Billionaire Mark Cuban On The Coronavirus Economy On ‘Worst Year Ever’

Robert Evans, Katy Stoll, and Cody Johnston discuss all things 2020 in Worst Year Ever, and in this episode, they have a long talk with Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban. This conversation came about because Cody tweeted at Mark several months ago and asked him for money “a bunch of times,” he laughs. During the coronavirus crisis, Mark has made headlines with his positions on pushing for stronger coronavirus relief, paying his hourly employees while they can’t work, and that this is an opportunity for “America 2.0” to come back stronger and better than ever. They discuss all this, as well as what he thinks about the role of billionaires in the economy, how the government should incentivize employee stock options, the importance of small businesses, and much more.

Mark says he ignores “bank account bigots” and doesn’t agree that there should be no billionaires at all in a working economy, but he does agree that the major problem in America is that workers aren’t making enough money. “If you’re one of the 77 million people paid hourly wages, you’re probably living paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to accumulate any type of asset based to increase your net worth,” he says. Companies should be forced, through tax incentives, to provide their employees with shares in the company, and if they don’t, the CEO should only be paid in cash and would have to go buy shares in the public market on their own. This way, “everyone gains,” when the company does well. And the only way a company works is when everyone “is doing their job to the best of their ability,” so it only makes sense for the workers, who truly drive the company, to gain when their work pays off. "Businesses thrive when we lift up the bottom," he says. "The top, we can lift ourselves." He points out the reality of taxing billionaires, too: He personally has no problem with his own tax rate going up, but as the crisis affects the economy more and more, billionaires are losing liquidity, which means they don’t have a lot of cash even when they have a lot of assets. So “you can tax them more,” he shrugs, “but they might not be able to pay it.” 

For Mark, the CARES Act, or the coronavirus stimulus relief, doesn’t go far enough in protecting “we, the people.” For example, the bailouts for large corporations don’t have any stock warrants attached to them. He points out that when Warren Buffett bailed out Bank of America for $5 billion, he required stock warrants and made an $12 billion profit. That’s the kind of negotiator the American taxpayer deserves, he says. He also gets into housing, the crisis in leadership we’re experiencing, how companies should know that "how you treat your employees right now, when your back is up against the wall, is going to define your brand for decades,” and a lot more on Worst Year Ever.

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