The grand estate custom built for the Bulls legend has been on the market for 12 years
2 min
Michael Jordan has found a buyer for his Chicago estate after more than 12 years.
The 7-acre compound, custom built for the basketball legend in the ’90s in the area’s Highland Park suburb, first hit the market in 2012 asking $29 million. By 2015, the price on the nine-bedroom home was reduced to $14.855 million—the digits of which add up to 23, Jordan’s jersey number—and it’s remained at that price ever since.
Spanning over 32,000 square feet on Point Lane, the home reflects the larger-than-lifeness of its owner, with 19 bathrooms, five fireplaces, a regulation-sized basketball court, a massive weight room where Jordan used to train, and a built-in aquarium, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The sale was first reported by Crain’s Chicago Business.
Outside the home, there is a tennis court, a putting green and a circular infinity pool with its own island, accessible by a small bridge. There are plenty of circular touches throughout, including a round skylight above a circular eat-in kitchen, an arched wine cellar and a circular sitting room with views directly onto the basketball court.
A large lounge area that was once an indoor pool includes glass sliding walls on either side that can open up completely during Chicago’s milder months.
Other unique features include doors from the original Playboy Mansion, a three-bedroom guesthouse and the number 23 emblazoned on the front gate.
Compass agent Katherine Malkin, who is marketing the property, confirmed the pending sale to The Athletic. Malkin did not respond to a request for comment, and the buyer and price were not immediately available. Jordan could not immediately be reached for comment.
It’s unlikely to exceed the asking price. A year after the home first hit the market in 2012, Jordan decided to sell via auction, but the home failed to even meet the reserve bid of $13 million. Despite the lack of movement, Jordan has not dropped the asking price any further since 2015.
Homes in Highland Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago can fetch upward of $5 million, but Jordan’s home has been the priciest option on the market for a long time. Fellow Chicago Bulls legend Scottie Pippen sold a nearby home in 2023 after a five-year wait. That home, which Pippen bought for $2.6 million in 2004, sold for $1.7 million two decades later, according to Realtor.com.
It seems that despite the home court advantage, this is one game that Jordan has not been able to win.
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Some have no qualms about treating ChatGPT like their servant; ‘Just like humans, AI can’t always be the bigger person.’
4 min
California couple Vikas Choudhary and Ridhi Sahni can’t agree on one thing: How polite must one be with ChatGPT?
Choudhary, the founder of an artificial intelligence startup based in Palo Alto, has fawned over the chatbot from OpenAI ever since it helped him squash a massive bug in his code.
“You’re a rock star,” he once told the AI chatbot.
“I’m super thankful for it, and I thank it quite a bit actually—especially if I think I was rude to it earlier,” said Choudhary.
His wife couldn’t care less. “If I’m using a microwave, I don’t go like: ‘Dear LG, Please heat this up.’ I just press a button and get on with my day,” said Sahni, who also works at a tech company.
She uses ChatGPT to generate cute greeting cards for friends’ babies.
“I think of this as purely transactional,” she said.
As talking to chatbots is now becoming more like normal conversations, AI users face an awkward ethical dilemma: Bots are programmed to be polite, but do we have to reciprocate? Is it wrong to speak harshly to them?
The debate has spilled onto social media where many people say one should practice politeness even with bots. Others think wasting kind words conversing with code is inefficient.
“I know AI isn’t real but it feels so rude if I don’t greet and thank it,” one user wrote on Reddit, prompting hundreds of comments and a lively debate over whether bots are keeping tabs on who is nice to them.
Some shot back with sarcasm. “AI will want to extinguish human race but not that one, he said ‘please and thank you’ 30 years ago to my 4.0 version,” one user wrote.
“I treat chatgpt like it’s my servant,” another said.
A recent survey showed Americans are split on being polite to AI. About 48% of 2,000 Americans surveyed by Talker Research thought it was important, with Gen Z respondents being the friendliest to bots. Around 27% of people agreed it was OK to be rude with or shout at bots.
One study out of Japan—a place where rules of etiquette are ironclad—concluded that being nice to ChatGPT can pay off. Impolite prompts “may lead to increased bias, incorrect answers, or refusal of answers,” the researchers found.
They found that the thesis held true across English, Japanese and Chinese.
Microsoft , which has added chatbots to its top products, says AI may not react well to bad behaviour as it is built to mimic human reactions.
“If you speak to the model rudely, you can expect it to be difficult with you too,” said Microsoft’s Chief Scientist Jaime Teevan.
“Just like humans, AI can’t always be the bigger person,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
Engineers say it helps to add phrases like “take a deep breath” to make models produce better answers. They joke that generative AI has a “praise kink” for its apparent need for positive affirmations and potential rewards.
In one experiment, ChatGPT gave longer answers when lured with a tip. The results indicated that responses were 11% longer when offered a $200 tip and 6% longer for a $20 tip. No real tips were paid during the experiment.
“The litmus test for how good a person you are is if you are nice to a waiter,” said Alana O’Grady, an executive at a tech startup based in San Mateo, Calif. “In the future, it’ll be how kind you are to your AI companion.”
O’Grady has used ChatGPT for a host of activities—from summarising reams of documents at work to recommendations for a family vacation to Lake Tahoe.
Her interactions start with a “Could you please” and end with “Great job,” or “That’s perfect!”
“People will think I’m crazy if they see how I talk to a computer,” she said.
Now O’Grady is training her children on the right etiquette by being polite to Apple ’s virtual assistant, Siri, around them. Her 4-year-old daughter recently said “I love you” to Siri.
Judith Martin—the author behind decades of “Miss Manners” books and columns on etiquette—suggests people be polite. She even thinks getting Siri or Amazon Alexa’s attention with a “Hey” is unacceptable.
“When it is one’s constant companion—and particularly in the presence of children—such devices should be treated with civility,” she wrote in one column .
Others disagreed, saying there should be a distinction between how people talk with people vs. bots.
Some humans are now turning to AI for help with etiquette. Frankfurt-based software developer Laszlo Deak uses a chatbot to vent and translate his work frustrations into polite prose.
He asked ChatGPT how to constructively tell another team that their product was bad. It suggested using kinder phrases to say it wasn’t working as well as expected.
“When you’re in the moment and angry, it takes extra effort to rephrase the whole thing,” said Deak. Reading ChatGPT’s iteration “helps me to calm down.”
He has also used ChatGPT to draft Slack messages to colleagues when they’re being difficult.
Mazen Lahham, a Dubai-based tech executive, said his company’s AI was better at satisfying angry and aggressive callers than its human call-centre workers.
“The AI learned to absorb and react in a calm, professional manner, something that can be very challenging for a human,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Choudhary, the Palo Alto-based startup founder, is betting his good behaviour might pay off someday. “In the future if the AI overlords take over, I just want them to remember that I was polite.”
