Mark Cuban: US Billionaire Businessman on the state of NZ rugby, NBA, US politics, AI

Mark Cuban has his hands in all sorts of pies. 

The US billionaire businessman is involved with tech, media, health insurance, the NBA, and more recently, politics. 

He got his first major start with the media company Broadcast.com, which he sold to Yahoo in 1999 for US$5.7 billion worth of stock.  

The next year he got into the NBA, buying the Dallas Mavericks for US$280 million, selling a majority stake of the team in late 2023 for $3.5 billion.  

Cuban has become something of an authority on sports, and while he’s not familiar with the economics of rugby in New Zealand, he does have a few ideas on it could be saved. 

“You’ve got to make it more fun,” he told Heather du Plessis-Allan. 

“Not so much on the pitch, right, but in the stands." 

There’s a difference, Cuban explained, between the quality of the sport being played on the field or court, and the experience people attending the game have. 

“When I got to the Mavs, the people that were at the NBA thought it was all about basketball ... but I was like, you don’t even remember the score of the last game you went to.” 

Instead, he says, what you remember is the people you went to the game with – the first date or the buddy that got drunk.  

“And I think rugby is fun, but it’s not, it’s not as much a spectacle." 

“You’ve got to make it different, otherwise you just get the purists that have been going for 50 years that don’t want to see it changed.”  

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