Joe Sanberg/Wikimedia Commons

Pt Capital cofounder prison bound

One of the founders of the Alaska investment firm Pt Capital – Californian Joseph Neal Sanberg, “Joe” to his friends – has agreed to plead guilty to running a $248 million scam, according to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California.

Pt Capital is not involved, and all indications are that Sanberg years ago severed ties with the private equity firm now involved with a variety of Alaska small businesses after having made its big score with the 2016 purchase of the Icelandic telecommunications company NOVA.

That ended six years later with both the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress probing NOVA connections to a partner company – Huawei Technologies – linked to Chinese spying. 

Oh, the tangled webs some weave when seeking to increase their wealth.

Founded in 2012 by Sanberg, his good friend Gabrielle “Ellie” Rubenstein and Alaskan Hugh Short with the backing of Alice Rogoff Rubenstein, Ellie’s mother and then wife of billionaire David Rubenstein, Pt Capital itself barely dodged a legal quagmire when Ellie was talked out of buying a platinum mine in far Western Alaska that she was confident would make a fortune.

Fortunately for her and her mother, who the Washington Post described as a member of the Pt “advisory board,” that deal never came together and the mine was picked up by a group of Canadian investors who ended up in serious trouble with the Environmental Protection Agency for polluting the Salmon River. 

Ellie’s mother, meanwhile, moved on to become, for a short time, Alaska media mogul Alice Rogoff.

A one-time Washington, D.C. socialite, she dropped the Rubenstein surname after signing a marital separation agreement with her husband and taking off for Alaska, where she immersed herself in the Alaska Dispatch, an online news organization, before buying the Anchorage Daily News from the California-based McClatchy Company in 2014 for the exorbitant sum of $34 million and later diving deep into Alaska politics.

She became a big supporter of former Alaska Gov. Bill Walker and helped connect him to both President Barack Obama, a self-proclaimed friend of her estranged husband, and the Chinese, with whom Walker wanted to build a pipeline to export natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to Asia.

When Walker joined Obama aboard Air Force One for a flight from the nation’s capital to the 49th state in 2015, the Associated Press reported that the then-president was beginning “a historic, three-day trip to Alaska aimed at showing solidarity with a state often overlooked by Washington, while using its glorious but changing landscape as an urgent call to action on climate change.”

Obama would also pay a visit to Rogoff’s house to meet with a select group of wheelers and dealers who her newspaper would refuse to identify. 

Two years later, when Chinese President Xi Jinping stopped in Anchorage for a seafood dinner and a meeting with Walker on the way back to China from then-President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago retreat, the Rogoff-owned ADN reported that “the Alaska stop underscored the significance of the Arctic to China’s long-term economic interests. For the Alaskans, trade and one of the governor’s pet causes – a liquefied natural gas export project aimed at Asian markets – was at the top of the agenda.”

Walker would eventually fumble his way out of office with the help of his lieutenant governor, the late Byron Mallott, and Rogoff would steer the ADN into a bankruptcy that caught the state’s mainstream media by surprise, despite the pending collapse of the state’s biggest media organization being obvious for more than a year to anyone who cared to look.

Pt’s Short, Rogoff’s one-time protege, would by then be distancing himself from her and claiming Rubenstein as his mentor, while daughter Ellie would temporarily depart the state only to return and join Team Trump in 2016.

That would eventually lead to her being appointed to the Alaska Permanent Fund board of directors in 2022 by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Trump supporter. In naming her to help oversee the state’s then $72 billion trust fund in 2022, the governor’s office cited her “background in investments and philanthropy, and she is an avid angler, hunter, and pilot.”

She lasted only a couple of years on the board before getting herself in trouble. By May 2024, the Financial Times, a major international magazine, was reporting that “the daughter of one of the most powerful figures in US finance is at the centre of a governance dispute at Alaska’s $80 billion sovereign wealth fund, prompting a staff revolt, a political backlash and accusations of undue influence.

“Managers at the fund suspect she has tried to steer state assets to friends and family members while seeking the dismissal of a junior employee who left her father “unimpressed”, according to leaked internal emails seen by the Financial Times and interviews with people with direct knowledge of the fund’s operations.”

The company you keep

Sanberg was one such friend and at one time linked Aspiration.com – the company that has since been accused of fraud – to Pt Capital.

A “team member” of the Economic Innovation Group, a self-promoted “bipartisan public-policy organization dedicated to forging a more dynamic and inclusive American economy, Sanberg was described on the group’s website as “a private and public-sector entrepreneur and investor based in Los Angeles, California.  Co-founder of two innovative financial services companies, Aspiration.com and Pt Capital, he is also actively involved in a range of other enterprises, including Bright Funds and Blue Apron.”

Blue Apron was an at-home meal delivery company teetering on bankruptcy when it was sold to the Wonder Group in 2023, according to CNBC. Bright Funds is a charity described as a “workplace giving platform.”

Charity Navigator gives it two out of four stars and says the organization “Needs Improvement.”

And then there is Aspiration.com, of which the headline on the press release from the U.S. Attorney for Central California about said it all:

“Orange County Man and Aspiration Partners Co-Founder Agrees to Plead Guilty to $248 Million Scheme to Defraud Investors and Lenders”

Sanberg is now facing up to 20 years in prison, but is unlikely to serve a lengthy sentence.  As the U.S. Sentencing Commission notes, “many defendants who plead guilty do so as the result of plea agreement with the prosecution, and some plea agreements contain the parties’ agreement about the application of the sentencing guidelines in a defendant’s case.”

The U.S. Attorney’s press release did not mention a plea deal, but did say that “Sanberg is expected to formally enter a guilty plea in the coming weeks,” which would indicate he is in the presentence interview process wherein, according to the Sentencing Commission, a “probation officer may ask questions about a wide variety of matters concerning the defendant’s offense or offenses of conviction and related uncharged criminal conduct, criminal history, personal history (including family history and substance abuse history), financial circumstances, and numerous other issues potentially related to the court’s sentencing decision.”

Sanberg, who has been lauded by many for trying to help the less fortunate, is likely to argue that his intentions at Aspiration were good, but the finances spun out of control. Aspiration pitched itself as an investment firm run as a bank, or a bank run as an investment firm, trying to help make the poor wealthier by turning their pennies into dimes. 

If Sanberg can convince the system that his intentions were good, he could get off fairly light. The Sentencing Commission reports the average sentence after a federal fraud conviction is 23 months. 

And the U.S. Attorney’s press release went so far over the top in publicly pillorying Sanberg that it’s hard to avoid wondering if the office wasn’t already trying to make up for a light sentence to come. Almost everyone who could took a shot at Sanberg in that press release did so.

“‘This so-called ‘anti-poverty’ activist has admitted to being nothing more than a self-serving fraudster, by seeking to enrich himself by defrauding lenders and investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli. “I commend our law enforcement partners for their efforts in this case, and I urge the investing public to use caution and beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

“‘For years, Joseph Sanberg used his position at Aspiration to deceive investors and lenders for his own benefit, causing his victims over $248 million in losses,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

“‘The defendant didn’t just bend the truth, he built a business on a lie to boost the company’s value and line his own pockets,’ added Inspector in Charge Eric Shen of the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), Criminal Investigations Group. ‘The Postal Inspection Service will go after this kind of calculated deception. No matter who you are, you will be brought to justice.”

And lastly there was Assistant Director Jose A. Perez of the FBI Criminal Investigative Division, chiming in to say the “guilty plea is a direct result of the commitment by the FBI and our law enforcement partners to hold those accountable who set out to defraud victims and undermine our financial system. The FBI will continue to work with our partners to ensure this kind of malicious behavior is investigated and stopped.”

Though Sanberg was pitching a scheme to those of limited means, there appear to have been some big-name investors caught up in Aspiration as well.

Among them, according to RIABiz, a California website covering the “financial advice business,” were eBay head Jeff Skoll, and Addepar’s Joe Lonsdale, lured by “Sanberg’s too-good-to-be-true ‘Aspiration’ scam…even as RIA experts questioned the business model.”

Addepar is a company now reported to oversee a $7 trillion wealth management platform, while Lonsdale has moved on to become the “founder and managing partner at 8VC, an early-stage venture capital firm managing over $6 billion in capital.”

“…The very rich. They are different from you and me,” as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald long ago observed. 

Still, the Sanberg news had to have made for a bad week for Rogoff with another of her associates, one-time Iditarod Trail companion Ghislaine Maxwell, actively trending, as they say, in the re-emerging story surrounding the dead sex-offender Jeffery Epstein and his circle of high-profile friends and acquaintances, a circle which included President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, England’s Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and more.

Talk of an Epstein “client list” led the FBI to i release a statement in July saying no such list exists, and to this month release a trove of tapes and transcripts documenting Justice Department discussions with a jailhouse Maxwell about her relationship with Epstein and his sexual relationships with underage females.

The latter attracted a huge amount of attention despite an evasive and defensive Maxwell providing little in the way of new information when interviewed in the Texas prison she now calls home.

Rogoff has a connection to Maxwell, but the Rubensteins – other than Ellie’s connection to Trump who had a connection to Epstein – appear to be among the few in the nation’s monied class who lacked for some sort of relationship to the pedophilic financier, who The Guardian in January 2024 described as operating “at the center of a globe-spanning network of the rich, famous and powerful” before the disclosure of court documents that proved “shocking in revealing the sheer magnitude of his elite circle.”