Mark Cuban: Love/Hate Relationship with Trump, Why He's Backing Kamala Harris
2024-10-03 spoken.md · speaker-labeled ▶ watch ← E197 all episodes E199 →
Every number here is replayed from score_events — the same ledger the pool ranks on. Decay is what the 135 ideas nobody mentioned gave up this week; it applies only when an episode is processed.
Tier crossings
conviction thresholds crossed by this episode — 65 / 45 / 15 · ideas born here show where they landed. why 65 isn't always green
Who moved the board
each voice's force on conviction this episode — supports and opposes, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of this episode's movement
What got argued (15 ideas)
ordered by how hard each idea moved · quotes are verbatim from the transcript, timestamps deep-link into the episode
Pharmacy benefit managers extract the largest single share of US drug-cost inflation through opaque formulary rebates, undisclosed subsidiary skims and contractual gag clauses. Cuban's published cost-plus price list, FTC litigation against the PBMs and CMS negotiation together force that opacity open, and mandated contract transparency drops all-in drug pricing 30-40%, compressing the PBM profit pools inside the listed payer conglomerates.
And by working, by requiring transparency in all contracts, signed by anybody anywhere in terms of pricing, you are going to see the same impact on across-the-board pricing of a decrease of 30-40 percent. And so all that is going to reduce out-of-pocket spending for everybody, reduce government spending for everybody, and have a net positive impact.
Cuban, months after selling ~73% of the Mavericks at a ~$3.5B valuation, argues franchise values still have room to run: the new collective bargaining agreement forces teams into adjacent revenue lines (casino and real-estate development wrapped around the arena, media rights) that can carry a single NBA franchise toward $20B. Listed pro-sports franchise equity is therefore not late-cycle and still trades below eventual private-market marks.
I don't think they've peaked yet because it for the reasons I just mentioned, if we're able to build a Venetian type casino, and Dallas with an American Airlines Center in the middle of it, the valuation is $20 billion.
So I think that in order to train a model, you need access to information. And the Internet ain't what it used to be in terms of being a source of information. And so IP is becoming more valuable. You're not, I think everybody by this time expected all the foundational models to have all this healthcare information. But if I'm Mayo Clinic, I'm not giving Microsoft or Google or OpenAI my IP, because that's what brands me. And so there's going to be a lot of money available there.
I don't think you can underestimate how companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon will react when they feel cornered. And I think in the last 20 or 25 years, what you've seen is those companies, when their backs are against the wall, they use money, their sharp elbowed, but the consistent thing is they've won.
There's a new story this week where OpenAI just raised, was it $6 billion at $150 billion valuation? They originally started that enterprise with $50 million or so from Elon. It was a non-profit. Then they became a for-profit. Now, there's a report saying that they're telling investors in this round that they can't invest in any other AI companies, so they're acting like, I mean, they've gone from non-profit philanthropy to piranha for-profit company.
I've literally talked to Kamala Harris at lunch about this specific topic of regulation through litigation. As a lawyer, she got it immediately and she knows it's a problem. She's even mentioned in one of her speeches that that's something that they're going to deal with.
if you just look at the competition set that they're up against, they're losing 5 billion a year, they're making three and a half, they put this thing at 150 billion, it's 40 times, 50 times revenue. To fill in that valuation on a price to sales basis, it's kind of crazy.
they realize that there's only a couple of ways to reduce the deficit. One, you get inflation under control and that reduces interest rates, and that's going to work in our favor, and I think that's happening now. If it's $1.6 trillion, then if interest rates go below 4 percent, that saves a lot of money and probably the most you can save.
Now, she's either even or ahead or a little bit behind in every single poll. Why do I bring it up? because it means what she's doing is working.
There's nothing that says that open AI is going to win. Nothing at all. And so I don't feel bad about what they're doing.
And I said, the most important thing from a technological perspective in this country today, is that we win AI. That is going to find everything militarily for us and economically for us. And that when you try to break up companies like Google and Facebook, you diminish our ability to compete globally with AI.
I have, but I stopped using it just because it terrified me. because it doesn't know what adversarial things it doesn't know. because you know, anything that's adversarial, that has to train on something it's seen, and it's not smart enough to figure out what it hasn't seen and whether or not it's a risk.
I think the problem, and this happens with all new technologies, is we're seeing the gold rush right now where everybody calls everything AI, particularly with agents. And I think you can put all these vertical agents together to do all these different things, but agents are just going to be a feature, not a product.
On the first day of the new fiscal year, federal debt jumped by $204 billion in one day. Federal debt now stands at $35.7 trillion. And the biggest challenge we have in the year ahead is that $10 trillion of the outstanding debt comes up for refinance. It's going to refinance at around 4%. So we're going to be adding another $300 billion in new interest expense next fiscal year, plus the Biden administration has proposed a $7.2 trillion budget for next year, which will inevitably lead to another $2 trillion of deficit spending, which means that by the end of 2025, we could be staring at $40 trillion of federal debt. And if you do the math on that at 4% interest, it's $1.6 trillion a year of interest expense a year just on interest expense on the outstanding debt, which effectively begins to eclipse the entire federal budget very quickly
The tax rates are completely different than the Biden budget proposals where there's no unrealized capital gains, etc. They went to 28% and 28%. So it's not going to be what was proposed by Biden.
Episode digest
written during extraction and stored in data/extractions/ep198.json — the auditable source of truth, including everything market-adjacent that did not earn a capture
Mark Cuban in the fifth chair five weeks before the election, mostly one-on-one with Sacks. The most tradeable content is tax: Cuban, citing direct conversations with the Harris campaign, says the unrealized-capital-gains tax is dead and the platform is 28% corporate and 28% cap gains, a direct oppose on Sacks' Democrat-trifecta wealth-tax thesis, which Sacks defends by pointing at the FY2025 budget and the DNC platform. Cuban also says he pitched Harris on ending SEC regulation-by-litigation and that she 'got it immediately' -- a claim that the pro-crypto policy trade is not Trump-conditional -- and argues from receipts that breaking up Google and Meta would cost the US the AI race, taking the other side of the pod's sum-of-parts breakup thesis. Friedberg used the fiscal-year rollover to table-pound the debt arithmetic: $35.7T outstanding, $10T refinancing at 4%, $40T and $1.6T of annual interest expense by end-2025. Two new ideas coined: Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs attack on the PBMs (he claims mandated contract transparency drops all-in drug pricing 30-40% and that his book is on a 'double, triple hockey stick' -- note he owns the disruptor, so treat the strength as self-interested), and pro-sports franchise valuations not having peaked, from the man who just sold three-quarters of the Mavs at $3.5B and thinks a casino-wrapped arena gets the franchise to $20B. On AI he is a commoditization bear: agents are 'a feature, not a product', tens of millions of models coming, nothing says OpenAI wins, IP and proprietary corpora are where the money will be, and Tesla FSD terrified him enough to stop using it because adversarial edge cases cannot be pre-trained. Chamath's closer is the cleanest hyperscaler-wins statement on the tape.