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Mark Cuban

Co-founder, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderinvestorentertainerauthor@mcuban ↗blogmaverick.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

He accumulated his initial fortune by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo! in 1999 before becoming the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and an investor on Shark Tank. He currently focuses on lowering prescription medication costs through Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company.

36statements → 19claims → 9claims resolved → 56%fully supported → 4.25/5average certainty → 2.56/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources → 49said about them ↓

5 supported 3 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 9 not checkable as stated how the 19 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 predictions · 14 assertions · 4 opinions · 6 insights · 6 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 19 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 9 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Mark argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Cuban refuses to invest in venture-backed companies that buy market share
“The type of investments I won't do or don't do is ones where companies buy sales. So this is going to be a company that has to raise five hundred million to do one hundred million in sales because they want to own market share. And then they can get an exit be…”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 15:29 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Cuban claims AudioNet was the only internet broadcasting company when founded
“When we started audio net, it wasn't like there was a streaming market. It was nice. It was nobody, not one single company doing what we were doing. And that was the exciting part because everything we did was the very first time it was done.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 7:27 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
75% certainty 4
71% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.2 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.4 · precision 4 · compression 3.6

redirected or did not address 2 of 22 assessed questions (9%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

250 words/min while actually speaking · 13.7 um and uh per 1k words · 13.8 false starts per 1k · 29.8% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,957 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 2 rated episodes:

host pushback ▾ 2.5/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 3.5/10
setup questions received 63%

Everything Mark Cuban said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Cuban opposes Medicare for All in favor of a hybrid healthcare model
“I'm not a huge fan of Medicare for all or single payer simply because there's a variety of issues. I'm more a fan of a hybrid system where lower income people get single payer and higher income people like me pay for what they use.”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 20:45 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cuban: Hospitals lie about losing eight to nine percent on Medicare
“It's a shit show. You know, you don't need, you know, all these, building all these new buildings and buying all this real estate, and there's no, you know, lying about your cost to do something. Oh, our Medicare, you know, we provide Medicare. We lose eight, …”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 24:13 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Cuban: Algorithmic content amplification is protected under First Amendment
“They made a really, really good argument while that it's still protected under the first amendment in the United States, whether it's algorithmically derived or some comes out of someone's mouth. And so I went from saying, okay, algorithmic amplification shoul…”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 25:28 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cuban: Post-pandemic period will be the best time to start a business
“And going forward over whatever period of time it takes for us to get to the other side, it'll be the best time in the history of mankind to ever start a business because there are no rules.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 9:27 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Prediction Held up
Cuban refuses to invest in venture-backed companies that buy market share
“The type of investments I won't do or don't do is ones where companies buy sales. So this is going to be a company that has to raise five hundred million to do one hundred million in sales because they want to own market share. And then they can get an exit be…”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 15:29 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
What-if
Cuban claims Uber and Twitter would be more successful outside Silicon Valley
“I think if you take some of the companies, Twitter, or almost any of them, Uber in particular, Lyft, and you move those to Kansas City, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, New York, they would have been so much more successful, so much more quickly.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 17:18 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cuban: Cost Plus Drugs prices beat market rates 99% of time
“And just the way the industry is set up, that price, not always, but 99% of the time ends up being lower than what you're probably already paying. And most likely, It's lower than your insurance copay.”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 0:59 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cuban: Big pharma will match Cost Plus Drugs' pricing as scale grows
“A lot of them will match. Some of them will ignore us. It depends on how big we get. You know, if we have ten million customers, they'll pay attention to us. If we have a million customers, maybe not. You know, and there'll be times when there'll be PR and, yo…”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 3:54 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cuban asserts that the greatest companies rarely have had to raise money
“Again, the greatest companies rarely have had to raise money.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 9:49 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cuban predicts the post-COVID economic recovery will not be V-shaped
“I don't think we're going to have a V shape where all of a sudden everything's back to normal. I don't even think we're going to have a Nike swoosh shape where we go down lower and then come back up over a little lower slope. I think it's going to be a struggl…”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 10:56 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Assertion Partly supported
Cuban claims the United States is not a top-three leader in robotics
“America is not the leader in robotics. We're not top three”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 12:31 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Prediction Held up
Cuban says he will never invest for a 1% or 2% stake
“You'll never see me invest to get one or two percent, because the company can't get big enough for me to get a material enough return to have it impact my net worth, just to be brutally honest.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 14:30 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Disclosure
Cuban passed on Uber's seed round after negotiating valuation with Travis Kalanick
“And so I negotiated on valuation because I knew it was a great idea. I just didn't realize how big it would be going back to some of the earlier questions. You asked me, and so I said, here's what I would do, and he never came back to me, which pissed me off, …”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 27:09 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Opinion
Cuban: The same qualities built Uber and got Travis Kalanick ousted
“So on one hand, those qualities for Travis are what built Uber. On the other hand, those qualities for Travis are what got him kicked out of Uber.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 27:28 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Assertion Partly supported
Mark Cuban: Cost Plus Drugs charges a 15% markup plus $8 fees
“The goal for us is to take generic drugs and be very transparent in what our costs and operation costs are and sell everything at a 15% markup. And from there, we add a three dollar handling fee and a five dollar shipping fee.”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 0:38 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cuban: 75% of underperforming employees know they are underperforming
“When somebody is not doing the job, 75% of the time, they know it, right? And, you know, the other 25%, those are the people who just love to create stress anyways, and then they try to tell you they're solving the stress, right?”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 11:37 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mark Cuban rejects five-year planning, focusing on short-term business execution
“I don't look forward five years. I look forward a month. You know, I look forward two years, maybe in terms of what drugs are available or coming off a patent or that we can add, but I'm not like, okay, five years.”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 22:07 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Cuban buys crypto carbon offset tokens like BCT, Klima, and MCO2
“I mean, there's this, these crypto tokens I'll buy that are carbon offsets, BCT and climate and others, MCO two, and just, you know, to try to reduce my guilt.”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 29:55 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cuban prioritizes cash flow over venture exit multiples when investing
“I want to make money off the cashflow from it, not to have to make money from an exit from it. Cause in exits, I can't control cashflow and profitability. I can work with the entrepreneur and have some level of control.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 13:53 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Opinion
Cuban compares Silicon Valley venture capital culture to old Hollywood
“I think they're like old Hollywood. So when you hear stories about old Hollywood, and everybody wants to be an actor, and even though they're working as a job, as a waiter, they're trying to get discovered. And that's the way Silicon Valley works. So no matter…”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 16:07 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cuban says every 'fake it till you make it' founder failed
“Every single fake it till you make an entrepreneur who pulled me has failed.”
Mark Cuban May 4, 2020 ▶ 18:27 20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Disclosure
Mark Cuban: Cost Plus Drugs has no outside investors and is self-funded
“I didn't bring on any investors I'm financing it all myself”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 1:29 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Cuban: Cost Plus Drugs does not accept health insurance payments
“You can't pay using insurance on costplusdrugs.com. You have to, you know, put in your credit card and pay that way.”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 3:34 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Mark Cuban has invested tens of millions into Cost Plus Drugs
“It's, you know, it's tens of millions of dollars and growing.”
Mark Cuban Feb 8, 2022 ▶ 8:13 Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Show 12statements(12 left)

The other half of the tape: Mark Cuban's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 42 times in 19 episodes on 20VC. 7 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 17Victor Riparbelli 5Jason Calacanis 5Peter Rojas 4Jason Wilk 3Aaron Levie 2Shaun Maguire 1Sarah Smith 1

Statements about Mark Cuban, by other people (7)

Assertion Partly supported
Mark Cuban invested $6M in Arlan Hamilton's fund for underestimated founders
“Last month, Mark Cuban gave Arlen six million dollars to invest in underestimated founders.”
Harry Stebbings Oct 5, 2020 ▶ 0:26 20VC: Arlan Hamilton: "We Have Come For Cake, Not The Crumbs", Arlan's Plan To Return $1Bn in 10 Years, Why Arlan Plans To Giveaway or Invest 90% of Her Wealth & What The LP Class Can Do To Ensure More Under-Represented Managers Get Funded
Insight
Kris Jones advises aspiring VCs to publish startup analysis on a blog
“It's as easy as going to WordPress and starting up your own blog and, You know, you could create a blog and start to express your thoughts on, on startup companies and, you know, that space so that when you do reach out to say a Gary Vaynerchuk or a Mark Cuban…”
Kris Jones Jan 13, 2015 ▶ 19:26 20 VC 002: How to become a VC with Kris Jones
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wilk: Mark Cuban Capped Startup Salary at $30K Until Profitability
“And back then, Mark actually capped my salary at 30,000 dollars a year until we could get the company profitable.”
Jason Wilk Apr 21, 2025 ▶ 3:51 Dave CEO, Jason Wilk: The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Riparbelli: Mark Cuban led Synthesia's $1M seed at $5M post-money
“The first round was a million dollars... And we ended up doing it at the five million post with Mark Cuban”
Victor Riparbelli Jan 15, 2025 ▶ 3:22 Victor Riparbelli, CEO @Synthesia: OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai - Who Wins and Why | E1246 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
The Chainsmokers launch $35M Mantis VC fund with Conway, Cuban, and Raboy
“Now, Mantis is their first thirty-five million dollar venture fund, and so if you haven't guessed it already, I'm thrilled to welcome Alex Poole and Drew Taggart, founders of the Chainsmokers, and now Mantis, with the new vehicle they have backing from some of…”
Harry Stebbings Sep 21, 2020 ▶ 0:11 20VC: The Chainsmokers on Raising Their First $35M Fund and Entering The World of Venture, Dealing with Vulnerability and Insecurity Today & How Music and Venture Compare; The Similarities and Differences
Disclosure
Calacanis Sold Weblogs Inc. for $30M With a Negative Bank Balance
“I sold Weblogs Inc. For thirty million dollars in Blogsmith. And I had negative in the bank, and I had one partner, and then one investor in you know, Mark Cuban”
Jason Calacanis Aug 14, 2017 ▶ 16:32 20VC: Jason Calacanis on The 4 Questions Investors Must Ask Founders, Whether YC Have Scaled Their Process Successfully & Why Early Founder Liquidity Is Good Not Bad
Assertion Supported
Rojas: Weblogs Inc. took investment from only Mark Cuban
“We only had one investor in Weblogs Inc. It was Mark Cuban”
Peter Rojas Oct 14, 2015 ▶ 22:21 20 VC 079: BETAWORKS WEEK: East vs West Coast Investing with Peter Rojas, EIR @ Betaworks, Co-Founder @ Weblogs & Engadget

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0082154201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions
024201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodes it came up in
002244201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions per episode
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 12 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2022 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2020 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
2015 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Cost Plus Drugs: EXPLAINED | Mark Cuban Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Feb 8, 2022 23m
20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Wi May 4, 2020 20m
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