I thought this interview was pretty cool and Cuban comes off as a pretty thoughtful guy, imo. Some of his ideas are bad (see the selling your sick days idea below, for example), but some are better (see the transparently-priced prescription drugs idea). He's clearly a "capitalist to his bones," but at least he seems like he's trying to harness capitalism to do something other than JUST make himself rich.
One of my companies is called The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Literally the name, because I wanted there to be no question about what we’re doing.There’s a drug called albendazole that’s generic now, and it’s for hookworm. And there’s still hookworm epidemics in Alabama and Texas and other places. It’s $200 a course, this is a generic drug. So we created a company that went and ... right now, we’re doing two things. One, we sent somebody overseas to the manufacturer that makes it for another country. They made it for all these other countries, but no one would import it here because they wouldn’t take the time. And we sent someone over there to make sure the manufacturing was perfect. And now we bring it over here, we gave away thousands and thousands of doses to Baylor to test it all. And we were ready to give away more and start selling it to Alabama, but the COVID blow-up, that’s using up all their resources. But long story short, we’re selling it for our cost, eight bucks plus 15 percent, so we’re effectively selling it for what’s going to be our cost. It’s going to be $10.50 instead of $200.
So those are the types of things that I’m focusing my time on. We’re trying to do the same thing with insulin, and I’m building what’s called an API in one of my buildings in Dallas. It’s an advanced pharmacy something-or-other, I forget what the “I” stands for. And we’re just going to be making generic drugs and selling them at cost plus 15 percent. Period, end of story. We’re going to post it all on our website so you know exactly what our costs are, and we’re going to fuck the pharmacy industry.
Now, the challenge for us is, they’re so entrenched with how they do pricing and how they do pharmacy benefit management... we’re going to have a battle. And there’s no antitrust there. And you talk about kill switches, that’s typically what they do to drug companies, they’ll just buy it. Or they’ll try to preempt them. But we’re going... All those drugs that we can make, and some I’m not going to go into now because I don’t want those pharmaceutical companies to come after us. They’ve already tried to buy us through the back door, and it’s just not going to happen. Those are the types of challenges I’m really looking at right now.
There’s a project I’m working on that’s just in its infancy called Sickbank. There’s an economic model that says if at your company you get one week or two weeks of sick days? Well, if everybody contributed one sick day from their own personal sick bank of days available into a centralized sick bank, and the companies paid some amount of money for that day, let’s say it’s $268 on average? Then we can have a centralized sick bank, where if you get sick or I get sick, or Kara gets sick, and 14 days is not enough? You just borrow, up to another 14 days and then we’ll pay you based off of your salary because your company’s already put the money in. But just the economics work like a bank, a little bit like an insurance company. Different ways to approach the health care.
Those are the types of things that I get excited about, because I’m not... Even in tech, it’s all tech-driven. There’s all the tech underpinning, there’s AI applied in a lot of different things. But it tries to solve... Who knows if we’ll be successful, but we’re going to try to solve these social problems that need to be solved.
― DJI, Wednesday, 11 November 2020 00:11 (five years ago)