When Mark Cuban is feeling spicy, he’ll all the time let you already know. 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 trade, and why he thinks “sofa fucking” and Gary Gensler’s crypto coverage value Kamala Harris the election.
Chatting with WIRED senior author Lauren Goode, Cuban touted the trajectory of Price Plus Medication, the pharmaceutical firm he cofounded in 2022. By providing transparency on prices and pricing insurance policies, Cuban says his firm has been capable of disrupt the drug trade, providing customers 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 total value record, one thing that’s all the time been extremely onerous to acquire from different drug suppliers for customers and researchers alike.
Now, Cuban says, research have come out displaying that if Medicare purchased, for example, 9 particular medicine from Price Plus Medication as a substitute 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 in addition the tangible impact that one well-funded firm can have.
It’s not that Cuban’s not being profitable on Price Plus Medication, both, as a result of he’s. He may very well be making extra, he informed Goode, however as he put it, “How a lot fucking cash do I want? I’m not making an attempt to land on Mars.”
The crack, presumably directed at Elon Musk, was simply one in all 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 general “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 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 wish to know what Elon thinks, Twitter’s superb,” 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