The argument for Ballmer is he was an investor in the company, the company was in bad shape, the company went around looking to raise more money, and he (along with other investors) put more money into the company to try and save it. That's totally plausible, it happens all the time. Rich people make lots of investments in startup companies and try to hit a home run. An additional $10 million investment from a guy like Steve Ballmer is like literal couch cushion money. (For context; the guy makes about $1.1 billion a year purely in dividends from his MSFT stock)
And hey! Maybe he really did just give them more money to funnel to Kawhi. Also totally plausible.
To me, the real issue would be that since Aspiration had other sham endorsement deals with celebs where the celebs donated money and then Aspiration then paid them a little bit more (booking the donation as revenue and hiding the expense of the endorsement deal) that its totally possible they had a similar deal with Kawhi, in which case there wouldnt really be any circumvention (there would be fraud!) . If so, there should be evidence Kawhi gave them money. If there isn't, then it just looks like Aspiration paid the guy $28 million to do nothing and got...nothing out of it? That seems petty bad!