Mark Cuban is game to chat on social media—just not necessarily on X, formerly Twitter.
"I’m on Bluesky now," Cuban told the crowd at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Dinner at CES in Las Vegas on Monday. "It’s my favorite, follow me on Bluesky. I answer a lot more questions there than on Twitter. Twitter’s a shithole these days."
The audience trilled with delight at Cuban’s candor, a trademark of his long and varied career. Cuban is one of those people who’s famous for all sorts of things—as a seminal entrepreneur of the dotcom boom, as the impassioned owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and as a straight-talking investor on ABC’s Shark Tank.
Lesser-known, but equally true: Cuban’s also the cofounder of Cost Plus Drugs, a pharmacy benefits manager started in 2022 to disrupt a healthcare subsector famously dominated by only three players. (PBMs coordinate prescription drug benefits and are on the front lines of drug pricing in America.) It was the American public’s deep frustration with healthcare’s inefficiency and opacity that drew Cuban to the sector in the first place.
"There's nobody who looks at the healthcare system or the pharmaceutical industry and says, ‘Wow, that's well-run. It's just the way you want it. It's great for us. We love participating in it,’" he said. "We thought that if we could create a company, limit our margins, publish all of our pricing and price list, then maybe we can have an impact."
In the aftermath of the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Cuban sees resentment surrounding healthcare in America at a boiling point. He thinks Congress will eventually act and that, in the meantime, we have more power than we realize.
"My biggest point first is that we as consumers and we as companies have more control over the insurance companies than we realize," he said. "It's been so opaque up to this point that people think insurance companies have all the power—they don't. Look at your plan."
Cuban also sounded off on AI, he sees it as having applications at Cost Plus Drugs and, well, everywhere. And everyone needs to be preparing and adapting to that reality.
"Going back on all the technology enhancements that we've had over the last 40 years, every time someone said, ‘We don’t need it,’" Cuban said. "But then you had to learn it. That’s not ever going to change. Technology is going to keep on marching forward, but that’s the beautiful thing about this country."
This logic applies, on some level, to how the NBA should be thinking about its much-reported-on viewership declines. Cuban’s point, in short: Traditional TV ratings are not the best metric for measuring the NBA's success in the modern media landscape. So, the NBA should focus on measuring total minutes consumed across various digital platforms, rather than just traditional TV ratings. And it’s all about Gen Z.
"I have a 15 year-old son, and he doesn't watch the whole game," said Cuban. "He watches highlights over and over. What did Luka do? What did Kyrie do? What did Steph do? What did [Dallas Mavericks center] Dereck Lively do? He’ll just watch and it's just tied to the algorithms in our social media, whether it's YouTube, Instagram, Bluesky."
Talking to Cuban later, I asked him why he prefers Bluesky. His answer: He finds the discourse on Bluesky to be fundamentally more civil. I suspect that especially matters to him because Cuban is someone who genuinely wants to talk to you.
Case in point: Hours after his talk ended, Cuban stayed through dinner, shaking the hand of every single person who wanted to meet him, probably smiling for more than 100 selfies along the way. With the Fortune team and a few Brainstorm members, Cuban closed down the restaurant, as we all wandered into the hazy Las Vegas night.
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See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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