Mark Cuban Says Covid Era Is Great Time to Start a Business

Outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban says the mayhem caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic has created business opportunities for those with the courage to try.

Cuban’s comments came while he was being interviewed by Carlyle Group Inc. co-founder David Rubenstein on Bloomberg Television.

During the hourlong conversation, the owner of the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks talked about his childhood, meeting President Donald Trump and how Covid-19 is changing the world. Here were some key insights from the discussion on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations”:

• When asked about how the NBA has come to tolerate his brashness, Cuban said: “I’ll still raise hell and speak up. But now they’re kinda used to me. And they’ve changed a lot. A lot of things have changed. You know, whether-- how we approach officiating, to how we market our games, to what we do for broadcasts. There’s just so much that -- that has changed over the 20 years, for the better.”
• Cuban spoke about his first meeting with Donald Trump, saying that the future U.S. president told him that some day he’d be allowed to sit in the exclusive section of Mar-a-Lago if he really worked hard.
• On his exploring running for president in 2020, Cuban said polling showed him that he’d dominate with Independents but he wouldn’t be able to pull enough Republicans or Democrats to succeed. Ultimately, the billionaire said his family asked him to not run.
• With companies struggling to transition to selling digitally or fully taking advantage of online sales, Cuban said he sees a lot of opportunity for new business brought on by the pandemic: Within a decade or two, “we’ll look back and there’ll be 10, 20, 30 world-class companies that were created by people who we probably think-- are thinking are crazy right about now.”
• As for his investment portfolio, Cuban says he no longer trades and sticks to companies he believes in like Netflix Inc., which he has owned since it was $50, or Amazon.com Inc., which he bought at prices from $500 all the way up to almost $2,000. These days Netflix is trading at about $545, while Amazon is about $3,450.