When Mark Cuban is feeling spicy, he’ll at all times let you realize. The billionaire businessman, basketball proprietor, and Shark Tank impresario lit up WIRED’s The Big Interview occasion on Tuesday, dropping sizzling takes about Elon Musk, the pharmaceutical business, and why he thinks “couch fucking” and Gary Gensler’s crypto coverage value Kamala Harris the election.
Chatting with WIRED senior author Lauren Goode, Cuban touted the trajectory of Cost Plus Drugs, the pharmaceutical firm he cofounded in 2022. By providing transparency on prices and pricing insurance policies, Cuban says his firm has been in a position to disrupt the drug business, providing shoppers medication like Droxidopa for one thing like $20 per thirty days versus the greater than $3,000 a month uninsured sufferers have been being quoted.
“We’ve lowered the price of [one of our 2,500 medications] every single weekday for 18 months,” Cuban boasted, saying the corporate has additionally discovered nice success in publishing its total value listing, one thing that’s at all times been extremely arduous to acquire from different drug suppliers for shoppers and researchers alike.
Now, Cuban says, research have come out displaying that if Medicare purchased, for example, 9 particular medication from Cost Plus Drugs as an alternative of their different sources, the federal government would save billions of {dollars}, one thing that not solely exhibits the bloat of the well being care system but additionally the tangible impact that one well-funded firm can have.
It’s not that Cuban’s not earning money on Cost Plus Drugs, both, as a result of he’s. He may very well be making extra, he informed Goode, however 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 simply one in all a number of remarks Cuban made concerning the billionaire X proprietor. For one, he spoke about his personal transfer from X to Bluesky in latest months, saying that he thinks it’s an general “existential moment” for Musk’s platform.
Because of Bluesky’s troll-blocking capabilities and what Cuban calls extra engagement-friendly insurance policies, he says he’s discovered it a lot simpler to interact there, whether or not it’s Kamala Harris, cryptocurrency, or the Dallas Mavericks basketball group, during which he owns a minority stake. “If you want to know what Elon thinks, Twitter’s amazing,” Cuban joked, however added that he thinks Bluesky is extra of a real “social network” compared.
Mark Cuban and Lauren Goode at The Big InterviewPhotograph: Tristan deBrauwere