The Next Reality TV President?

Mark Cuban is a self-made billionaire, sports mogul, small-business influencer, media personality, Democratic surrogate and possible health-care disruptor. There’s only one job he doesn’t yet have on his résumé. By Max Chafkin and John Tozzi

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The next reality TV president. Mark Cuban is a self
made billionaire, sports mogul, small business influencer, media personality, democratic surrogate,
and possible healthcare disruptor. There's only one job he doesn't
have on his resume. By Max Chafkin and John Tozzi
Read aloud by Mark Leedorf. If Democrats were to try

(00:24):
to design from scratch the most electable candidate for president
in twenty twenty eight, they'd probably start with an outsider.
That could mean an elected official who's energetically committed to
presenting themselves that way, either by way of a populist
political program New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortes, or a
willingness to show up on podcasts with right wing provocateurs

(00:47):
California Governor Gavin Newsom or a folkesy upper Midwestern affect
Minnesota Governor Tim Walls. But after nominating an octagenarian amid
concerns about his competence, then switching candidates because of those concerns,
and then losing anyway to a convicted felon who's already
been impeached twice, Democrats may well conclude that the most

(01:07):
electable candidate isn't a politician at all. That could mean
an entertainer, a professional athlete, or a celebrity rich guy,
though the last option is particularly attractive since famous executives
tend to have at least some actual executive experience. Of course,
you'll need a very specific celebrity rich guy, prolific on
social media and at ease in front of cameras, attributes

(01:30):
that sound common but are actually quite elusive. Highper successful
business people, surrounded by assistants and accustomed to speaking to
audiences consisting of people they pay, can come off as
aloof or robotic or hostile when confronted with the concerns
of actual voters. It's hard to cultivate an everyman vibe
from the cabin of your private jet. There are exceptions,

(01:52):
of course. The most famous is Donald Trump, real estate
developer turned name rights licensing mogul, turned star of a
Mark Mark Burnett produced reality TV show, turned forty fifth
and forty seventh president. The second most famous is Mark Cuban.
Like Trump, Cuban is a billionaire with decades of experience
playing a rich guy in the press. Trump did so

(02:14):
first at nineteen eighties hotel openings for Cuban, it was
on the sidelines of games played by the Dallas Mavericks,
the basketball team he bought in two thousand and then
transformed into a perennial playoff contender. Like Trump, Cuban eventually
took his stick to Network TV, starring, like Trump in
a primetime reality show that was like Trump's show, The Apprentice,

(02:36):
produced by Burnett. Cuban also has some time on his hands.
He sold his controlling stake in The Mavericks in twenty
twenty three and recently recorded his final episode of Shark Tank.
The comparisons could go on. They're both avowed fans of
Einran's The fountain Head. They're both fixtures on the Manoverse
podcast circuit. They both like Crypto. They've both been mocked

(02:58):
for being less accomplished than their net worth would suggest.
Not that Cuban wants to hear too much about these similarities.
He and Trump have been publicly feuding for more than
twenty years. Get Out, he says, nodding toward the exit.
After a Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter gently suggests during an interview
in April that the two men have had similar career trajectories.

(03:18):
That's the worst thing anybody's ever said about me. It
isn't immediately clear whether Cuban intends to end the interview
right there, but after glaring for a few seconds, he
breaks into a grin. Even at age sixty six, the
six foot two inch former college rugby player is physically imposing,
but with a certain regular guy ease in his speech

(03:38):
patterns and word choice, he still sounds like the working
class Jewish kid from Pittsburgh who hustled his way through
high school and college, who tended bar and worked in
a computer store in the nineteen eighties. Cuban's first business
was a modest tech consulting company he sold for six
million dollars. Then he got involved with a small streaming
media company so he could listen to radio broadcasts of

(03:59):
Indiana University basketball games on the Internet. Cuban took over
the company, renamed it Broadcast dot Com, and sold it
to Yahoo at the height of the dot com bubble
for almost six billion dollars. The difference, Cuban says, referring
to Trump is he never had to start from broke.
This is how Cuban sees himself as a broke guy

(04:19):
who worked his way into being a rich one. If
you can sell something door to door, your confidence goes
through the roof, he said on Trevor Noah's podcast last year,
rattling off a list of things he sold as a kid,
baseball cards, garbage bags, magazines. He seems to relate to
the always be selling part of Trump's character. In fact,
as much as he can't stand the president, he grants

(04:42):
that in another world he and Trump could easily be buddies.
I understand him, Cuban says, if he weren't president, I
wouldn't be involved in politics at all. Cuban's involvement in
politics to date, at least, has mostly been a tease.
He flirted with running for president in twenty sixteen twenty twenty,
but ultimately endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He supported

(05:05):
Biden again in twenty twenty four, but very much half heartedly.
If they were having his last wake and it was
him versus Trump, and he was being given as last rites,
I would still vote for Joe Biden, Cuban told Bloomberg
News when he visited the White House last year. Like
much of what comes out of Cuban's mouth and Trump's,
the comment was a bit loopy, but it was apt

(05:26):
and memorable. Cuban, who identifies as an independent, became more
involved in the race after Biden dropped out, frequently appearing
on cable news as a campaign surrogate for Kamala Harris
and even showing up with her at campaign events. At
a rally in Wisconsin in October, he referred to Harris's
opponent as the Trump that Stole Christmas and the Grinch, because,

(05:48):
as Cuban argued, Trump's proposed tariff policies would make toys
and other consumer goods expensive, ruining the holidays. Cuban's taunt
looks prescient, even if it was mostly ignored of the time.
He's annoyed about that, though his main complaint about Harris
is more fundamental. She didn't know how to sell. He says,
you have to be relaxed, you have to be open.

(06:09):
Another way of saying this, Harris didn't act enough like
Mark Cuban. Since the election, Cuban has been ubiquitous talking
to political journalists, showing up on pretty much every podcast,
posting up a storm. His general pose has been to
criticize Trump and Elon Musk, while often not so subtly
suggesting that he'd do a better job than either of them. Ostensibly,

(06:31):
he's doing this in service of his next act, a
healthcare venture known immodestly as the Mark Cuban cost Plus
drug Company. The company offers generic medications, often for a
fraction of what people pay through their prescription drug plans.
It's the cornerstone of Cuban's plan to upend healthcare by
throttling costs and reducing the vast inequalities in the system,

(06:53):
all while working outside it. The big picture of Vision
is one look for inefficient markets in healthcare, he says,
and two f it up. Cuban isn't the first billionaire
trying to fix healthcare in the US. Around the same
time he got involved with cost Plus, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett,
and Jamie Diamond teamed up to launch Haven, a joint

(07:13):
venture formed by their respective companies that was supposed to
lower healthcare costs and simplify benefits. It went nowhere and
folded in twenty twenty one, but there are reasons to
take what Cuban is doing seriously. Cost Plus sells twenty
five hundred drugs on its website, from asthma Inhaler's to
pills for advanced prostate cancer. Using a simple pricing equation.

(07:35):
The company takes a fifteen percent markup on what it
pays to acquire the drug, plus five dollars for dispensing
and another five dollars for shipping. A ninety count bottle
of IMATINEB, a generic leukemia drug, was recently selling for
thirty four dollars and fifty five cents on Cuban site.
The same amount of the same medication at CVS care Mark,
one of the three big pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs,

(07:59):
would cost three one thousand, one hundred and sixty two
dollars and nineteen cents, including nine hundred and forty eight
dollars and sixty six cents the patient would have to
pay out of pocket, according to an estimate recently quoted
to a Bloomberg reporter on the drug plan's website. Cost
Plus doesn't accept the largest prescription insurance plans, such as Caremark,
but for drugs like this, it offers big savings, even

(08:21):
for people paying cash. The PBM industry argues that examples
like this aside their plans, tend to save money for
people overall, and yet that somebody with health insurance would
be expected to pay twenty seven times the price Cuban
charges for a generic medication is a source of embarrassment
for the insurance industry and proof, in case anyone needed it,

(08:42):
of the capacity of the US healthcare system to bleed
money from those it's supposed to be helping. Cuban's advocacy
on drug costs has put him in a politically advantageous position,
railing against a wildly unpopular industry while offering a solution
that seems both sensible and non partisan. That, plus his
history in politics, has led to speculation he might be

(09:02):
preparing to run for president. Cuban is almost wistfully seen
as a guy who understands how to talk to voters,
says Matt Engel, a long time Texas political operative and
founder of the left leaning Lone Star Project. Cuban insists
this isn't the case. I don't see it, he says,
citing a desire to continue working on cost plus and

(09:23):
spend time with his family, though his actions suggest he
might change his mind. He's building a political profile to
see if there's an appetite, says a Republican aligned consultant
who's been following Cuban's political activities since Trump entered the
political arena, and who asked not to be named because
they were speaking without approval from their employer. He's bored,
he's ambitious, and it feels like he's been looking at

(09:45):
this for ten years. All of this makes Cuban unusual,
especially in twenty twenty five. He is simultaneously the rare
healthcare reformer who's managed to find a way to put
pressure on the industry, and the rare billionaire willing to
pick a fire with Trump. Since November, pretty much every
chief executive officer in America has tried to stay out

(10:05):
of the line of fire, either by lying low or
by throwing their support behind the president. This has created
an opportunity for Cuban to take the opposite approach. Asked
by anti Trump activist Rick Wilson, what caused him to
become so vocal, Cuban smiled. I got rich as f
he said, so I didn't have to care what anybody thought.

(10:25):
In April, a poll of self identified Democrats and Democratic
leaning voters conducted by Yale University found that Cuban was
seen as the most electable among all the major potential candidates,
including all the Democratic front runners. If it sounds absurd
to suggest that the Shark Tank Guy might be a
contender to claim the Democratic nomination, consider the following. Donald

(10:46):
Trump was elected president twice. Nine months after NBC released
the first season of The Apprentice, in which aspiring white
collar workers competed for a chance to work for Trump,
ABC released its own business reality show, The Benefactor. The
Apprentice was built around Trump's bombast and bullying, with its
star offering withering assessments of contestants business prowess and ending

(11:11):
each episode with the ritual humiliation of You're fired. The Benefactor,
which featured contestants competing for one million dollars from Cuban,
relied on his more approachable persona for decades. He's shared
his email address widely, even on the Mavericks JumboTron, and
responded directly to pretty much anyone who writes to him.

(11:31):
After Trump mocked Cuban as a copycat, Cuban embraced the contrast,
writing a blog post that made light of Trump's self
regard and his propensity for starting business ventures that end
up failing. The Benefactor is going to be nothing like
The Apprentice, he wrote in two thousand and four, Why
because Donald, we are not alike in any way. The

(11:51):
show was a dud and was canceled after only six episodes.
Trump wrote him a gloating condolence letter. At that point,
Cuban was mostly known for his antics at Mavericks games.
Owners of pro sports teams generally watched from luxury boxes,
but Cuban sat courtside, cheering wildly when his team won,

(12:11):
jeering at refs, and booing opposing teams when they didn't.
The NBA find him constantly for these breaches of decorum,
and his own players made light of that psycho at
the end of the bench, as former Maverick center Sean
Bradley described him in two thousand three, But fans saw
in Cuban an ideal owner, especially after the Mavericks won
the championship in twenty eleven. He is beloved, says Clay Jenkins,

(12:36):
who served as Dallas County judge for the past fourteen years. Jenkins,
a Democrat, says Cuban distinguished himself during the twenty twenty
election when he hosted a series of events about systematic
racism in response to the murder of George Floyd and
turned the Maverick's arena into a socially distanced, safe voting site.
Of all the companies we worked with, the Maths did

(12:57):
the most with the community. Jenkins says, if Cuban's nice
guy persona had been insufficient to carry his own reality show,
it was perfect for Shark Tank, which he first joined
as a guest judge in twenty eleven, the year the
Mavericks won their title. The show featured small business owners
pitching their ideas to a panel of successful investors who

(13:18):
were ostensibly competing with one another. Cuban was goofier than
the other judges and also way more successful, which made
it all the more charming when he got excited about
ideas such as I want to draw a cat for you.
Cuban invested twenty five thousand dollars in that company, a
one man operation that sells drawings of cats on the internet.

(13:38):
It was all a lot of fun, which business can be.
He says, not every company is serious. Cuban joined the
cast full time in twenty twelve, and Shark Tank grew
into a cultural phenomenon, drawing more than eight million viewers
per episode by twenty fourteen. He remained on the show
for ten more seasons, saying yes to hundreds of companies

(13:59):
and ultimately investing around thirty three million dollars in them,
including an inflatable paddleboard maker, a foam party hat manufacturer,
and a nut butter company. I tried to make it
not so much about an academic investment show, Cuban said
during his final episode in May. Instead, he said he
saw Shark Tank as a show about people trying to

(14:19):
have their dreams come true. As he got more famous,
his public email inbox was flooded with pitches from entrepreneurs,
including one from a radiologist named Alex Oshmiansky, who wrote
to Cuban in twenty eighteen with a proposal. Oshmiansky had
been following the case of Farmabro Martin Screlly, the tabloid
infamous hedge fund manager who'd bought the rights to an

(14:41):
obscure anti parasitic drug commonly used by AIDS patients and
hiked the price by more than five thousand percent. The drug, dereprim,
was off patent, meaning any company could theoretically make a
generic without paying licensing fees, but no other companies had
bothered to do so o. Shmansky pitched Cuban, whom he

(15:02):
knew from watching Shark Tank, on a solution to the
screlly problem, a company that would make off patent drugs
like daraprim and sell them for reasonable prices. I was like,
why not. The worst is it goes into a slush pile,
Oshmiansky recalls, but no, he reads all of them. We'll
be right back with the next Reality TV President. Welcome

(15:27):
back to the next Reality TV President. Cuban was taken
by the obvious market inefficiency Oshmiansky described, initially putting two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars into the company at the
time called Ash's Affordable Pharmaceuticals. The startup was just another
company in Cuban's exceedingly diverse portfolio, which runs the gamut
from highbrow to lowbrow, starting with indie film studio Magnolia

(15:50):
Pictures and continuing all the way to Dude Wipes, a
toilet paper alternative for men pitched to him on season
seven of Shark Tank. Over the next few year, Oshmiansky's company,
where Cuban is now co founder, became more than just
another investment part of What hooked Cuban, he says, was
the opportunity to take on a bewildering tangle of companies

(16:12):
that sit between drug makers and patients. Chief among his
targets were PBMs. These companies are hired by employers, insurers,
and government agencies to manage prescription plans. PBMs negotiate pricing
with drug makers and contract with networks of pharmacies. This
gives them a great deal of power in deciding how
much drugs cost and which drugs patients can get, power

(16:36):
that's been magnified by consolidation. The top three PBMs handle
roughly eighty percent of prescriptions in the US. They're owned
by United Health Group, CVS Health, and Signa Group, all
among the largest US companies by revenue. In theory, PBMs
can use their market power to lower costs for patients,
though it's hard to know whether that's true. In practice,

(16:58):
patients rarely know they'll pay until they get to the
pharmacy counter, and even big employers complain they don't know
how much they pay for drugs covered by their health plans.
Cuban says he encountered this himself when he asked the
company that the mavericks had hired to manage coverage for
their employees to tell him how much he was paying
for various generic drugs, they wouldn't provide it to me,

(17:19):
he says. Cuban came to believe that instead of lowering costs,
the PBMs were deliberately creating an inefficient market and claiming
some of the spread for themselves. Drug pricing essentially became
a lie, says Antonio Chacca, a pharmacy expert who consults
for Cost Plus. PBMs blame drug makers for the high

(17:40):
cost of medications and say PBMs lower costs for patients
and employers. Mister Cuban's repeated comments about PBMs are unfortunate
and a wholly inaccurate representation of how pharmacy benefit services
actually work and save money for businesses, says Greg Lopez,
a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association trade group.

(18:01):
Drug Makers set what Chacha describes as a bogus inflated
sticker price, which then becomes the basis for a multitude
of discounts and fees negotiated by PBMs and others throughout
the supply chain, distributors, wholesalers, hospitals, pharmacies and insurance companies.
Government programs have their own elaborate rules to determine payment.

(18:21):
The result is a stew of jargon assigning different designations
for drug prices wac AWPASPMAC, NADAC that leads many would
be reformers who start looking into drug costs to eventually
just look someplace else. The prices for medication have become
increasingly disconnected from their actual net cost. Chatcha says this

(18:45):
essentially became Cuban and Ashmansky's pitch when they introduced cost
Plus drugs to the public in twenty twenty two. Cuban
says he put his name on it for legitimacy so
pharma companies would allow them to distribute their drugs. When
we first got started, we couldn't get people to do
business with us, he says. I wanted people to realize
I was serious. Cost Plus started off as a mail

(19:07):
order pharmacy, offering one hundred generic drugs with pricing that
made it clear how much Cuban's company was paying and
how much money it was making. The number of drugs
has grown since then, and cost Plus has expanded its
operations to include an eleven million dollar factory in Dallas
that aims to make drugs facing shortages. A wholesale division

(19:28):
called cost Plus Marketplace sells drugs to hospitals, clinics, dialysis centers,
and other providers, including pen Medicine and the hospital chain
community health systems. Then there's Team Cuban Card, a free
service that lets patients get similar prices to what cost
Plus offers on its website at a network of retail pharmacies.

(19:48):
It's meant for time sensitive prescriptions and for people who
prefer to pick up medication in person. The big PBMs
say their plans offer lower prices for most of the
prescription drugs that cost Plus sells and are a better
value for consumers most of the time, a claim that
was backed up to some extent by a twenty twenty
four analysis published in JAMMA Health Forum. But it's clear

(20:10):
they're paying attention to what Cuban is doing. In twenty
twenty three, Signa announced a cost plus option that would
allow patients to pay a fixed markup based on the
cost of the medication. CVS unveiled similar changes the next year.
The other big PBM, United Health's Optimrx, said it would
move to cost based pricing this year. In an interview

(20:32):
in March, Patrick Conway, who leads the division that includes OPTIMARX,
acknowledges one person who's very famous who does it for
a small group of drugs, arguing that Optim's move will
be far more meaningful. We're doing it for all drugs,
all pharmacies, all clients, sixty two million plus people. Oshmansky says.

(20:53):
Cost Plus has millions of individual customers and dispenses hundreds
of thousands of prescriptions each month. CVS, on the other hand,
filled one point seven billion prescriptions last year. They play
bigger than they are. Sean Grimminger, who represents employers as
CEO the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, says of

(21:13):
cost Plus, if it wasn't Mark Cuban's name on it
and his face on TV and him throwing bombs and stuff,
and it was just another startup company, we wouldn't be
having this conversation. Yet. If Cuban's criticisms of the healthcare
industry have helped cost Plus get traction, they've also raised obstacles.
He is mostly shut out of the ecosystem, says Eric Levin,

(21:35):
CEO of script To Insights, which helps people with employer
health coverage find the most affordable drugs. Levin says most
big PBM contracts block his company from showing Cuban's prices.
A bigger issue is that cost Plus doesn't sell most
brand name or specialty medications, which is where the money is.
Cuban says he's working on this, but without top selling

(21:57):
drugs like Ozembic or Eloquist, cost plus US will continue
to operate as a niche discounter rather than a true
alternative to a PBM. The absence of wildly popular GLP
one weight loss drugs is glaring, especially since the manufacturers
of those medicines, including Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, increasingly
seek to bypass middlemen and sell to consumers for transparent

(22:19):
cash prices. People involved in administering benefits at two large
companies who ask not to be named discussing private contracts,
say the complexity of adding cost plus to their offerings
simply isn't worth the trouble. One says their contract with
a major PBM ensures that if cost Plus offers a
better price on a drug, the PBM will match it.

(22:41):
That's a business problem for Cuban, but it's also a
sign that his advocacy may be working. His push for
transparency is also putting pressure on large employers that purchase
health benefits on behalf of most working age Americans. In
a series of lawsuits over the past year, plaintiff's lawyers
have accused big companies of squand entering employees money by

(23:01):
overpaying for prescription drugs and driving up costs for workers.
The class action complaints targeting JP Morgan, Chase, Wells, Fargo,
and Johnson and Johnson allege there are examples where the
companies paid far more for drugs than the prices available
on cost plus. The companies have disputed the allegations, and
the lawsuits are ongoing. There's also the prospect of a

(23:23):
government crackdown. Just before the election, the Federal Trade Commission
sued the three big PBMs, alleging they drove up the
cost of insulin, and a separate FTC report in January
accused the PBMs of raking in billions by marking up
drugs for cancer, HIV, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases, sometimes
by more than one thousand percent. The companies dispute the

(23:45):
allegations related to insulin and have called the January report misleading,
but so far this is one of the rare issues
Trump and Cuban seem to agree on. The President appears
intent on allowing the agency to continue to press its case.
Conversation with pharma CEOs at mar A Lago in December,
he promised to knock out PBMs, calling them horrible middlemen

(24:07):
who don't do anything. After Trump issued an executive order
on drug prizing in April that mostly focused on pharmaceutical companies,
Cuban praised the move, while urging Trump to redirect his
attention away from the drug manufacturers and toward the PBMs.
Put me in coach, he posted on x I'm here
to help. In late twenty twenty three, Cuban sold seventy

(24:30):
three percent of his stake in the Mavericks for three
point five billion dollars. The purchase price, more than twelve
times what he'd paid for the team in two thousand,
reflected the way pro sports had changed over the past
twenty years. Revenue, team valuations, and player salaries have all skyrocketed,
attracting private equity investors and making it harder for teams

(24:51):
without lots of capital to compete. Cuban felt that he
was out of his depth and that he needed a partner.
You hear every single team talking about real estate and
expanding in casinos, Cuban told the ESPN host Stephen A.
Smith on a podcast in April, that just wasn't my strength.
The buyers, Miriam Aidelson and her son in law Patrick Dumont,

(25:12):
had plenty of experience in real estate and casinos. Adelson,
whose late husband Sheldon, founded the resort developer Las Vegas Sands,
also happened to be one of Donald Trump's biggest donors.
Cuban believed he had a handshake agreement with the Adolson
family that would allow him to continue to oversee basketball operations,
but within months, ESPN reported that he'd been ousted. Cuban

(25:36):
has said he was further blindsided when the Mavericks traded
Luka Doncic, the superstar player he had built the team around,
in a deal that seemed so unbelievably lopsided to many
fans that its burred conspiracy theories that suggested Adelson was
trying to undermine the team so she could move it
to Las Vegas. The team has said it isn't moving.
Cuban hasn't hidden his feelings about the Doncich trade or

(25:58):
his sense of betrayal. I don't hold a grudge, he says,
then catches himself. Maybe a little bit with the MAVs
these days, he says he doesn't think Adelson pushed him
aside or traded Doncic because of their political differences. I
love maryam We get along great, he says. During the campaign,
she was like if kamalowens, make sure that I have

(26:19):
an entrade to talk to her, and I'm like done.
Cuban says they haven't talked politics since then. An Adolson
spokesman declined to comment. Cuban's role in the campaign was
rooted in the Biden administration's attempts to rein in PBMs.
In early twenty twenty four, the White House invited him
to speak at a roundtable about rising health care costs.

(26:40):
Cuban's critique of PBMs, namely the accusation that they used
their market power to trick businesses into overpaying for prescription
drugs while underpaying pharmacists and drug makers, fit neatly into
then FTC chair Leni Khan's idea that consolidation had played
a role in rising costs. Attends a Biden fundraiser in

(27:01):
Dallas later that month, becoming a supporter, albeit a reluctant one.
He was like an efin corpse standing next to me.
Cuban says, it was like, Oh my god, we're ft.
If it was any other candidate from the Republican Party
other than Trump, I probably would have voted for whoever
that was. After Harris became the nominee, Cuban made it

(27:23):
clear that even though he supported her, he disagreed with
aspects of the previous administration. He said that while he
appreciated Kahn's work on PBMs, he thought she'd been excessively
heavy handed in trying to break up tech companies and
suggested Harris replace her. The jab, which Cuban walked back,
irritated progressive Democrats, who regarded Cuban's presence on the campaign

(27:45):
as counterproductive. I don't sense a single bit of populism
in that man at all, says a former Biden administration
staffer who likens Cuban to the right wing tech billionaires
who became active during the twenty twenty four election in
support of Trump. He's a group chat cowboy. The counter argument,
of course, is that Cuban's identity as an unabashed rich guy,

(28:06):
unafraid to say whatever's on his mind is the very
thing that makes him valuable to Democrats. He's a small
business owner historically a key Republican constituency who also happens
to be in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
He's an entrepreneurial influencer who can channel the pain inflicted
by Trump's tariffs. He can simultaneously praise Musk's Department of

(28:29):
Government efficiency as great in theory and criticize it as
unbelievably cruel in practice. I think what Mark has that
comes across is a person who is real, says Jenkins,
the Dallas County judge. It's kind of the mirror image
of the things they like about President Trump. Trump is
not very nice, but he'll get in there and stand

(28:49):
up and fight. That's something they see in Mark. Cuban
seems indifferent to the possibility of a run for office.
He says he wants to prioritize spending time with his
three children, whom are teenagers. My son's graduating high school,
my daughter's graduating college. That's what I want to be
a part of he says. When asked to pick a

(29:09):
preferred twenty twenty eight presidential candidate, Cuban points to ESPN's
Smith cracking a version of a joke that he made
on Smith's podcast when Cuban told him that if he
ran for president, Smith could be his vice president. Smith,
who has also semi seriously suggested he might run, countered
with the same offer. Cuban's stance on the populist left,

(29:30):
the faction of the party led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders,
appears to have also relaxed. I give Bernie credit because
he has a vision and he sticks to it. I
believe healthcare is a right and that there's a path
to get everybody health care. You just can't be dogmatic,
Cuban says, sounding less like an iin Rand fan and
more like a centrist politician shoring up his left flank.

(29:53):
Oshmansky frames cost plus Similarly, Sanders had a movement of
twenty million people and wasn't really able to drive any
meaningful change in healthcare, he says. But they can't stop
me from just making and selling drugs for less. It's
an argument that entrepreneurship can succeed where politics has stalled,
and it could be the groundwork for an entrepreneur's pivot

(30:14):
to politics. Cuban says a president should be pragmatic instead
of dogmatic, and suggests if I were to run, I'd
be like, how can I reduce your stress