When Mark Cuban is feeling spicy, he’ll always let you know. The billionaire businessman, basketball owner, and Shark Tank empresario lit up WIRED’s The Big Interview event on Tuesday, dropping hot takes about Elon Musk, the pharmaceutical industry, and why he thinks “couch fucking” and Gary Gensler’s crypto policy cost Kamala Harris the election.
Chatting with WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode, Cuban touted the trajectory of Cost Plus Drugs, the pharmaceutical company he cofounded in 2022. By offering transparency on costs and pricing policies, Cuban says his company has been able to disrupt the drug industry, offering consumers drugs like Droxidopa for something like $20 per month versus the more than $3,000-a-month uninsured patients were being quoted.
“We’ve lowered the price of [one of our 2,500 medications] every single weekday for 18 months,” Cuban boasted, saying the company has also found great success in publishing its entire price list, something that’s always been incredibly hard to obtain from other drug providers for consumers and researchers alike.
Now, Cuban says, studies have come out showing that if Medicare bought, for instance, nine specific drugs from Cost Plus Drugs instead of their other sources, the government would save billions of dollars, something that not only shows the bloat of the healthcare system but also the tangible effect that one well-funded company can have.
It’s not that Cuban’s not making money on Cost Plus Drugs, either, because he is. He could be making more, he told Goode, but as he put it, “How much fucking money do I need? I’m not trying to land on Mars.”
The crack, presumably directed at Elon Musk, was just one of several remarks Cuban made about the billionaire X owner. For one, he spoke about his own move from X to Bluesky in recent months, saying that he thinks it’s an overall “existential moment” for Musk’s platform.
Because of Bluesky’s troll-blocking capabilities and what Cuban calls more engagement-friendly policies, he says he’s found it much easier to engage there, whether it’s Kamala Harris, cryptocurrency or the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, in which he owns a minority stake. “If you want to know what Elon thinks, Twitter’s amazing,” Cuban joked, but added that he thinks Bluesky is more of a true “social network” in comparison.
Digging deeper into crypto, Cuban said that he thinks Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler’s villainization of the currency really hurt Harris’ chances during the US election. After polling the audience to see how many people owned crypto and sharing that he owns “a lot” of bitcoin himself, Cuban said that because something like 40 percent of young men have owned or do own crypto, either because it’s the cool thing to do or because they don’t trust or understand the stock market or traditional banking system, “Gary Gensler telling you to ‘roll over and let me stick a bike handle up your ass’ … did not make it good for people who own crypto and didn’t make it good for Kamala.”
Cuban said he told both Harris and her team as much, ultimately asserting that with more young men coming out to the polls for the election than were previously expected, “I don’t think it’s a stretch to connect” the candidate’s loss to what he sees as her team’s antiquated crypto policy.
He said he offered the Harris campaign thoughts on how to win over social media as well, though they didn’t take them. For anyone, candidate or not, to control the narrative on any given day, he said they need to “flood the zone,” putting memes, quips, and clickable videos out into the ether to be passed around online and covered in the news. (MAGA architect Steve Bannon has also used “flood the zone” to describe his strategies.)
“It’s not like it was facts that made the difference in this election,” Cuban said, making a joke about Donald Trump’s assertion that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs in Ohio. The democrats, he said, “needed more couch-fucking stuff. Sixteen million couch-fucking extensions and everyone would have seen it.
“Weird. Brat. Fucking the couch. They started out flooding the zone,” Cuban said, “but then they dropped it and tried to use accuracy. Donald Trump floods the zone continuously [and that’s why he won.”
