Robert Pera: The Kid That Bought the Grizzlies

Robert Pera has just lost a game of Horse, and he wants to play again. He’s palming the basketball as he paces the court across the parking lot from the San Jose offices of Ubiquiti Networks, the wireless hardware company he founded and runs. Pera is in jeans, a brown polo shirt, and black mid-top Kobe Bryant Nikes. He stands 6-foot-3 with thick, freckled arms, a spiked, strawberry blond crew cut, and the beginnings of a mustache. As we start a new game, he dispenses with small talk. “Let me finish this off,” he says to a PR handler sitting at a courtside picnic table, as she prods him to talk more about his company.

Jason Levien, the chief executive officer of the Memphis Grizzlies, warned me about Pera. “I once beat him in a game of Horse,” he says. “You could tell it really bothered him.” Pera bought the Grizzlies last fall after the initial public offering of Ubiquiti made him, briefly, a billionaire. He wins our second game by one shot.