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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenovek on Bloomberg Radio.
Well, he's a billionaire with decades of experience playing a rich guy in the press. He took a stick to a TV network. He starred in a primetime reality show. He's a fan of Ain RAN's The fountain Head. He's a fixture on the Manaverse podcast circuit.
Is this Donald Trump?
He likes crypto sounds like Donald Trump?
Right.
Yes, he's been mocked for being less accomplished and than his networth would suggest. And no, Carol, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.
I'm talking about Mark Cuban.
He's a sports mogul, a small business influencer, a media personality, a healthcare disruptor, and perhaps the ultimate Trump foil. Max Chafkin and John Tazzi profile Mark Cuban and the forthcoming new issue of Bloomberg Business Week. It's the July issue. It's out on newsstand soon, but you can read the story right now on the Bloomberg and at Bloomberg dot com. Max is Bloomberg Business We call him this. He's also the co host of the Elining Podcast. John is Bloomberg
News healthcare reporter. Both join us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio.
Max. I want to start with you. Wait, I want to know.
Is it up in the food car court and you guys were grabbing some coffee and you're like that Mark Cuban guy and you're like, yeah, we gotta do a story.
No. I mean the way the genesis of this is that John, who's been following the healthcare industry. You know, Cuban got on his radar because Cuban has been doing some really interesting things there. And where I got interested in it is all this buzz around Cuban as a political figure, and it seemed, you know, it seemed like an interesting thing because on one hand, he is this kind of somewhat goofy, somewhat unseerious reality TV personality. On
the other hand, he's doing something serious in healthcare. And we've just learned that being a little goofy, being a little unserious sometimes it can work politically. It obviously works politically really well for Donald Trump.
Well, let's talk about the serious stuff that he's doing in healthcare, cost plus drugs. John Tazzi, Yeah, there's a good portion of the piece that's dedicated to explaining the intricacies of buying certain drugs in the US, and I was shocked to find the price differences.
Yeah. I mean, Mark Cuban launed this company that launched in the public, you know, several years ago, started working on it with an entrepreneur in twenty eighteen, initially as kind of just an investment, just another kind of portfolio company put some money into, but he got really involved and became a co founder. And now this is sort of what he's spending a lot of his time on.
He's going to conferences. He's going to like small wonky health conferences that you don't expect, you know, a lot of boldface names.
At But there's something that really resonates with Americans about healthcare. You've written a lot about United Healthcare and the aftermath of of the murder of a healthcare executive here in New York in December, and the frustration that Americans had. There's something that's sort of visceral when it comes to tackling this problem. Yeah, and having someone like Mark Cuban do it.
Yeah, And what he marked, what he did is he came in and looked at this market prescription drugs where there are just vast inefficiencies. There are things that make no sense, and we've written about them, we've talked about
them here. You know, drugs that cost you know, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in one place that you know are cost a tiny fraction of that for the person acquiring them, and you know, huge markups being taken in the middle And what he's trying to do is kind of go into those transactions and sort of take out the middleman and make these medications available for people paying cash without their insurance at a more affordable price than they sometimes get when they go through the
traditional channels.
I got to say, you wade into something like drug costs and healthcare, and all of a sudden you're you know, you're tackling what has been, as we've been talking, one of the biggest problems.
That are around.
And there are other billionaires who've been like tackling, you know, trying to trying to look for some solutions, whether it's uh, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Jamie Diamond who teamed up. I remember, you know, we were all reporting and thinking, okay, they're
going to be able to fix all of this. Having said that, you wade into an area like drug costs and all of a sudden it's a real political kind of field, right, and you wonder, Okay, what else does he want to do because it's a it's a big beast of a problem.
Well, yeah, I mean there's something inherently politically political about talking about this stuff just because it's a thing that makes people angry. Also, you know, a lot of the solutions here are going to require some form of regulation or government spending. And also Cuban is just politically involved. I mean he was during the Harris campaign. 're in the twenty twenty four election. He was like a really important surrogate for Kamala Harris. He was on the campaign trail.
He was kind of crafting or attempting to essentially sell Harris to the business community and sell Harris as a moderate on economic issues. And that is sort of you know, if you think about different directions the Democratic Party could go in twenty twenty eight, you know, one of them
would be some sort of moderate approach. And Cuban is very attractive and there are a lot of like Democratic political consultant types who are excited about this, a lot of Republican political consultant types who are thinking about this already, because not only does he have this kind of identity as a as a moderate, as a business guy, solutions oriented, but he's really good on camera and he's also good
at sort of sounding like a real person. And that's the thing that kept coming up in my reporting how important that is. And when you look at when we talk to Cuban about like what went wrong with Harris, that's kind of what he Keety Cayden on. You know, she didn't know how to sell, that's what he said,
and and that she you know, she wasn't herself. It's this, it's this kind of like incredibly difficult thing for a lot of politicians, and I think especially for the type person Mark Cuban is a business guy, somebody who hasn't been in that spotlight. To be able to thread that needle to sound like a normal person while also being moderate, like it makes him politically potent.
You know, I want to go back to this comparison that I was talking about earlier. Then you guys laid that out perfectly. I read right from your story. You actually suggested Max to Mark Cuban that he's had a similar career trajectory to President Trump.
What happened, he.
Did not, he did not react well he can called it the meanest thing anybody's ever said to me. And John and I were sitting there with him, and I really did think for a second, you know, he's a big dude.
He was gonna throw us out, I know.
And the thing is he was kidding to some extent anyway. But he and Trump have been kind of publicly feuding for almost twenty years. It goes all the way back to The Apprentice, when shortly after Trump launched The Apprentice, Cuban launched his own show. They sort of traded punches back then, they traded verbal punches during the Obama administration.
I think Cuban is sort of an effective critic of Donald Trump, partly because they are kind of similar, because they are both sort of professional billionaires, guys who play billionaires on TV, and Cuban is able to sort of effectively point to some of the ways that Trump's you know, personality, you know, sort of like the character he plays doesn't really live up to the reality.
However, he didn't carry his own reality show he didn't do as well as Donald Trump.
And the other point that Cuban makes in terms of their differences is that he is a self made billionaire and you know, kind of worked his way up, started companies, you know, started selling trash bags door to door, you know, and that he has that background that the president doesn't.
I love the highlight quote the difference Mark Cuban says is he never had to start from broke.
You know. You brought up the difference between Apprentice and Shark Tank, and I do think that's an interesting it's an interesting contrast, and again it shows you why Cuban could be politically potent.
You know.
On The Apprentice, it ends with this kind of ritual humiliation Donald Trump's firing someone, which course is very entertaining. And I think one of the reasons cuban show, which was called The Benefactor, didn't work is that Cuban was too nice.
He you know, nice shark. I'm gonna I'm a huge fan of that show and he's always the nice shark.
So Cuban playing this kind of nice guy on this as a supporting role that was really effective. The other thing I think made him sort of beloved both on Shark Tank. Well, initially on Shark Tank was just the fact that he's the richest and most successful person there. He's the only billionaire of those judges, and he is the one who's kind of back the goofy companies. He's taken not quite as seriously in the same way that cubans as a sports owner. As the owner of the Mavericks.
Part of what made him fun as an owner is that he's the billionaire, but he's also acting like a fan. He's running up and down the court, he's acting like you know, goofy, he's booing, he's doing all this stuff that a billionaire would not normally do, and that, of course can be attractive.
So that's the perfect segue to talk about the genesis of cost plus drugs because as a shark on Shark Tank, he had this inbox where he would get all these emails you Max and John Wright in the piece John and back in twenty twelve or a few years I should say perhaps a few years after that, because it was around the Martin Screlly time. Ye twenty eighteen is when this guy alexsk Oshmayansky got in touch with him.
Yep, what happened yep.
So.
Alex Oshmyansky is a radiologist entrepreneur who is following the drama around drug prices and Martin Screlly raising prices of some older off patent drugs that attracted you know, a lot of attention, a lot of criticism, and he said, why don't we start a company where we can make some of these drugs that are in short supply and kind of solve some of these problems in the market and kind of eliminate the window for people to take
advantage of shortages by raising prices. So he came to you know, he cold pitched Mark Cuban through an email with this idea. The I think the company was originally called something like Osh's Affordable Pharmaceuticals.
Doesn't have the same ring to it.
Doesn't have the same rings, but and you know, Cuban bit and he invested and kind of took an interest in the business, and it became what's now known as as cost Plus. A lot of people who know cost Plus know kind of the mail order website primarily for generic drugs, some brand drugs available and but mostly lower cost generics. But there are other elements they're trying to
build out too. And you know what they articulate is really they're trying to kind of build an alternative to the existing pharmacy benefit managers the way most people get prescription drugs. They're trying to build something outside of that system to compete with it. It's not really there yet as a full service solution. You know, there are a number of drugs you can't get. You often can't use
your insurance through the site. It sometimes can be much less expensive than going through your insurance, but it's not always. Sometimes you pay.
You can't get JLP one drugs there.
You can't get GLP ones for the most part.
Right now, just an anecdote to share about cost Plus. I have a friend who works for a company that owns one of the large PBMs. I will not say which one it is. He told me a generic medication that he was trying to get, a rubber He works for one of these company. He's like, that's his insurance, right, he works for one of these companies. It was like an eighth of the price to get it at cost plus Drugs versus going through his own company.
Well, so he works for one of these pbis.
Which is which is amazing, which is crazy, right, So it makes me ask him just as we kind of wrap up, because you know, we know Zacumen, you know, in terms of a businessman, he's a billionaire sports he's doing this, you know, trying to solve some of the problems in the pharmaceutical industry.
I mean, is this.
Enough for him, let me start with you Max, for him to ultimately get to the White House.
So Cuban has basically so far going to do it, but he hasn't quite He isn't like one hundred percent ruled it out. You know, in various interviews with us he said not interested, I believe. But anyway, he's he's he's sort of pushed this down. You know, when you talk to people in democratic politics though, and in policies general, they say, is what Cuban is doing is number one, exactly what you would do if you were running for president. You know. He he's doing a lot of interviews with
political journalists. He's going to in addition to healthcare events, he's going to political events. He is really putting himself out there in a way that raises his profile, that allows them to test messaging. And then the other thing is the way the Democratic Party is now basically somebody like Mark Cuban has to be taken seriously. There is as we saw with this in New York.
City, it is wide open.
There are a lot of potential paths for Democrats to take. And you know, obviously one version of that is is kind of the progressive populist left. But there's another that is this kind of Mark Cuban style thing, and that lane is definitely going to be there during the twenty twenty eight primary. And it's kind of a question of who occupies it. Cuban being an entrepreneurial guy, being a guy who you know likes to be in the center of things. You would never say, never listen.
I'll bets are off. I think I feel like when it comes to the political landscape, we got to unfortunately leave it there. It's an incredible deep dive and a great read. Max Chafkin Calmness at Bloomberg business Week, co host of the elon Ink podcast here in studio along with John Tazzi, healthcare reporter Bloomberg News. This is what we love about Bloomberg, these types of collaborations. Check it out the story and the upcoming new issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek Magazine. Thank you, guys
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