Mark Cuban on High Drug Prices, Taxing Billionaires, and 2028

18:48Kara Swisher:But you can't publish the prices of the ones you can't get, can you? Correct. Right. Yeah, because we don't know what our cost is. We can't sell them. And they don't want us to be able to sell them specifically. Could you not get those lists, Mark, and start publishing? No, no. Literally, it's like Fight Club. Number one rule of Fight Club is you can't talk about Fight Club. Number one rule of PBM contracts and pricing, you can't talk about it. And I'll give you the perfect example. You're a clever man. I bet you could get your hands on them. It's not that I can't, but it doesn't really help me in terms of pricing, right, or selling.

19:20But let me give you the perfect example. There is something called Tricare, which provides pharmacy to the military. People that are enlisted now, people that are retired, wherever they may live, right? And Elizabeth Warren went to them and they said, okay, Tricare, you have hired this company, this big PBM called Express Scripts, right? And - I know them well. Right, so Express Scripts. And so I want to know what you're charging the government every time somebody in the military or formerly in the military uses a drug that you carry. Express Scripts said no. The military said, we're not going to show you.

20:00That's proprietary information. Get the fuck out of here, right? Like you said, you can find it if you need to find it. But President Trump could ask for it. They would say no. Ah, wow. So we can't know their prices.

20:14Kara Swisher:They can't know their prices. They hide them. And that's what they do, not just in this instance, but across the board. Right. So we don't know. So we don't know. That's why they're terrified of cost plus drugs. Well, what has to give? What has to give then? Well, I love the breakup big medicine bill that Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren proposed in the Senate. But not one single senator got behind them and co-sponsored it. Wow. Where is it in the House? Does it even have it in the House? No. No one's even brought it up. And I pushed it. You name it, right? Anybody, every senator, when I saw you right at those events, I talked to all of them.

20:50Kara Swisher:What did they say to you quietly behind the scenes? Quietly behind the back. We want their money. Yeah. Yeah. We have midterms coming up. Yeah. Maybe after the midterms? Hopefully. Will they get any guts? So another big news in the world of health care, I don't know what you think of this, Costco is getting into the Medicare business. The company is teaming up with non-profit insurer Scan Group to launch Costco-branded Medicare Advantage plans in two states and Medicare supplement plans in a third. The plans will integrate Costco offerings like prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs plus vision and hearing products.

21:20Kara Swisher:Talk about this. It was really, you know, I'm getting close to Medicare, and although I have insurance, so I don't quite know what I need to do in that regard. By the way, it's so confusing because I have kids, and so I want to keep my insurance. But what do you think of this kind of thing? It's a sales and marketing effort, right? I mean, I don't know enough about the details to say if it's good or bad. There are some, you know, the thing that people don't realize about Medicare in general, it is driven mostly by private insurance companies. It is. Medicare Advantage is all private insurance, UnitedHealthcare, in this case, the new one with Costco.

21:55You know, Costco does a good job. Hopefully, you know, it'll be an above board product because not all of them are. Then you have traditional Medicare Part A, Part B, but then you have to buy supplemental insurance because you still have a 20 % hickey that you have to pay for out of pocket for medical, right? And then it doesn't cover your pharmacy, that's Part D. So you use that from a traditional insurance company. So you're getting, you have the same problems even though you're on Medicare.

22:23Kara Swisher:People say take A and B, not Advantage, and D. That's what people say. Yeah, and get supplemental insurance too. Right, right, exactly. But does this help if a company like Costco is doing this? People have a lot of trust in the company. No, it's still the same numbers. The math is still the same math. You can be more efficient and offer incremental benefits. So you might, you know, Costco could offer lower cost over-the-counter drugs. They can offer lower cost prescription eyeglasses because it's Costco. But it's not the future of healthcare turning it over to big business. No, no, no, no. Yeah.

22:54Kara Swisher:So again, what has to happen is what? So you've got to get rid of the middleman, right? And so what I push for all the time is to get cities and states and companies to let me look at their contracts. Because what I do is I've set up my clod, so I'll just run, and anybody can do this, I run the contracts through clod, and I just tell them where they're getting fucked over. And they have no idea. I've literally had some big, big companies do it, talk to me, realize just how badly these PBMs and TPAs, the big climbers, are ripping them off. And now they're changing to, you know, they're passed through PBMs like Rightway and 360 or SmithRx and I forget all the names of them.

23:42But in any event, so there's alternatives. You don't have to go just with the big guy. And you're doing the country a big disservice. And look, you know tech, right? And so you know these guys are trying to do all they can to figure out AI, and it's expensive. The easiest way for any big tech company with more than 1 ,000 members, employees, and families, is to look at their health care benefits. Because every penny they save on their health care benefits is cash flow that goes right to the bottom line. And it's just not their core competency. And what happens is their HR departments, particularly in tech, are always undermanned and understaffed.

24:23And you know that when somebody has a problem at Vox Media, whoever does your health care and benefits, they go right to HR and they complained about getting, you know, having to go through this preauthorization process about the claim being denied. And HR spends 90 % of their time doing that and doesn't have the resources to look at reducing costs. And when they do see, and I'll walk in the door and meet with them and huge companies, Mark, you're right. We could save millions, if not tens of millions of dollars or more and give us a 20 PE. That's 200 million,$2 billion, whatever it is, a market cap.

25:00But we're afraid of our employees because they don't want to change the logo on their card. They want that same insurance card. So for the one time in all of tech history, they're afraid of their employees because the HR people. And all I tell them they have to do is two things. Run their contracts, all their healthcare contracts through CLOD or CHAT GPT and just say, where am I?

25:22Kara Swisher:What's the prompt? What's the prompt? Where am I getting fucked over? Oh, all right. Okay. Is that the technical term? Yeah. Yeah, it really, really is. And it'll tell you because the game they play, the PBMs in particular play is they mismatch definitions. They'll say, this section is for pass-through pricing on drugs. We will pass through all the rebates. Then at the bottom of that paragraph, they'll put in the definitions and they'll say, well, that doesn't include specialty drugs or other fees. And then they get the option of what to make a specialty drug. Right. Yeah. It's just they game the whole thing.

25:58And the reason they can do that is these contracts are 50, 100, 200 pages long in some cases. There's no human that has enough coffee available to them to literally go through and drink it. I have gone through and put contracts through where, and these are contracts provided by these huge insurance companies, multi-hundred billion dollar companies, right? And they have misspellings. They, you know, this says 36%, this says 46%. And they didn't even catch it, right? It's so mind-nouder.

26:28Kara Swisher:Yeah, you would think the grifters would be good at that. Oh, they're brilliant at it, right? Because that's to their favor. They can't spell. Right, well, it's to their benefit. it. So that's why you need AI. So if you want it for every single company in this country, if you want to benefit from AI and have it pay for itself, all you have to do is this one thing. Apply it to health care. Yeah. Put your contracts in there. You know what I've been doing around this Paramount deal? I have a friend who's a lawyer who's been putting it into claw at all the stuff. And then he sends it to me. And I have to tell you, it's fucking accurate.

27:04Kara Swisher:And then I say something and everyone's like, how did she know it would turn out this way. And I was like, this is good. But it matters. The person matters, the prompts and how. Oh, yeah. You have to be smart. It's him and the prompt and Claude. And you have to be smart enough to know when Claude is wrong. That's right. That's right. But I have to tell you, with the combination, it's been startling. Oh, it's great. Right. But it's like using Claude or ChatGPT for health care. Right. It's like, well, you didn't tell me that you had this blood test three years ago. Right. So I gave you the wrong answer.

27:43So I have to recorrect it.

27:45Kara Swisher:Right. Exactly. So speaking of health care costs, I want to continue and finish on this. You had a post on X the other day that got people talking. You wrote, if you own shares in a fund that owns any big of the biggest insurance carriers, you're part of the cost of health care problem in this country. Those companies put the share price over the health of you, your family, co-workers and friends. The worst part is that they will lie and mislead you to make more. Tell the funds you own that you will sell if they don't divest their interest in the biggest insurance companies. That's something else to do that.

28:12Kara Swisher:Explain why you're calling this out now, and do you think funds will actually divest? So, no, they won't. Some can't just because it's SPX or it's part of an index, right? But they won't because their interest is just in making money, not in doing what's best for the country. And it's the same with the big insurance companies. Their fiduciary responsibility, at least right now, is to shareholders. That's all they care about. Yeah. Reminds me of tech companies, but go ahead. Yeah, right? But when you listen to the quarterly earnings conference calls or run them through your favorite LLM, right, and you just say, did they say anything about reducing costs for patients?

28:50The answer is never yes. Yeah. You know, and if they maybe save something here, they're making it up in fees or somewhere else. They're rarely saying, like one company, one PBM insurance company said, their earnings are going to be a little bit lower for two years because they're making this one adjustment on rebates, but they'll make it up after that and more than compensate and get back to their normal margins. Get the fuck out of here. Nobody is going to change their habits that run these companies unless it impacts it where they care. And that's the price of the stock.

29:27Kara Swisher:So does that happen? I mean, it works. with South African companies, it works. Right, no, it can. When someone, you know, if you had Bernie saying, do this, if you had, you know, Jayapal doing this instead of pushing for Medicare for all and just talking trash there, something could happen. If you had Republicans pushing it, it could happen. But again, that's where their money's coming from. And I'm not saying Bernie and Jayapal are getting it, but a lot of people are. So what would you, what reaction did you get? Not a whole lot, honestly, just a couple articles and, you know, some requests for quotes.

30:00And nobody said, yeah, I did it. Not one single person.

30:03Kara Swisher:Yeah. I'm going to do it, Mark. Thank you. I shall do it. I shall do it. Now, yet another post of yours is generating buzz this week, a prediction that one outlet says has investors watching. You posted chips as an asset class to be the new crypto. Explain for me. Yeah. I mean, I sold most of my Bitcoin. I went from not being a believer to being a believer, thinking it's a better gold than gold because it's digital. And I also believe that it would be a good hedge against political and geopolitical instability. That it'd be a hedge against, you know, economic instability. No, it really got washed out to, by the way.

30:44Yeah. Bitcoin has lost the plot.

30:46Kara Swisher:Yeah. Right. Tell me why. Explain. Well, all the things I just mentioned had to come true. That's what the maxis were pushing, right? It's protection against fiat instability, you know, money printer go burr, right? Money printers burring as much as it could possibly burr, right? And the dollar is down. And so you would think the price of Bitcoin and dollars would be skyrocketing, particularly with all this geopolitical instability and all the uncertainty. But it's not. It's, you know, it's flatlined for the most part because if there's not a good narrative, like any other stock, right? If the narrative isn't good, supply and demand defines the price unless it pays dividend, which these don't.

31:31And so people aren't buying it. And the reason I said chips are the next thing is because it's not intuitive until you really think about it, right? Right. Chips are like, you know, the NVIDIA chips, AMD chips, maybe TPUs from Google and some others. Amazon's trying to make their own, you know, all that stuff. Apple is, yeah. Yeah, Apple is, right. They're like apartments, right? You can rent them and when they're brand new, they're worth the most and you might as well rent them at the highest price. And then over time, they degrade in quality because you can't improve them, at least not now. And so I think it makes a good investment and it makes one that you can create a really cool narrative about.

32:15And there's so much money chasing it that the crypto bros kind of like these types of things, right? And so narrative makes economic sense. Lots of money there.

32:27Kara Swisher:How do you make it an asset class then? Just the stocks in it, the stocks of companies that make it? Yeah, you can tokenize it. You can use crypto there to tokenize it and sell it as a real world asset. They can do different types of - Tokenize the stocks. No, tokenize a chip. A chip. Yeah, a chip. You know, here's the right to - You own the rights like a barrel of oil. You can buy it and sell it, right? Oh, like what Michael Saylor was doing, right? Well, kind of, yeah. Yeah, with the Bitcoin itself. That's a lot more complicated. That's more financial engineering, right? Right. But more like you can put contracts on the chips and take the share of revenue created from that chip and sell it.

33:12Right. Oh, interesting.

33:13Kara Swisher:Are you doing that? I'm still trying to learn. I mean, it's relatively new. What's the reaction to that? I mean, it was like, interesting. Let's see what happens. And the crypto bros that are still holding on, you're an idiot. You know, you're dumb. Holder. Holder. What are they waiting for? What are they actually, they're hoping it will go to the sky. Well, there's still a chance it gets hot again, right? Remember, it's supply and demand. I mean, a stock's not a whole lot different than a baseball card. Whatever's hot and whatever has the greatest narrative. So Bitcoin and all the others, Ethereum could go up.

33:46I'm really disappointed in Ethereum because it has smart contracts. And my hope when I got excited about it was that we'd be able to use smart contracts and the ledger of Bitcoin to create better social media applications, to create new types of applications that feed data to other things, right? Like tracking the weather so I could buy weather insurance for a Mavs game in case it snows, you know, that type of thing. But it never really came to fruition. And everybody just tried to play the same games. How can I extract the most amount of money from a new blockchain, because the biggest downfall of crypto always has been the marginal cost to create a competitive blockchain is close to zero.

34:31So everybody created their own, said amazing it was, and you can't have that many. Right, right.

34:36Kara Swisher:Because then it goes, say, like Trumpcoin down to zero, and then you lose all your money at it. But a lot of it was. I know it sounds crazy to say, but a lot of it was a scam, I believe. Yeah, I mean, look, when Trumpcoin came out, again, it's not even relevant to Trump. He doesn't have the only meme coin or shit coin out there. I literally emailed the people I know at Coinbase. So what the fuck are you doing putting these shit coins out when you know all you're going to do is watch people lose their money? Because it's just a game of musical chairs. And then, you know, online, if X is like anything, they'll tell you, we know it's musical chairs.

35:17We know it's not even as good as a lottery ticket. And that's why we play. Right. That's our gambling and that's our rush.

35:23Kara Swisher:Well, there's also there's also another idiot out there. Well, yeah, well, that's the whole point. Right. Yeah. And so it's just it's just gambling. And it's just that's that's the rush they get. What can people do with either their prescription drugs? What's the one thing? is it not invest in insurance companies? Is it moved away from the express scripts or whatever? What is the one thing people can do to start moving the ball? Because politicians certainly won't. It's got to be the CEOs. So self-insured companies provide insurance to 67 % of employees who get insurance from work. 67%. So most of it, yeah.

36:02Yeah. And so if those CEOs got their shit together and weren't idiots and just run these contracts through their LLMs and just adapted their contracts accordingly, the whole business would change like that.

36:16Kara Swisher:Yeah, I like your convincing. If you're not idiots, you idiots, that's how you persuade people. Yeah. No, you get the point though, right? I do. That's how I talk. What would you call a CEO of a company that has a chance to save millions and millions and millions of dollars, increase their stock price as a direct result, improve the health and wellness of their employees and their families, and refuses to do it? Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right, idiots. Yeah. No. You want to be right or you want to be effective. Right. And you're not even being right. You're looking like an idiot. And so I'm hoping, I can't name the company, but there was one company who did exactly what I said.

36:52Exactly. And they just got back to me and they said, we're saving millions upon millions, more than we ever possibly could. We did an audit. We're going to get a refund. And I said, please, just do one thing for me. Just say on your quarterly earnings conference call that this is why earnings are up.

37:09Kara Swisher:Yeah. Because if you do that. Then they're copycats. They're sheep. They'll do it. You're right. A hundred percent. We listen to Mark. OK, Mark, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, billionaires buying sports teams. You might know something about that.

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40:14Kara Swisher:Mark, we're back. Family drama is complicating the blockbuster sale of the L.A. Lakers. Jeannie Buss, controlling owner of the Lakers, is challenging her siblings' attempts to sell the family's remaining 17.8 % stake, arguing the sale can't happen without her consent. This comes after former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Thrive Capital's Josh Kushner, the other Kushner, agreed to buy the Lakers from current majority owner Mark Walter in a deal valued at$12.5 billion. Walter's in a bit of trouble with all manner of his very problematic empire, whatever it is. Iger and Kushner are already buying 65 % of the team, adding the Buss family shares would bring their ownership to roughly 83%.

40:55Kara Swisher:Now, this is a world you know well. I was really fascinated with this. You bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000. You sold your majority stake in 2023. We're talking about chips as an asset class, but our sports teams seem to be an asset class now. And I'll note, recently Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he was open to you coming on as a minority owner, but the team is - Yeah, he was just kidding. Yeah, he was just kidding. Yeah, on the investors at this point. Yeah. But I assume you'd buy it if it was available, presumably. But that's - Depends on, yeah, neither here nor there. Depends on the price.

41:26Kara Swisher:So explain what's happening here for me. I find this really interesting, especially, you know, you have Iger in there, which is interesting. I think he's the pretty one and Josh is the money. Explain what's happening here. A couple of things. One, it's a vanity asset. Like if I didn't buy the Dallas Mavericks, probably wouldn't know who I was. Right. I mean, you would because of tech, but most people would not. I would not be a celebrity. I wouldn't have gotten on Shark Tank. Right. David Stern, rest in peace, was the commissioner of the NBA. And he used to always say, I made you by fining you all those times.

41:57And he was right. You know, it is the ultimate vanity asset. Wasn't your behavior. No. You know, there's 30 NBA teams, 32 in other leagues. And so we know Jerry Jones's name, not because he was in the oil business. You know, people now know who Josh Kushner is, not just because of his brother. And so that, one, it's a vanity asset. Two, because it's a vanity asset and now the leagues are allowing private equity to get involved, that's increasing the prices because private equity chases where the narratives are. You know, and this is crypto for rich people in some respects, right? It's where the fun narrative is.

42:39But from a true business perspective, there's two sides to this. One, if you can leverage it to build, you know, so if you look around Staples that were crypto.com center, right, there's all kinds of cool stuff. There's if you go by, there's the battery outside Atlanta, right? There's by the Chase Center, there's all kinds of stuff, right? And so if you're able to build all that stuff, you can make real money. So it's not the team per se, but it's the leverage it gives you by the traffic. In the surrounding area. And you can do it once you own the arena, you can do concerts, which is where the Mavs and the Dallas Stars that we shared the arena with made most of our money.

43:19Right. By doing concerts and events.

43:21Kara Swisher:More in Brooklyn with the Nets. Yeah. They don't even have to have a good basketball team. No, you don't. You really, really don't. Well, they have a good women's basketball team. Yeah, but the delta between the number of fans when you suck and when you win a championship, you can raise ticket prices, but it's not a huge number in the bigger scheme of things. It's all driven by the externals, the real estate, and by streaming, right? Because the NBA has got a huge revenue deal and you divide that by 30 teams and that's real money. And so, you know, that increases the valuation as well. And if you want to win, it's going to cost you a decent amount of money to win, even with the second apron, this new thing they put in the NBA.

44:04And so you've got to be willing to accept putting money in to cover losses in most cases and be willing to invest in all these external things. That was the thing with me. I don't want to be in the real estate business. I wanted to be in the basketball business. And it really changed to be a PE-driven business as opposed to people like me and Jeannie Buss who cared about fans.

44:28Kara Swisher:You didn't want to do restaurants. No, I don't want to do any of that shit, right? And I pretty much would have had to. Right. And so what is going to happen with Jeannie Buss? Explain her as an owner. I mean, I agree. I love Jeannie. I love Jeannie. I love her, love her, love her. She cares about fans. She was always engaged. She wanted to do what's best for, you know, not just Lakers, but the Lakers fans. Kate Hudson is playing her well on that show. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that, you know, it's a fair, you know, representation of Jeannie. She's just got a good heart. And so we'll see what happens.

44:57I really don't know.

44:58Kara Swisher:What do you think is going to happen here? Can't she stop them? That depends on the legal aspects of it. It depends if she can buy them out. Right. Oh, that's right. Has she come to you? Because she has to keep 15%. And I have no idea if she can buy out her siblings. That's a lot of money. Because if she can, then she can. She doesn't have to buy all of them out just enough to get the 15%. Well, I think they all want to sell. I think there are five of them. Is that right? Five of them, right. And so you would think they would sell to her. Is there others who could buy it? Well, no, the whole Iger Kushner group could.

45:30And could they sell to somebody else?

45:32Kara Swisher:She wants to say controlling owner. And she has to be over a certain amount. 15%. Yeah, would it be attractive to them to have her have that if they own so much of it? I don't know. I mean, she could possibly even offer them a little bit more than Josh and Bob are. Oh, offer. Walter, you mean? Yeah. No. Oh, the family. The family. Well, no. So the family has got the trust in their existing holdings. And you've got Bob Iger and Josh Kushner coming in, offering the$12.5 billion, right? And taking out Walter and the siblings. Right. And the siblings, right? Would they want to stay if they can't take her out?

46:09Yeah, they probably would because I don't think she wants to stay forever. And I think she only would do it based off of what I've read for the term of the contract she has with Mark Walter.

46:20Kara Swisher:Which is what? Four years left, I think. So what do you imagine is going to happen here? What should happen? How about that? I mean, what should happen is she should be able to do a contractual arrangement where she commits to sell her percentage to Bob and Josh in four years in exchange for running the team for those four years. Yeah. That's what should happen. Why would she want to do that? Because she loves doing it. She loves the Lakers fans. She loves being part of it. I mean, look, having been there, it's stressful. but at the same time, it becomes your identity and you get to learn to know all the fans and you get to love them and they love you.

47:02And, you know, it's just a different feeling.

47:05Kara Swisher:And how do you assess Bob Iger as this is his next chapter? And Josh, presumably, Josh lives in New York. Yeah, Bob, I love Bob, right? I think he's smart. He's fair. He's caring. He's empathetic, right? He's an LA guy. He's an LA guy. He knows the scene, right I would see him at Clippers game and anybody who would support like he'd bring his son all the time and anybody who would support the Clippers when the Clippers were bad is a true basketball fan okay all right and so that that means a lot these days yeah so where is this all going these prices of all these sports teams you know there's a lot of financial engineering involved and so really kind of correlates to the Nasdaq and to the price of tech as long as money's coming in You know, a big chunk of that money goes to private equity.

47:52A big chunk of, you know, people's holdings can be borrowed against to buy a portion of the team. So, you know, if it's$10 billion and you have to own 15%, you have to come up with $1.5 billion and you're probably not going to write a check because it's after tax check, right? So you borrow against other assets and that gives you the$1.5. You get amortization and depreciation from the player's contract, which maybe, you know, offsets the gains you anticipate from chat GPT, open AI going public or Anthropic going public. And so there's a strategy there. But if the price of those assets drop, two things can kill, right?

48:33One, if the price of those assets drop so you can't borrow against them or you get called in, right, that's a real problem. And two, all the TV money for all the four big professional sports is built on the fact that by streaming the games, you can add more subscribers and have less churn and better. Well, you're reading all this stuff now with Paramount and all that's going on, right? They need a couple of things to work for them. They need Paramount Plus to not only add subscribers, they need to reduce churn. And if the sports contracts do both of those things, add subs, reduce churn, it's worth the price paid.

49:17If they don't, the shit hits the fan.

49:20Kara Swisher:Yes, it does. And there's a big problem because now Paramount's money is going down. And along with that, you've got... They've got a lot of problems, but go ahead. Yeah, in this particular sector, right? And then you have legacy media with CBS, right? And so if all the fees and everything that are charged, like the carriage fees, if they can't get the money they need from the cable networks because they're getting messed up or from Fox, whatever it may be, that's more problems for them. And that's all driven and impacts sports rights fees. Right, right. And then that's the golden goose at this point.

49:55Kara Swisher:So prices don't have to go up. They don't have to go up. No, not at all. Like when I first bought the Mavs in 2000, the value of my franchise actually went down the first 10 years. What did you buy it for? What did you buy? $285 million. A million? Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's cheap. Doesn't it feel cheap? Looks cheap now, yeah. Yeah. All right, moving on. Let's talk about this idea you find insane. This is your rant period of the show. California voters will consider a proposed one-time 5 % tax on billionaires this month, a measure backed by Representative Ro Khanna. One big question is how founders whose wealth is tied up on a company stock would pay the tax without selling shares.

50:34Kara Swisher:Khanna suggests the state could provide loans in exchange for shares, but the terms that are long but not infinite, you called the idea, I think the word is insane. by the technical term, arguing the state would be essentially lending billionaires money so they could give it right back as taxes. I have to agree with you on this one. And I have different thoughts on the billion. I think people should pay more taxes who are wealthier, as you know. But tell me more about your concerns and where this is. You know, Sergey Brin's, you know, bust in the bank trying to stop this thing. It'll ultimately probably will pass, would be my guess, is my guess.

51:10Kara Swisher:But I don't know. I mean, I can tell you at a base, like my daughter just graduated from college and she was asking about living in L.A. I'm like, you can't afford it. Right. The taxes are insane. But going back just to the billionaire stuff. Right. People don't realize that a billionaire doesn't mean you have a billion dollars in liquid assets. Chances are you might have five percent if you're lucky. Rest is in stock is what you're saying. Or and it might be in non not publicly available stock. It might be an illiquid asset that you can't sell. Which is why they borrow against it all the time.

51:46Well, yeah, if they're able to. It's more recent that you're even able to borrow against private stock, right? But even then, there's so many things that can work against you, you know? And particularly now, companies aren't going as public as much as they used to. Like, it's a big deal for SpaceX. It's a big deal for OpenAI. It's a big deal if Anthropic goes public, right? all these other AI companies in particular, based in California, that are raising money at$10 billion and more, those guys might, I mean, like if I'm investing in one of those, I don't want the money going right into the pockets of the founders, right?

52:26You can take a little bit, but if you're, let's just say to make it easy numbers, if you have a company that's valued at $10 billion and you have three founders that each own 10%, they're billionaires by the state of California's definition. The chances of them having$50 million in cash are zero. Zero. So now all of a sudden what Ro wanted to do, and I like Ro, we get along great. I respect them. I think his heart's in the right place, but he's a politician first, right? And so the idea that, Hey, Perry, you just did this AI thing and you did a company valued at$10 billion. You own your 10%. You are a billionaire.

53:10Kerry, I know you don't have$50 million or anywhere near it and you don't have liquidity at all. So I'm going to loan against your shares in a non-recourse deal, right? And we'll give you that$50 million so you can give it right back to us. And if you can't pay us in the future, we'll just keep the shares of your stock.

53:29Kara Swisher:Mm-hmm. Well, what does not pay actually mean? You've seen many tech companies who have grown, grown profits, right? Added thousands of employees, right? Paid who knows how much in taxes, particularly in the state of California. You know, just benefited the communities. And the founders don't have$50 million. Tell me about this tax, how you're feeling about it. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's going to cost them more. that I'll say, and look, people say, well, you're a billionaire, right? Well, look, you're already getting people moving. You're getting companies moving. So they said that they would raise 20 million because you can delay it, right?

54:09You don't have to pay it all at once. The estimate amount that I read when I was looking into all that stuff was$20 billion a year. And 90 % of that was going to go to medical for, to Medi-Cal, right? To make up for the money that was lost in the Medicaid need to work stuff, right? And then 10 % for education and like. Well, you have to do the math. Could you lose, if the average job pays$100 ,000 before benefits, right? Could you lose 200 ,000 jobs a year? The answer is yes. You could be cutting off your nose to slight your face.

54:46Kara Swisher:So how would you do this? Because people, you know, there's this, I mean, the polling is very clear with voters. Oh, no, everybody wants my money. And, you know, Unfortunately, usually they say they'll eat me last, right? And I get it. You are the favorite billionaire. Although you would be delicious, I will say, compared to many of them. Yeah, I already know. Yeah, Elon would be gamey. Go ahead. I mean, the obvious answer, you spend less, right? Right. But the reality is California doesn't have a lot of leeway to raise taxes. No, they do not. You know, they already charge a lot. I think they already charge on capital gains.

55:24They charge the same amount as ordinary income. You know, and I forget which taxes at 13.3%, but they already get you coming and going. And so in terms of where you can probably raise some additional money is maybe, you know, stock buybacks. I'm not a big fan of stock buybacks. I think it's financial engineering. The federal government always taxes some. Maybe the states can do a little bit there. That's not going to raise$20 billion. So you can tax on some of the loans on public companies, or you can make it easier for people to go public. Start, you know, working with the SEC, doing whatever you can.

56:02And I don't have an answer here. Making it easier to go public, making it easier to sell shares of stock so that you have an actual event where they would pay capital gains tax because your capital gains tax is already damn high.

56:14Kara Swisher:So what about an alternative minimum tax that like Scott is proposing? And I don't have a problem with that either. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the Warren Buffett thing, right? Because it used to be all the time. I mean, I remember when I started Micro Solutions that I had to pay money on retained earnings. Like if I kept too much money in the bank, I had to pay taxes on it. And I was like, okay, whatever, that's the law. I'm just going to keep on running my company. That's the way most entrepreneurs think. if you made it so that you had to pay an alternate minimum tax, and preferably at the federal level as opposed to the state level, then, you know, you would get more tax.

56:52And then hopefully, whoever comes in next, we could reimburse or we could change those Medicaid work laws so that everybody who deserved Medicaid got it. And so that even with Medicaid, and I think of Medi-Cal Well, two, if your assets increase for whatever reason, you get a job, they don't immediately take it back to recapture the Medicaid money. You know, there's so many ways that you can go about it. An alternative tax is as good as any.

57:20Kara Swisher:And so what do you make when you consider the anger and the clear, you know, anti. I just saw yet another poll today around AI, around the meta case in Oakland, California happening right now. The data centers. I've been doing show after. I've been talking about this for you. I went in to visit some Facebook people, and they asked me what I thought. I said, people hate you. And they're like, oh, yeah, but what do you think? I go, people hate you. And I said, in data centers, it's just a proxy for that. I wrote a tweet about that. I tweeted exactly that. Yes, I know you did. And I was like, they hate you.

57:52Kara Swisher:And, well, some of them can be good. I said, but many of them aren't. And you really are treating these people like shit. And I think Facebook is the worst of the worst, right? Well, Elon, with the gas spewing things in Memphis didn't help matters. Or your friend Kevin. Or your friend Kevin. Kevin just wants to make money. Yeah, really? I had no idea. No idea, right? But let's talk about Meta. And I'll give you, this is my Michigan-like experience with Meta. Okay. Every single week, I get emails from little old men and ladies saying, will my cure for diabetes work? Or I just ordered your cure for diabetes for$294.

58:30Oh, no. And I'm like, I already know the answer now, which is they're using an AI version of me. And Meta allows it. It's always on Facebook, right? Where I come in and I say, and I've seen it and I've sent it to them. And I said, look, you know, we'll cure diabetes, whatever, da, da, da, da, da. And then when you read the fine print all the way at the bottom, this is just an AI representation of Mark Cuban. It's not real. This is for entertainment purposes always. And to Facebook, that's good enough. Facebook knows that it's bullshit. Facebook knows the little old ladies are getting ripped off, right?

59:05And the point is that defines the culture of the organization. If you're willing to rip off little old, if you have grandparents, your grandparents, right? And that's acceptable. All that kind of bullshit is acceptable top to bottom in your organization. It's just like healthcare. They do the same shit, right?

59:22Kara Swisher:I was just recently meeting with a bunch of publishers who are worried about audio piracy of books. You know, they're doing pretty well with audio books. And actually, it's a good, strong business. But, you know, they get pirated all the time. And YouTube is the culprit for the most part here. And people do now AI versions of books and all kinds of books, everybody's books. Oh, yeah. I see books about me that are just AI nonsense. Well, that's also books generated. Amazon does that. But YouTube does AI audio piracy. But see, that's the whole thing. This is where AI and data centers truly are the bad guys.

59:56Because they are so expensive, right? Right. They're going through every bit of cash that they have. They're having to borrow on top. So in the mindset is the bigger picture, this is the greater good. Whatever it takes. And so and I tweeted about this, too. I forget the exact example. But it used to be with Google AdWords that when you ask for an exact match for your AdWord, you got an exact match. Right. Now it's an approximation, right? And also it used to be that there was a set price. Now the price varies, but it always goes up, right? Whatever the specific details are. They're gaming the system.

1:00:36It's financial engineering to try to make up all that money. And so - Which they need to do. Yeah. And so that's, you know, the ends justify the means, right? And that's just wrong. Look, I'm not anti-data center. I literally had an office right above my Mavs office. The practice facility was right next to an IBM soft layer data center, you know. And so, you know, it was no big deal to me, but it wasn't an AI data center, at least not yet, right?

1:01:06Kara Swisher:You know, so getting back to that idea of these taxes, it's all. Yes, of course. So what to do? So leadership, honesty, right? Things that we lacked, right? And again, I'm not going to talk about the president, but I'll use Medicare for all as an example, because since we're talking health care, like there was that study, I don't know if you saw it, that said Medicare for all would save$1 trillion. Sounds great, right? Until you look at the fine print and see all the references that they used, right? So I looked at these numbers to get to a trillion, and one of the numbers was$265 billion, and it was elimination of fraud.

1:01:51I'm like,$265 billion, that's a big number. Elon tried it.

1:01:56Kara Swisher:I think he cost us money. Yeah, and it didn't work at all, right? So I go down to the footnotes and I'm like, okay, there's this article that was written in 2003 about Taiwan and their conversion to universal health care. I'm like, okay, so what happened? Well, Taiwan went from a paper system, basically, and a market-driven system to a transition to universal health care. It was a disaster the first couple of years. But there was this article written that said they saved 8 % on waste. So what do the authors of this article? They just extrapolate. They extrapolate from Taiwan from 1995, a paper-based system, and they applied it to the U.S.

1:02:43budget, right? And so they get, you know,$3 trillion times 8%, you know, and it gets their$265 billion. That is the problem. You've got something that everybody wants. Like if we walked out there and we said, it's a dollar a month to give healthcare for each person, dollar a month per person. Everybody's like, yeah, let's go. Republicans be for it, everybody be for it, right? But we're not trying to figure out a solution, right? We don't know what those costs are. A lot of the reasons we talked about earlier, but you can't lie about it. You have to put together a plan that gets you from here to there.

1:03:21Another thing that they did was they said, if we change what we pay the best hospitals in the country, right, to Medicare rates, they would make up the losses in revenue by the reduction in administrative costs. That's the biggest bunch of horseshit. If you walk into a really nice hospital, right, it's designed to be a really nice hospital. It's got all the machines that go ping the really, really expensive stuff, right? And they've got the most expensive doctors. If you start paying doctors in those hospitals Medicare rates, you know what they're going to do? They're going to opt out. They're not going to be available to anybody on Medicare, right?

1:04:03And the hospitals are going to opt out. But in both Bernie's and Representative Jayapal's Medicare for All, right, like in this article, in this study, they just accepted that as fact. There's just no way. And then the creme de la creme in both of those Medicare for All legislations that were proposed. Section four, administration. At the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, they have the option to figure out everything, basically. It's a fucking politically appointed position. How would it be going right now? Right? Yes.

1:04:40Kara Swisher:We'd all have measles. Measles for everybody. And then salmonella. It'd be a disaster. and yet they just make it seem like everything is perfect. That in the case of the job - I don't, I'm going to push back. I don't think anything is perfect. It's like a sentiment of people are tired of what you talked about at the top, right? Don't fix the problem. Yeah, well - Fix the problem. Don't come up and say - We may need an entirely new system. Yes, we do. Which actually Trump gives us an opportunity. If he can't build that ballroom, maybe we do need a ballroom, a smaller one. Maybe we do need - We do not need those shiny horses, I could tell you.

1:05:14But you get the point of all this, right?

1:05:16Kara Swisher:Yes, I see your point. Right. Come up with a plan so we can actually solve these problems instead of throwing out bullshit. Well, it's bullshit gets thrown because bullshit has been thrown. But anyway, let's go on a quick break. We'll be right back.

1:05:35Kara Swisher:Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have eczema. So I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about ebglis?

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1:06:23Kara Swisher:Respect your time. Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.com. Or call 1-800-LILLY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends and now that's next level. Suddenly the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Kara here. The other day I saw a picture of Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve courtside. She was wearing a T-shirt that read, trans kids belong.

1:07:07Kara Swisher:I think this was an epic move, and I have so much respect for that. Go Cheryl. This week, Cheryl is on Megan Rapinoe's new podcast, Why Are You Like This? Megan asked Cheryl why her T-shirts are more than just a fashion statement. There's just so many things that we could really champion for women and other marginalized groups. And I just heard from so many people what it meant to them. And so we've continued that. The conversation with Megan gets into why Cheryl is the WNBA goat, from being one of the first openly gay coaches in the WNBA to standing with her players during Black Lives Matter.

1:07:44Kara Swisher:She also recently became the winningest coach in WNBA history. You should check it out. Why Are You Like This? Wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

1:07:59Kara Swisher:Mark, we're back. Scott and I have talked a lot over the years about who we want to run for president, and one name keeps coming up. Let's listen to a clip. By the way, who's going to be the next president? Because according to AP, you get to decide. I'd rather have Mark Cuban. I'd vote for Cuban. He's clearly positioning himself for a run, and I hope he runs. I want cubes. He's a super smart, super impressive guy, and a decent man. I would pick Mark Cuban. Honestly, I would. I would like that because I'd get to go to the Lincoln bedroom, largely. That's my goal. I get a lot of shit for saying that, by the way, but I don't really care.

1:08:34Kara Swisher:I have actually written saying you should run. I have. We text all. We have very funny texts. And you resist it. It's the one thing I'm asked more than anything else, you know, because I've been interviewing all these different possible candidates through Democrats. I'm going to move to the Republicans soon. It's hard right now. They don't want to talk about it until Trump is out of the picture in a more substantive way. talk about why you don't want to run explain for people so I don't have to anymore because everything is it's all laws right you got everything I think like an entrepreneur right if I see like we're just talking about medicare for all I want universal health care in some form or fashion right we need to make sure that everybody in this country has a right and gets care health care that they need it would help the economy yada yada all the second and third order effects are enormous, right?

1:09:26And so if I was president, you would think, well, you could go, I've talked to people at HHS, CMS. There is no from here to there. And I've talked to, you know, about the breakup big medicine bill. There's not one single senator that wants to support it other than those two. Same with the legislation. You know, I've talked to Bernie's people about how do we change this? Whether I was president or not, that ain't going to change. Their self-interest stays the same. Whereas as an entrepreneur, I can do things like cost plus drugs, cost plus wellness, all the other things that we're working on that allow me to have an impact.

1:10:02I can go and bang on the door of a CEO and call them a moron or her a moron to their face and actually institute change.

1:10:09Kara Swisher:You can do that as president now. You can call people morons. Well, yeah, you could. But then I got to kiss the babies. I got to do all the stuff. I got to worry about stuff that maybe I'm not the best person, you know, or most qualified towards. I have to have temperament, which I don't have. I have to have patience, which I don't have. Again, allowed now, just so you know it's changed. Yeah, it's allowed, but it doesn't make it right. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Although I doubt you'll go down those roads. But the idea is you're more effective outside than inside. Yes, I can do things, right?

1:10:38I can create change. I truly believe I'm going to change healthcare. I'm positive. By doing. Yes, I've already had a big impact. You know, I've seen things change. I've seen people come every day. I hear about people like you mentioned, you're using it, right? Cosmos drugs. I mean, every day I hear stories. Yeah, we had somebody who just, we helped. She literally got a heart transplant and then her new insurance plan wouldn't pay for the rejection medications. And they came to us and we fixed it. We're working with a family from Australia now who can't get photon radiation because they don't have it in Australia yet.

1:11:18And we're connecting them with a variety of different doctors through Cost Plus Wellness. And so those are things I can do, bam, bam, bam, bam, as opposed to, okay, Mark, on your calendar today is a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, who the fuck? You would handle him well, I feel. Yeah, I mean, the guy who put a target on every Jew in the world's back, right?

1:11:40Kara Swisher:Yes, yes, him. That's him. Yes, see, exactly. See? See? You're already doing it. So you don't think you can be effective, I think, what you're saying. You don't have the temperament or patience for it. The patience for it. Now, when I say that to people, I said he doesn't think he has a temperament or patient, everyone's like, he's lying. Really mean it. Really means it. Although, you should run as a Republican. That would fuck them up. Oh, no, that's what, if I was going to run, that's what I would do. I can't win as a Democrat, not with the DSAs and all that shit there. And, oh, by the way, speaking of Medicare for All, I read Al Saeed's book on Medicare for All.

1:12:11It's not bad. He has a lot in common with Trump on some of his positions on drugs. Yes, yeah. But, you know, it wasn't a bad book. I think people just look for things that are not what is, they're looking for something different. Went from the Tea Party to, you know, change it, hope and change, Tea Party, Trump, not Trump, J6, now DSA, anything that's different. It's just like what people said to me about Trump. Trump won. I had a buddy I played basketball with, and I'm like, I know this guy, yada, yada, yada. He's like, let me just tell you something. I've been voting for politicians my entire life.

1:12:46You know what they've done for me? Nothing. Why would I vote for a politician again? I've been voting for Democrats my entire life. You know what they've done for me?

1:12:56Kara Swisher:All right. So then what are you going to do? Run as a Republican. That would be fun. Oh, that would be fun, though. It would be so much fun. Would you just please do it just for driving? It would be fun. J.D. Vance's head would blow off. See, part of you is thinking of it. I can feel it, Mark. Come on. No, of course I've thought about it because you bring it up every time we talk. Do it for me. Do it for me. Anyway. I'll tell you what, when they auction off a night in the Lincoln bedroom, I'll buy it for you. Oh, thank you so much. As long as Trump's not there because he's a little creepy, honestly.

1:13:23Kara Swisher:Anyway, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

1:13:32Kara Swisher:The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

1:14:09Kara Swisher:There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. Elon Musk and a lot of other very smart people think we're all going to have robots at our house any day now. But when you look at where the tech is today and how far it has to go, you might reach a different conclusion. This idea that humanoid robots are coming to live in our house, and I went and explored that, is just not true. That's Joanna Stern, the tech journalist who spent a year outsourcing her life to AI and robots.

1:14:49Kara Swisher:That's on Channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

1:14:59Kara Swisher:Okay, Mark, let's hear a prediction. James Tallarico, let's go. Oh, okay, tell me. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I'm a huge fan. Yeah, I know you are. I think he's honest. He's trustworthy. He cares. He'll do the right thing as opposed to the politically expedient thing. I think he truly wants to change, you know, bring back reality to politics. And I think he's got a real chance to win. Yeah, so you really do believe that. I mean, the polls are pretty good in his favor. Yeah, and you can't tell him polls anymore. That's right, you can't. But he's going into red areas. He's going into red areas and drawing big crowds.

1:15:38Kara Swisher:Big crowds. And what would you say to some of those voters who, I mean, first of all, Ken Paxton seems like literally a villain. It's just everything he does seems awful. Yeah, I'm not a fan. No, I don't think many people are. But what do you say then to those red voters? Do what's best for the state of Texas. Do what's best for your wallet. Do what's best for you, right? There's nobody in the same thing. My buddy who voted for Trump in 2016, I say the same thing to all these voters. You've been voting for Republicans all these years. What have they done for you? Now it's time for somebody who is going to literally be able to sit with you at the dinner table and discuss your budget and be able to relate to it.

1:16:19And hopefully, you know, with help from folks like me, go talk to grocery stores, go talk to manufacturers, go talk to oil companies, whatever it may be, and come up with some solutions. We really try to change things beyond just legislation.

1:16:33Kara Swisher:All right. Tallarico. That's it. All right, I'm going to be a very, very short prediction. This META trial that's happening in Oakland right now, it's a trial brought by 29 states, which charged the company with violating federal child privacy and state consumer protection laws. They're going for product liability here, a nuisance in public interest. California's deputy attorney general said in an opening statement, this is another, by the way, Rob Bonta case among the others. There's a lot of states here. There's a ton of states. META's business model can be summed up in four simple words. hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth in the public when making public statements.

1:17:08Kara Swisher:I thought it was highly effective, which was hook, hold, harvest, hide. Yes, that is a great slogan. It's the beginning of the cigarette. I have not said this before, but they're coming from everywhere. I hope so. I truly, truly, truly hope so. Because whoever controls the algorithm controls the mind of your kids and the mind of adults, too. I mean, in politics, Mandami, right? Brilliant with Al Saeed, really, really good. And once you impact that algorithm, that's what you see on your feed. The best way to know what your kids are about is just ask to see their TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram feeds and just go looking through.

1:17:48And you'll know exactly who they are.

1:17:50Kara Swisher:Yeah. Anyway, Mark, I really appreciate it. We want to hear from you. Send your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Tell us what you think about Mark Cubes. Okay, that's the show. Thanks for listening to Pivot. Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back next week. Mark, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Anytime, Kara. You know I love you. Lincoln Bedroom. Lincoln Bedroom. Lincoln Bedroom. Think of me, Cuban. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Todd Wiseman.

1:18:22Kara Swisher:Ernie Enderdott engineered this episode. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

1:18:42Kara Swisher:Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions! I have sold my chariot on Carvana!

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