After Shark Tank, Mark Cuban Just Wants to Break Shit—Especially the Prescription Drug Industry

Everybody’s going to be immortal in a certain sense. So if you keep all your emails and interviews, or your parents keep it for you from the time you’re a kid—your first-grade papers, your pictures, all the things kids do—now you have little Lauren LLM. By the time Lauren’s 11, that’s probably going to be her best friend.

I do think building an AI version of yourself is increasingly going to become a part of people’s end-of-life planning or legacy thinking. But I also think it gives us a bit of main character syndrome. As I think about my own life, do I need that stuff? Does anyone?

It’s not that you need it. But look at social media. Everybody’s already a brand.

Right, we all think about how we’re going to be perceived, but is that a good thing?

In the big picture, no. Particularly not for kids. With my kids, there is no balance. That’s all they know. Would I prefer they didn’t have that? Yes. Just because playing and going outside and connecting is different.

Yeah. Our curiosity had to be fed in different ways.

That’s the right way to put it.

And I had a lot more alone time, which I kind of liked.

You might’ve read. I used to read a lot, and tried to teach myself the guitar.

And I played basketball for years and years. That was a community.

And so, now …

Very online.

Yup.

You said something once about how the boomer generation—

Yeah, how it was a disappointment.

Had a good rep for a while.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll was a great start. And protesting the Vietnam War.

And now you call it the Fox News generation. I’m wondering if you think there is an antidote to that.

You buy Fox News.

Would you do that?

If I had enough money to do it, which I don’t, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

Explain that to the readers, who are like, how does he not have enough to buy Fox?

What’s the market cap of Fox?

Let’s see. Well, you’d also have the whole Murdoch heir thing to deal with. But putting that aside, it’s $15.6 billion right now.

And you’ve got to pay at least 50 percent premium. So now it’s $22 billion. And then you’ve got to make all the changes, so that’s another $2 billion. You can sell some things off. So maybe it’s $15 billion, $20 billion net. I don’t have $15 or $20 billion in cash sitting around.

Short of buying it yourself then, how would you fix something essentially like propaganda?

Too late.

That’s dire. Why don’t you buy Twitter?

He wouldn’t sell it.

What if you convinced him it was his idea?

I wouldn’t know how to do that.

Would you, in a perfect world, consider buying Twitter?

Yeah, for sure.

Would you please, for the love of God, buy Twitter?

I wish I could. There’s no reason for him to sell it.