Mr. James is again playing for the Cavaliers. A call to his agent seeking comment was not returned.

The year before, Mr. Gilbert got into an altercation at a bar mitzvah, punching a former colleague, David Hall, in the head before he was escorted out by security, according to interviews conducted by the Birmingham Police Department in Michigan. In police documents, Mr. Gilbert’s lawyer said Mr. Hall filed the complaint in order to pressure Mr. Gilbert into paying $2 million to buy out Mr. Hall’s investments in Mr. Gilbert’s companies. The Birmingham city attorney ultimately denied a warrant in the case on the grounds that the charges were not “supported by probable cause.”

Mr. Hall did not return an email seeking comment. In an email statement, a Quicken Loans spokesman said Mr. Gilbert “defended himself in a minor confrontation that was instigated by a former employee who was the aggressor.”

On a more trifling scale, after sending text messages about this article to a reporter at The New York Times but not receiving a response — Mr. Gilbert was texting her landline number by accident — he followed up with an email accusing the reporter of disconnecting her mobile phone to avoid him. The phone “likely is one of your temporary numbers that you deploy for the surreptitious work that you do,” he wrote.

When alerted to the misunderstanding, Mr. Gilbert apologized “for any of it that was caused on my end.”

When Mr. Gilbert was asked in an email if he “often strikes a ‘combative stance’ or ‘frequently attacks his critics,’” a Quicken Loans spokesman responded in an email, “It’s interesting that when someone with as long and successful career as Mr. Gilbert is forced to defend his integrity and honor from old and/or insignificant already rehashed incidents and accusations from a media source as credible as The NY Times, you would imply that doing such is ‘frequently attacking’ his critics.”

These days, Mr. Gilbert appears to be itching for a fight with the Justice Department. In court filings, Quicken argued that the three-year government investigation was based on 55 “cherry-picked” loans out of nearly 250,000.

Quicken also argued that a longstanding F.H.A. process to resolve loans that did not meet its requirements, through either the repurchase of the loan or by indemnifying F.H.A. from any losses, was retroactively discontinued for Quicken.