When Mark Cuban is feeling spicy, he’ll at all times let you already know. The billionaire businessman, basketball proprietor, and Shark Tank impresario lit up WIRED’s The Huge Interview occasion on Tuesday, dropping sizzling takes about Elon Musk, the pharmaceutical trade, and why he thinks “couch fucking” and Gary Gensler’s crypto coverage price 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 per thirty days versus the greater than $3,000 a month uninsured sufferers had 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 whole worth record, one thing that’s at all times been extremely exhausting to acquire from different drug suppliers for customers and researchers alike.
Now, Cuban says, research have come out exhibiting that if Medicare purchased, as an illustration, 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 exhibits the bloat of the well being care system but in addition the tangible impact that one well-funded firm can have.
It’s not that Cuban’s not earning money on Price Plus Medication, both, as a result of he’s. He could possibly 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 among 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 latest months, saying that he thinks it’s an general “existential moment” 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 want to know what Elon thinks, Twitter’s amazing,” Cuban joked, however added that he thinks Bluesky is extra of a real “social network” as compared.
Mark Cuban and Lauren Goode at The Huge Interview{Photograph}: Tristan deBrauwere
