When Mark Cuban is feeling spicy, he’ll all the time let you recognize. The billionaire businessman, basketball proprietor, and Shark Tank empresario lit up WIRED’s The Massive Interview occasion on Tuesday, dropping scorching takes about Elon Musk, the pharmaceutical business, and why he thinks “sofa fucking” and Gary Gensler’s crypto coverage price Kamala Harris the election.
Chatting with WIRED senior author Lauren Goode, Cuban touted the trajectory of Value Plus Medicine, 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 medicine like Droxidopa for one thing like $20 monthly versus the greater than $3,000-a-month uninsured sufferers had been being quoted.
“We’ve lowered the worth of [one of our 2,500 medications] each single weekday for 18 months,” Cuban boasted, saying the corporate has additionally discovered nice success in publishing its whole value record, one thing that’s all the time been extremely laborious to acquire from different drug suppliers for shoppers and researchers alike.
Now, Cuban says, research have come out exhibiting that if Medicare purchased, for example, 9 particular medicine from Value Plus Medicine as an alternative of their different sources, the federal government would save billions of {dollars}, one thing that not solely reveals the bloat of the healthcare system but additionally the tangible impact that one well-funded firm can have.
It’s not that Cuban’s not creating wealth on Value Plus Medicine, both, as a result of he’s. He may very well be making extra, he instructed Goode, however as he put it, “How a lot fucking cash do I would like? I’m not attempting to land on Mars.”
The crack, presumably directed at Elon Musk, was simply one in every of a number of remarks Cuban made in regards to the billionaire X proprietor. For one, he spoke about his personal transfer from X to Bluesky in current months, saying that he thinks it’s an total “existential second” for Musk’s platform.
Due to Bluesky’s troll-blocking capabilities and what Cuban calls extra engagement-friendly insurance policies, he says he’s discovered it a lot simpler to have interaction there, whether or not it’s Kamala Harris, cryptocurrency or the Dallas Mavericks basketball staff, during which he owns a minority stake. “If you wish to know what Elon thinks, Twitter’s wonderful,” Cuban joked, however added that he thinks Bluesky is extra of a real “social community” compared.
Mark Cuban and Lauren Goode at The Massive Interview{Photograph}: Tristan deBrauwere