Mark Cuban on why he won’t invest in media: ‘The worst industry in the history of industries’

We were sold the idea for years that tech CEOs would save us. These geniuses would steer us towards a better tomorrow, where humanity would be free from the shackles of work and servitude. We would find ourselves in a utopian society where anything we wanted would be at our fingertips.

The reality has been… not quite that. Most of these tech overlords turned into right-wing nut jobs (or just stopped pretending they weren’t always), and most of the technologies and media companies they created invariably enshittified over time.

And now we find ourselves on the precipice of artificial intelligence’s rise, whether we like it or not. We’re told that AI will revolutionize our lives, while, in practice, it often makes them more complicated. Our octogenarian-run government won’t help us, and neither will the “good” tech billionaires, who see all of this through the lens of profit and cost-cutting, not human empowerment.

All of which is a long-winded way to say that Mark Cuban was recently asked why he doesn’t invest in media companies anymore, and he offered up a word salad answer that sums up the mentality that got us here.

“You don’t do a lot of media investing these days. You actually started off in the media business. That’s one of the ways that you made a lot of money. What do you think about the kind of current state of the media business when you step back? And why don’t you do as much media investing these days?” Max Tani asked Cuban during his appearance on Semafor Media’s Mixed Signals podcast.

“Oh, it’s the worst industry in the history of industries,” replied Cuban. “In a digital world, bits are bits. They don’t care what they are, how they’re communicated, or how people consume them. And so that means everybody can compete. And now with AI, with the Veos and the Soras of the world, the ability for somebody who’s creative to not have to be dependent on a third party to create the output is just going to have so many implications.

“I literally thought about starting a podcast where I just talked to Gemini or ChatGPT or Perplexity and just ask it deep questions, right? The questions that you normally don’t want to ask in a normal podcast because they’re too esoteric. But when you talk to a non-entity and now they can go so, I don’t want to say deep, cause they’re not smart, but the way they respond is insane in a lot of respects. Insanely interesting.

“Media has changed forever. Forever. There’s no limit, and if you’re creative, you can amplify that creativity because you’re not limited in time, funding, or access to professionals like you were before. And those professionals that you might have been dependent on, the producer you’re using, the audio engineer or video engineers that you’re using, it just gets condensed their ability to do their job faster, better, cheaper, so they can do more things.”

It’s unclear why Cuban, who is reportedly worth $6 billion, wouldn’t be interested in funding these creative people who are apparently thriving in the media space, thereby giving them even more ability to break through. The idea that individual creators are the reason large media companies are failing seems at odds with leaders like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, who have been doing the heavy lifting of devaluing their own media companies without the help of outside forces. If anything, it seems like an ideal time to back a media company full of talented journalists, creators, podcasters, and elevate their work at a cost that barely scratches the surface of someone like Cuban’s net worth.

Cuban also kind of gives the game away at the end, saying that creative people don’t need producers and engineers anymore, but that those producers and engineers will be able to do everything faster and cheaper. So which is it? Why does it matter if they can work faster and cheaper if you don’t need them anymore?

If anything, usage of AI so far tends to demonstrate that it exists for uncreative people to offer faux creativity rather than for actual creative people to expand their horizons. But it makes one feel better if they imagine that AI exists to help “creative people.” The hard truth that people like Cuban don’t want to deal with is that human creativity was thriving and didn’t need or ask for the help.

Finally, that podcast idea sounds f*cking awful. And anyone watching Alien Earth will get a kick out of hearing what the “trillionaire” character in the show has to say about why he is investing in everlasting life, which sounds remarkably similar to Cuban’s aborted podcast idea.

“People always think it’s about money with trillionaires. Or ego,” says Boy Kavalier in episode two. “You know what I really want? I want to talk to somebody smarter than me.”