In case you missed it, billionaire Mark Cuban is set to testify on Capitol Hill today. Cuban can be expected to use the opportunity to pretend like he is a champion for American consumers while touting his own business interests – and criticizing the Trump agenda.
As a reminder, this is the same billionaire who put his full-throated support behind Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. In an October 2024 interview, Cuban said:
“Kamala is who I think is best for the country.”
In a September 2024 interview, Cuban claimed President Trump has a “lack of character and ethics,” and can be manipulated, because he’s “so transactional and so devoid of core values.” In an exchange with the media in March 2024, Cuban called President Trump a “snake oil salesperson,” insulted Trump voters and praised Joe Biden, saying “he would support Biden even if the president [Biden] was on his death bed.”
Cuban has proven time and again to be an opponent of President Trump’s agenda. In an interview on a liberal podcast in July of this year, Cuban criticized the president on trade and immigration, before saying “Trump has no idea what he’s doing.”
In April, Cuban criticized that President Trump’s America First trade policies would force him to hike prices on the prescription drug platform he owns (despite the fact that his platform already cherry picks low cost, high margin generics to maximize profits, while Cuban presents the platform as a more comprehensive pharmacy alternative):
“Cofounder Mark Cuban said any potential tariff on goods imported from India would force Cost Plus Drugs to raise the price of its medications. ‘We won’t have a choice,’ Cuban said during an appearance on the ‘Somebody’s Gotta Win with Tara Palmeri’ podcast…’If you only have a 15% markup and there’s a 25% tariff, we’d have to lose money on every single medication,’ Cuban said.”
Cuban has repeatedly put his business interests in the prescription drug market above the good of the American consumer. During the previous Administration, Cuban appeared with and supported Biden Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Lina Khan as she advanced a radical far-left agenda because it was trying to undermine market forces in health care that Cuban competes with.
An op-ed in Blaze Media explains:
“Drug companies … and their relationships with Washington decision-makers have enabled them to raise prices above free-market levels. Mark Cuban’s company, Cost Plus Drugs, also negotiates drug prices as [pharmacy benefit managers] PBMs do, so he would benefit if the government squelches PBMs. In other words, he parrots Big Pharma’s talking points on who to blame because an anti-free-market outcome would help him personally.”
During the hearing, we can expect Cuban to hit his usual self-interested talking points, that portray him and his business interests as the salvation of the American consumer — when in reality he is calling for heavy handed government intervention in the marketplace that would increase costs for American consumers, to undermine Cuban competitors and Big Pharma’s counterbalance in the marketplace.
