Cuban, who is worth $7.66 billion, told Wired’s Lauren Goode that he’s doing the “exact opposite” of having a midlife crisis. Instead, he’s taken a massive leap into pharmaceuticals, an industry he hasn’t had much experience with before.
He’s “more platforming for the next step,” he said. “I don’t look at myself and think, ‘I’m a man of a certain age, I’ve got to change what I’m doing.’ No. It’s more like, I like to disrupt things. I like to play the game. I like to compete in business, and Cost Plus Drugs could be the biggest thing I’ve ever done.”
Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs’ mission is to eliminate the middleman in the pharmaceutical industry, which Cuban diagnoses as being the major culprit behind high drug prices. After a 2018 cold email from a 33-year-old radiologist, Alex Oshmyansky, pitching a pharmaceutical startup, Cuban invested $250,000 to get it up and running. However, Cuban invested “so much” within just two years that he ended up owning the company, according to Wired.
Essentially, Cuban’s company sells drugs based on the base price of the drug, plus a 15% markup and $5 pharmacy service and $5 shipping fees. That allows Cuban’s company to still make margin without being as expensive as pharmacy benefit managers. Today, the company ships about 2,500 different drugs for various conditions, including diabetes and epilepsy. It even carries birth control.
Cuban denies he’s pursuing this venture out of altruism, yet isn’t really in it for the money either.
“I want to make it so it’s self-sustained. I don’t want to subsidize it the whole time. But I don’t need to make money,” Cuban told Wired. “Disrupting an industry that everybody hates, that’s fun. I’m getting emails and letters.”
Plus, Cuban has reveled in the positive response he’s gotten from customers, highlighting one letter he received that said, “You saved me $15,000 a year on my cancer medication. I would be dead if it weren’t for you.”
Mark Cuban said he wants to buy Fox News and X
Although Cuban isn’t buying a Ferrari as he reaches midlife, he has bigger things on his wishlist: Fox News and X.
He has previously lamented baby boomers’ love of Fox News, and was asked by Wired how he would fix that. His answer was to buy Fox News.
“If I had enough money to do it, which I don’t, I’d buy it in a heartbeat,” he said.
But with a multibillion-dollar fortune, how could Cuban not be able to afford the right-leaning news network? Essentially, he doesn’t have enough cash, and Fox News’ current market cap is about $17.6 billion (though he was working off a $15.6 billion estimate in his Q&A).
“And you’ve got to pay at least 50% premium. So now it’s $22 billion,” Cuban explained to Wired. “And then you’ve got to make all the changes, so that’s another $2 billion. You can sell some things off. So maybe it’s $15 billion, $20 billion net. I don’t have $15 or $20 billion in cash sitting around.”
Wired then asked how he would fix “something essentially like propaganda,” and he replied that it’s too late.
What about buying Elon Musk’s X? “He wouldn’t sell it,” Cuban replied.
“I wish I could,” he added later. “There’s no reason for him to sell it.”
Fox and X didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
