’s franchise, The Boardroom, covers the
business around elite athletes with a website, newsletter and
ESPN show. “The younger generation is looking for access
and authenticity,” says ESPN president James Pitaro.
All these initiatives possess an incredibly potent market-
ing solution, the ten-bagger kind. The secret sits in those
workout machines in Durant’s apartment. No player of Du-
rant’s caliber has ever returned from a ruptured Achilles
to the same level of dominance. No player in almost half a
century has brought an NBA trophy to the country’s larg-
est city, one mad for basketball. “The team is in the garage
stage, where we are putting the idea together. It’s more inti-
mate, everyone understands the goal and has a fresh experi-
ence,” Durant says. “A championship would be a whole oth-
er level, but injecting a new energy into a city through bas-
ketball would be even cooler.”
If Durant can pull this off , he’s now positioned himself to
reap. Acorns and Lime scooters will succeed or fail without
him. With his new initiatives and his own assets, he controls
his destiny, and the sky’s the limit. “I want to own and run
an NBA team—run day-to-day operations and impact young
players coming through the league,” he says, ticking off the
path that Michael Jordan took to become a billionaire.
“I started down here,” Durant adds, leaning forward to
touch the fl oor of his apartment with his gigantic hand. “I
know there’ll be kids popping up in my family, and I want
them to start above this roof. The only way to get there for
your family is to create money, and I want to do it in a cool-
er way, not just being greedy and accumulating as much as
I can.”82
THELIST^—KEVINDURANTAGE
56 35 31
NBA DRAFT PICK
3 1 2
NBA TITLES
6 3 2
INSTAGRAM FOLLOWING
19.1 Million 53.5 Million 11.6 Million
@jumpman23 @KingJames @easymoneysniper
NBA CAREER EARNINGS 1
$90 Million $307 Million $224 Million
(1984-1993, 1995-1998, 2001-2003) (2003-present) (2007-present)
20 19 NIKE SNEAKER DEAL
$130 Million $32 Million $26 Million
BEST INVESTMENTS
Charlott e Hornets Blaze Pizza, Liverpool FC Coinbase, Postmates
DISCARDED NICKNAME
Magic The Akron Hammer DurantulaMJ VS. LBJ VS. KD
HOW KEVIN DURANT POSTS UP AGAINST MICHAEL JORDAN
AND LEBRON JAMES ON (AND OFF) THE COURT.(^1) Not adjusted for infl ation.
MICHAEL JORDAN LEBRON JAMES KEVIN DURANT
F