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For Tilman Fertitta, the billionaire restaurant magnate, host of the CNBC television show “Billion Dollar Buyer” and owner of the N.B.A.’s Houston Rockets, silence is unusual.
Yet, he has been mostly silent publicly since his Oct. 4 social media rebuke of Daryl Morey, his basketball team’s general manager, after Morey expressed support for the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong with a post on Twitter. With his team getting set to play preseason games in Japan, Fertitta quickly distanced himself — not from the authoritarian Chinese government, but from his widely admired executive.
His statement was simple: Morey had gone rogue.