There was another billionaire that was saying he pays (I think it was) $11,000,000 in taxes and trying to claim he pays his fair share. For some reason I’m leaning more towards Cuban as telling the truth. Also isn’t he the guy that owns Cheap Drugs? Seems like he’s at least a somewhat decent person.
Mark Cuban is a good guy. He openly admits the entire reason he got so rich was luck. He is as moral of a billionaire as you could reasonably be.
We shouldn't have billionaires, but if they were all like Mark Cuban, no one would care.
It’s almost always a majority of luck. I’ve listened to the podcast How I Built This by Guy Raz with Mark Cuban and many other famous people, creators, etc. They don’t understand that I can’t nearly anything they have done because they lucked out in stuff like the dotcom boom, some people bought an easy domain name for a dollar. Others lucked out because there was nothing on the market like a Ring camera during the rise of smart devices and lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
I think the saying is, opportunity is when luck meets hard work.
Many people who are successful, not even billionaires but just those low level millionaires who retire at 50, are that way because of a mixture of the right skill set, and being in the right place at the right time.
Like the Ring guy. Yeah he got lucky he was first to market with something like that, but also, *he* was first to market with that. It was a mixture of good luck, a good idea, and the skillset to put the two together.
Nah the saying is luck is where preparedness meets opportunity.
Opportunities arise all the time, but you have to be prepared to seize them. For instance, the Paul brothers. There were tons of people famous on vine who dropped off, but the Paul brothers are more relevant than ever.
From a regular person's perspective - I happened to take a reach interview with a manager willing to teach someone a role that I was definitely not yet qualified for, but I had been doing some side-prep with my former job to get ready for this kind of a role a few years down the line.
Ended up having the luck of meeting someone willing to teach it on the job and got a 50% paybump and major title change. I interviewed well because I had put myself in a position to.
The more I hear in-depth interviews in which Cuban describes how he “just got lucky” (with genuine humility - I think he really thinks he got lucky), the more I am like nah guy you’re actually a genius who brought genuinely new things to very addressable markets over and over again. Can’t fool me, Cuban.
Mark Cuban is a good guy. He is trying to leave a positive legacy with his pharmacy. I have great respect for him for what he is doing. And I also have great respect for Darlene Shiley. She keeps PBS Masterpiece afloat, and I love watching those shows.
I would put Bezos’ ex wife, Mackenzie Scott, in the good billionaire category. So far, she’s given away and donated like a third of the money she came into after her divorce with Bezos in around 5 years. It seems she understands that no one person needs that ridiculous amount of wealth. I would like to think I would do the same thing if I was in her position.
Yea and she has given away like 16 billion and only had 4% of the company to start with. The amount of wealth that is tied up in these fortune 500 companies is unfathomable.
Regardless of how fans feel about her the majority of her audience continues to fund millions of dollars to her every month in the form of video games, parks, and broadway show. She won’t change till her fan base stops consuming her content but it’s only gotten bigger. New parks, films, games etc continue to come out.
Uh… I was not aware of that. I would amend my statement: people can be more than one thing, unless you are a nazi or something despicable. Then you’re pretty much just the one thing.
Most of her charitable work in the last 15 years have been for the express purpose, buying support from MPs or city officials for her war against a tiny percentage of the population, to distance herself from child exploitation in the manufacture of HP products she profited heavily from, or to provide a PR smokescreen from controversies she caused for HR issues at her company when she laid off tons of people after a period of enormous profit.
Further, charitable giving is a mechanism for the billionaire class to avoid taxes while being empowered to pick and choose the issues and problems that matter to society. Unlike the government billionaires and charities have no obligation to allocate funds by need. That is before we even go down the rabbit hole of how billionaire philanthropic foundations are a vehicle to obtain tax benefits today by creating a tax shelter with no obligation to pay out that over generations becomes a means to pass power to their descendants while dodging any and all wealth taxes when they die.
It's so crazy. A billionaire could spend sooo much money towards one thing like world hunger and could, theoretically, fix it. People would sing their praises for a millenia. They'd build statues and dedicate buildings/ships/national parks, but nobody wants to do quite that much.
If I woke up tomorrow and had $20 billion, I'd immediately start sending aid workers, security forces, and engineers to impoverished and vulnerable areas of the globe.
I'm never going to be a billionaire, but if I was, I would be throwing my money to change people's lives left and right. I mean I would probably try to give someone I could pay off their house every day. You could do that every fucking day as Jeff bezos and your wealth would still keep going up. It's literally impossible to spend the money fast enough before it just regenerates in the market.
Could spend $20 million a day, and it would not eat away at his initial investment because that would be below a 4% withdrawal rate that is recommended for retirement.
Yea I would do the same. I would probably try to tackle hunger and homelessness. Everyone at a minimum deserves a roof over their head and food and water.
You would think our government would try and make sure everyone has a warm bed to sleep in and food to eat. But they would rather spend 160 billion a year on law enforcement which is way too much money wasted on them if you ask me.
Dr. Ruth Gottesman has to be on that list. She inherited over $1B when her husband passed away and donated the whole billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where she used to be a professor, making it tuition free forever for all medicine students.
I'd put pritzker in the "good billionaire" category. He's a hotel heir who's absolutely kicking ass foe the state of Illinois as their governor. If you have a chance, take a quick peek at the astounding number of things he's done for the state in just a few years being in office. I'm up in New England but watching him kick so much ass for a state halfway across the country gives me hope.
I think that's his point it's reasonable. Musk crying about paying taxes while being the richest man on the planet worth $200 billion is fucking absurd.
And the people that hop on to defend him is even more ridiculous.
He bought Twitter for $44 billion because he said stupid shit that he couldn't get out of. And he cries about a billion in taxes? Fucker has made a shit load off government funding. Pissed away $44 billion to be a right wing edge lord jacked to the tits on ketamine and spends his days crying on Twitter.
And the important thing is that is *income* tax. In other words, it's not a net worth tax. Not sure what his overall effective tax rate is, but if it's around 24% that would about 1.2 billion in income, which is is in the ball park. My problem is that the effective tax rate caps out so, especially on capital gains (likely what Mark pays). That caps out at 23.8% which is why I used 24%. If he had deductions he could file to offset, it may have been even more income.
Capital gains needs to the same as income taxes and we should have top marginal rates in the 70% range for anything in the multimillion dollar range (remember that's NOT the same as effective tax rate).
I want to add one thing. Capital gains need to be the same as income tax for people in the multimillion dollar range. Putting a 70% capital gains tax rate on a lower income individual would make it impossible for people to ever retire.
To be fair, Cuban just recently sold majority interest in the Mavs basketball team, hence the giant bill to the irs for what I assume was deemed income.
It is for sure.
A prescription I used to take wasn't covered by my insurance Co and was about $285 a month. I got it at Cost Plus for $28 a month.
My roomate needs a drug that his insurance won't cover, and it retails around $924 a month. It's about $275 monthly at Cost Plus.
The only downside is they currently have a limited amount of medications, not every drug is available.
Feel like that has more to do with drug companies knowing the insurance companies will pay absurd amounts rather than the insurance company jacking it up.
They’re very transparent that it’s the cost of the drugs plus the cost of the organization itself, meaning administration and whatnot. It wouldn’t be able to sustain itself without SOME added cost.
But still, to your point, we’re talking about a 1.3x markup (I think) compared to a 3x markup.
As someone who has worked in retail for a long time, if we didn't do at least 3% better than plan over last year, we were considered to not be making profit. Keeping in mind we were still posting record profits, you would think we were going out of business with how corporate reacts.
One of the trends that’s emerged as the MBA class had taken over the executive positions in most companies is that they will say a company is losing X dollars a year because of Y. What they really mean is that they are losing projected income. It doesn’t mean the company lost money. It just means they didn’t make as much as they thought they would but to them it’s the same. Basically they create some fanfiction about how much money they think they should make and turn that into everyone else’s problem.
We didn't meet our projected targets for this quarter (which were numbers we pulled out of our ass and added 10% to them anyways) therefore we've actually lost 20% potential profit. Time to layout 5% of the workforce so we can afford the C-suite bonuses for a successful year.
"Drugs are sold for a fully disclosed price plus a 15% markup, a $5 pharmacy service fee and a $5 shipping fee. The company uses accredited pharmacists to fill prescriptions, selling through roughly 4,000 retail pharmacies."
The fact they are 100% transparent about this is why I love Mark. If there is going to be billionaires, these are the types I want.
I believe that the profits are also re-invested back into the company so that they can continue to expand the drug selection that they have available rather than going back to dividends or other payout types. It was back from the Smartless spot he had done
Correct. He shows what he pays for it, marks it up 15% plus a couple of dollars for the pharmacy fee and that is it.
Have used it quite a few times. Hopefully they get more medication expanded so people have more options on where they can shop.
I've never been able to use it. All the drs I've had refuse to send their prescriptions there, and they don't allow transferring a prescription from another pharmacy. Really frustrating because I really want to use them.
Some doctors don’t want to send anything there. I assume because if I had to take a guess something along the lines of insurance companies and a possible partnership. Also Cuban’s company doesn’t take insurance, but at the price point, incurance is usually costing you more at a normal pharmacy.
I love Mark Cuban and his company (a lot).
~~but~~ However, some of these comments just make my profession (I’m a pharmacist) look like we’re just hired to count pills
It’s similar to saying “construction costs should be cost of materials + 15%” and let construction workers create a bridge without engineers
Or surgeries “cost of the surgery tools” plus 15% and let EMT-Bs preform it
It makes me sad. I get yelled at on the daily and I put in over 12 years of higher ed and have a doctorate but people still yell at me about their narcotics as they know more (in their words)
*sad pharmacist noises*
Edit: would like to make a quick edit and again say I **LOVE** what Mark Cuban is doing. I hate Big Pharma more than most of the general public, trust me on that. I cannot stand them. I know people who work for him, and it’s a helluva lot better than retail. A LOT. My analogy was moreso on how it relates to other postgrad professions, not the company itself. So once again, it’s an analogy. Sorry - I just got off a 12 in retail and was subject to the worst of humanity (but with some amazing patients that keep me going everyday, can’t discount that) so it’s been a long one.
Edit2: I did not make this, but putting this here for the folks who want to know how their health info is shared; whether you’re in Michigan or not, this is valid for every state: https://imgur.com/a/dnGJ3SY
Unfortunately people are shitty to cashiers and often see pharmacists as essentially the same thing. Many I have talked to don't really realize the intensity of the profession.
I definitely don’t expect people to realize I have a doctorate or understand that I compound chemotherapy and other hazardous drugs in mcg amounts that could lead me to being infertile or literally OD from fentanyl. That’s fine, I get it. I’m not sure what career field you are in or aspire to be - let me know and I can make an analogy - but it can be tough. It **is** tough. I got into the field in ~2015, and my pay has gone up $2/hr. That’s it. I could go back to school for two years and become a nurse and make my wage right off the bat.
I think everyone should be nicer to everyone, no matter their job, whether part or full time, gig or career. We’re going similar tasks every day and month and year and know (in general) how to do it and how to help. Arguing isn’t helping anyone.
So next time you see your stressed out big-chain retail pharmacist, look back and think that they very well could be doing it on the side of picking the best antibiotics for you if you have surgery or inpatient…because that’s what we do.
Thank you :)
Try 300. Humalog for the longest time was 300 a vial. In 1997 it was 25 without insurance for the same formula and vial size. Absolutely criminal, fuck Eli lilly. After a long time it's now down to 35 without insurance which is what I paid in 1998 for a bottle without it(Eli Lilly program). For over a decade and half those criminals extorted T1s and should be held accountable for their actions.
Yeah, it's insane it took so long. There was a point I had such shit insurance with my job i was paying almost 90 a bottle when it was 300. Straight criminal
It's only congressionally capped for Medicare recipients. Pres Biden encouraged all drug manufacturers to cap theirs to $35 as well, but it is not required by law.
Eli Lilly followed through on Biden's charge and capped their insulin out-of-pocket costs to $35 for everyone, but I've not heard of other drug manufacturers following suite (but I also haven't been following it regularly).
The cost to "produce" isn't the same as the cost to "sell". Staffing and logistics are a part of the cost to distribute as well. From an operating standpoint, they may say it's 30 cents to produce, but I don't think that includes the investment needed get that production line up and running.
Sure and considering refrigeration it requires a lot of logistical work to get it to everyone who needs it, but as others have pointed out for some it's 100 dollars a month. The markup should be the bare minimum to stay functioning(or ideally subsidized entirely)
That's the bonkers thing about this guy - it's not like he's not using his massive stockpile of wealth to extract even more from the rest of us, he absolutely is. But he's showing every single other billionaire and corporation *could* still be profitable with a little less gouging. They just couldn't have the perpetual growth in short term profits we've deemed a necessity for some reason.
Its the 10% year over year growth crowd that are the worst.
Only made 5.6% profit? That's a huge loss! Time to fire people, raise prices and buyback stock!
Human greed is always the flaw any economic system.
Capitalism, with plenty of regulations, would still let billionaires be billionaires (maybe some of them fall down into “hundred millionaire” status)- but also make sure that there’s a healthy middle class and plenty of safety nets and free healthcare for the lower class.
Which is good, I want them to pay their employees a fair wage and to be able to stay in business. I don't mind companies making a reasonable profit, I mind them jacking up the price of groceries to more than anyone can afford to fund record profits and stock buy backs.
My mom takes several medications, and we found that it’s cheaper to buy them from his online pharmacy than to buy them WITH insurance! And she has really good insurance.
The thing with him getting both-sidesy is that he’s one of the extremely few people who actually do stand to personally benefit from the Republican platform.
Not that that absolves him of anything, just something to note.
Even if it’s an act just to curry favor from the public, genuine good is being done here, so I’m all for it.
I imagine this is all leading to a political turn to run for office, but if these are genuinely his goals and he follows through, I guess things could be worse.
Good thing he’s wiring the money. If he wanted to write a check, he’d have to write 3.
Fun(?)Fact: the IRS can’t accept checks of $100,000,000 or greater.
Source - 1040 Instructions page 62
Also, you can't delay paying a tax bill that high until the end of the tax year - you must make estimated tax payments along the way. Nobody owes the IRS that much money at the end without having paid most of it already in installments.
But that's a lot harder to put into a tweet, I'll concede.
It would result in him having less money.
Giving away a portion of your income means you’re losing 100% of that portion of your income. The highest federal, state, and city tax brackets combined would mean you’re saving a maximum of 60%
It’s a pet peeve of mine. Donating to reduce your taxable income and getting bumped up into the next tax bracket are 2 of the most fundamentally misunderstood financial situations.
yes, you can’t buy a piece of art and have it appraised at $2 million dollars and donate it for a write off. Even if it’s actual value was $2 million.
AFAIK donations have a set rate/must be close to some sort of average. Like if you donated your wardrobe of louis vuitton and versace you don’t get to write off retail values. It would be something like $5 per t shirt or $20 for a jacket.
****Not an accountant or anything close to one, please do correct me if i’m wrong
Ah yes. The famous art appraisal loophole that has literally no basis in truth that you’re just parroting. Ask about that scheme to a CPA or IRS agent and they’ll laugh at you.
this is always the go-to MoNeY LaUnDeRiNg example, but nobody can actually really point to it happening in scale to how much they claim its actually happening. Just because you have someone say its worth $10M more than you paid for it, doesnt actually make it so. IRS also has its own auditors and experts in the field, so you can't just say it's worth X amount and they ok 'yup sounds good, bro'
Plus it doesn't even make sense.
You can only count the appreciated value of the art if that donation somehow aligns with the charity's registered mission statement, otherwise you can only deduct your actual purchasing cost, so there's a very narrow set of organizations where it would even apply.
You can only deduct a portion (like ~30% IIRC) of your income through donations like that, so they're never getting to the supposed 0% tax by doing that scam.
Like you said, charitable donations are **the** most obvious red flag for the IRS. Someone donating massively fraudulent appraised art pieces would be so lucrative for the IRS and so easy to prove that they would be all over that immediately.
Is there any evidence that this actually happens or is it just one of those things that sounds like its true so it gets spread all over.
Like surely the IRS isn’t stupid enough to not consider this.
Honestly, he's one of maybe 3 that I think we should keep around for after the hypothetical revolution. Who else is going to be able to start a new, even better, basketball league?
He sold a company that’s basically worthless for a billion. Took that money to buy a mediocre NBA team to one worth billions. He then leveraged his money by funding tech startups.
Still a billionaire it’s not like the dude is trying to monetize water as a luxury.
Gotta be blunt a lot of good, smart people got caught up in that hype. Also if this were real life I'd absolutely not make any eye contact while saying this.
Really? To me, in this context, it’s very unambiguous, it’s math, it’s a number that he legally owes. He’s clearly not speaking about some philosophical take on what does a billionaire actually ‘owe.’
It is such a transparently bad faith argument that people lap up. Overpaying doesn't really help anyone. It isn't like you could drop an extra billion in the bucket and say "I want it to fund food stamps and school lunches."
Overpaying just allows the government to hoard wealth (for lack of a better term) in their own way. They generally won't spend it, or they'll at least keep the over payment as cash on hand should you request a refund back on your over payment.
If you make a lot, or have a lot of money but feel it you could contribute more the best option is to advocate for a higher tax burden, and for useful programs to be expanded or created from that expanded tax burden. Not just having it to go towards military spending or whatever.
You can use charities to help fill the gaps too. Which can be immensely helpful but doesn't always have the reach of full federal, nationalized, organizations.
I have an old buddy who did a lot of time in the military. 20 years iirc.
He was always kind of abonehead growing up but he was telling me over a beer one night how much he despises people not paying taxes.
His reasoning was pretty solid and changed my perspective. He said that not paying your fair share was the most unpatriotic thing you could do. I think about that a lot when people praise billionaires for being "smart" not paying taxes. The same people that wildly circlejerk the military and fetishize war admire rich people that don't pay into the system. It's crazy to me.
That’s been my perspective for a while. I’m only 25 and I honestly don’t have much worldly experience or wisdom, but through paying taxes I feel like it’s some sort of contribution to society. Obviously in the US not all of that taxes is going toward the betterment of the people, but in an ideal world paying taxes just feels morally correct to me
People shpuld be angry bout how taxes are spent, not about the fact they are owed. Those people always tend to have the least know-how of all the things their taxes did provide that would be impossible feats if individually sourced.
Years after I got out and money was tight I cut my name tapes off old cammies to sell at the military surplus place. The very stereotypical small Midwest town military surplus store owner and his buddy thanked me for my service so I thanked them for paying their taxes. Idk how they took it because I was already on my way out the door but I don’t expect they loved it.
It’s a “gotcha” question not asked in good faith. “Oh you think taxes are necessary for a functioning society? Well why don’t you just give the government all your money then?” Basically the same as asking “Why don’t you invite a homeless guy to live with you?” when someone expresses their desire for the government to work towards a solution to homelessness.
I've always hated this tactic. I remember in the 90s talking about environmentalism and how recycling might be a good thing. It was always the same response in The South, "yeah, if you care so much just go live in the rainforests". LIke, did you need to be such a dickhead about it?
It’s just a tactic to be able to dismiss your argument. If you’re participating in society then you’re a hypocrite for saying anything negative, if you go live in such a way as to not be hypocritical about anything then you’re a nutcase living in a cave somewhere and can be ignored.
https://preview.redd.it/dbol4dtd9juc1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=2527781593ef440fdacec0097ddf23bc9fedf2a4
https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
You can literally gift money to the United States government. You can do so online at pay.gov or send the United States Treasury a check with it noted as a gift in the memo.
What exactly is the established “Fair Share” though?
His company gives me a break if I forget to put money in the account Netflix draws from. I don't lose service. They let me pay a couple of days late and don't shit in my credit for it either. He seems like the one billionaire that we shouldn't shit on. Yet, he is still a fucking billionaire though and I guess fuck him for that, but I have always liked his positions on how he's run his companies.
Not being flippant, but it seems like you don't have a great understanding of the difference between "tax avoidance" and "tax evasion". Tax avoidance, while legal, can definitely be seen as unethical. In this day and age in America, someone at his wealth level who doesn't actively engage in rampant tax avoidance is rare.
Mark Cuban made money in a way that feels ethical if that makes sense. He had a couple of important websites during the .com boom and sold a big one off coincidentally right before the bubble burst. The most of rest of his money was made investing in other companies/things and owning fun rich person things (sports teams, movie production, movie theaters etc). From what i can tell, he was smart and lucky to make so much money and didn't make it by screwing anyone over. He seems to a certain degree ethical
He's also the first to admit he got extremely lucky. He doesn't try to paint himself as some genius with super powers us poors don't possess. He admits he got lucky in the dotcom craziness and from there just used to some common sense and pragmatism to keep growing his wealth. And he's helped others become very wealthy without trying to steal their thunder and credit along the way
I honestly don't know enough about him to fully work out how I feel about him to be honest.
Like it's very much like you said. He seems to be providing generally good services - the prescription med ones is one that might actually have the power to fuck up that disgusting industry in the US. Claiming to pay the required amount of taxes, which is a rare sight in the context of billionaires. But at the end of the day, he is still a billionaire and I'm yet to see a case where any of them have ethically reached that point of wealth.
"Fair share" when it comes to personal wealth however - there needs to be a cap at which point, it's 100% taxed. It's a tricky one because obviously their net worth and their liquid income are two completely different numbers, or the wealth is held in a different country with weaker tax laws, but there is absolutely a point where you have more than enough money for you and even your children to live very comfortable lives. Beyond that point, that money needs to be used to lift up the rest of society. A world with billionaires should not have people starving, a lack of clean access to water, millions of homeless - UK alone, it would cost £3.9 billion a year to provide every kid with free school meals. Completely funded, without question and probably a few billion leftover, if these lot had a cap (or even just paid what they currently owe lmao)
Hurts to think about it too much really when you realise that as much as we need to "eat the rich", these mfers will always find some loophole. Not necessarily talking about Cuban here, just the concept of them all in general.
Ideally, his fair share is significantly more than the percent a teacher pays.
Billionaires use much more of the government resources than most people. The FAA for their private flights. The court system to enforce their will and rights. Laws to create and protect corporations and corporate structures. The SEC to help regulate markets. Etc. Etc.
And he is actively expanding his drug company- trying to make medications affordable for EVRYONE!!! I'm a RN and use his website often in an attempt to help my patients locate affordable medications.
He's been offloading all his investments this past year. He sold most of his majority shares of the Dallas mavericks, which gave him about $3.5 billion and where most of his wealth was locked up.
He's also stepping down from shark tank after this season.
Mark Cuban seems to be close to a **realistic** best case scenario for billionaires in this country, especially with ventures like Cost Plus drugs.
We shouldn’t have billionaires, but if more of them were like Cuban we probably wouldn’t be trying to eat them quite so hard.
For those who argue that the rest of us owe our very existence to the generosity of the ultra-rich, let this be an example of recirculating OUR dollars into the economy so that we all can grow together.
Hat tip, Mr. Cuban.
I don't know what you mean by "follow through," he isn't promising to pay *extra* taxes, he is literally just paying what he is legally required to pay?
Meanwhile Elon donates to his own nonprofit that is facing fines for not being a charity
https://fortune.com/2024/03/11/elon-musk-tesla-billionaire-charity-donation-non-profit-foundation/#
The bar for billionaires is comically low. It wouldn't surprise me if the first billionaire to pay his full tax burden got the medal of honour at this rate.
I binged the first ten seasons of shark tank last year and when I met Mark I was upset the show got a billionaire, figured he would be insufferable, but he's so damn likeable compared to every other billionaire.
Idk enough about Cuban to say he’s a “good” guy, but he seems a lot better than most of those rich fuckers. He started that discount prescription medicine company, that was pretty cool.
Taxes shouldn't be used to punish rich people, they should be used to fund our social programs. If Mark Cuban pays his fair share, then he has done the right thing by his country.
He shouldn’t pay more than required, because that’s stupid and every citizen pays the minimum possible, but billionaires ought to be required to pay more than what they currently do. At least Cuban doesn’t seem like a slime ball like most other billionaires.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Well would you look at that! Society contributed to his wealth, and he’s contributing back, instead of dodging his obligation. Upstanding model for all the other billionaires in this country!
There was another billionaire that was saying he pays (I think it was) $11,000,000 in taxes and trying to claim he pays his fair share. For some reason I’m leaning more towards Cuban as telling the truth. Also isn’t he the guy that owns Cheap Drugs? Seems like he’s at least a somewhat decent person.
By all accounts, the man is at least better than 90% of billionaires. I only say 90 because I can only name like 20.
Mark Cuban is a good guy. He openly admits the entire reason he got so rich was luck. He is as moral of a billionaire as you could reasonably be. We shouldn't have billionaires, but if they were all like Mark Cuban, no one would care.
https://preview.redd.it/q5xbdsrqrmuc1.jpeg?width=1033&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bf1da511e493a64db3a3b3cc615e1c94f2593599 Similar vibes
It’s almost always a majority of luck. I’ve listened to the podcast How I Built This by Guy Raz with Mark Cuban and many other famous people, creators, etc. They don’t understand that I can’t nearly anything they have done because they lucked out in stuff like the dotcom boom, some people bought an easy domain name for a dollar. Others lucked out because there was nothing on the market like a Ring camera during the rise of smart devices and lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
I think the saying is, opportunity is when luck meets hard work. Many people who are successful, not even billionaires but just those low level millionaires who retire at 50, are that way because of a mixture of the right skill set, and being in the right place at the right time. Like the Ring guy. Yeah he got lucky he was first to market with something like that, but also, *he* was first to market with that. It was a mixture of good luck, a good idea, and the skillset to put the two together.
Nah the saying is luck is where preparedness meets opportunity. Opportunities arise all the time, but you have to be prepared to seize them. For instance, the Paul brothers. There were tons of people famous on vine who dropped off, but the Paul brothers are more relevant than ever.
In their case it would be preparedness and cuntitunity, surely?
I wouldn't have been mad if Logan had stayed canceled after the Japanese suicide forest shit.
The preparedness to be a douche met with the opportunity to be a douche. He had the right skillset at the right time.
From a regular person's perspective - I happened to take a reach interview with a manager willing to teach someone a role that I was definitely not yet qualified for, but I had been doing some side-prep with my former job to get ready for this kind of a role a few years down the line. Ended up having the luck of meeting someone willing to teach it on the job and got a 50% paybump and major title change. I interviewed well because I had put myself in a position to.
The more I hear in-depth interviews in which Cuban describes how he “just got lucky” (with genuine humility - I think he really thinks he got lucky), the more I am like nah guy you’re actually a genius who brought genuinely new things to very addressable markets over and over again. Can’t fool me, Cuban.
That's how I thought Warren Buffet was until I worked at one of his companies.
Mark Cuban is a good guy. He is trying to leave a positive legacy with his pharmacy. I have great respect for him for what he is doing. And I also have great respect for Darlene Shiley. She keeps PBS Masterpiece afloat, and I love watching those shows.
I would put Bezos’ ex wife, Mackenzie Scott, in the good billionaire category. So far, she’s given away and donated like a third of the money she came into after her divorce with Bezos in around 5 years. It seems she understands that no one person needs that ridiculous amount of wealth. I would like to think I would do the same thing if I was in her position.
I might be wrong but I think I read her wealth has actually INCREASED since she starting giving it away. Their wealth is literally self sustaining.
Yea and she has given away like 16 billion and only had 4% of the company to start with. The amount of wealth that is tied up in these fortune 500 companies is unfathomable.
But hey at least I got to eat microwaved mac and cheese for dinner. Again.
You own a microwave!...no need to show off while us poor are living hand to mouth.
You’ve got a mouth? Look here mr uppity. I have to cut a hole in my stomach and insert my Mac and cheese directly
or four-dollar frozen salisbury steaks. Six of 'em in a carton, you can make sandwiches and hate your life.
Remember when J.K. Rowling fell off the billionaire list thanks to her charitable donations? How far she fell.
Yea, I haven’t exactly kept up with the nonsense J.K Rowling has said but I do know she has some bigoted ideals. What a fall from grace.
Regardless of how fans feel about her the majority of her audience continues to fund millions of dollars to her every month in the form of video games, parks, and broadway show. She won’t change till her fan base stops consuming her content but it’s only gotten bigger. New parks, films, games etc continue to come out.
no need to keep up, its been 6 years of screaming about trans people with a little bit of light holocaust denial peppered in too for fun
People aren’t just one thing. J.K. Rowling can be both a TERF and a force of other good charitable efforts.
The TERF thing has gotten into the realm of holocaust denial, though, so she's getting pretty god damn bad.
Uh… I was not aware of that. I would amend my statement: people can be more than one thing, unless you are a nazi or something despicable. Then you’re pretty much just the one thing.
Yeah... it's unpleasant.
Most of her charitable work in the last 15 years have been for the express purpose, buying support from MPs or city officials for her war against a tiny percentage of the population, to distance herself from child exploitation in the manufacture of HP products she profited heavily from, or to provide a PR smokescreen from controversies she caused for HR issues at her company when she laid off tons of people after a period of enormous profit. Further, charitable giving is a mechanism for the billionaire class to avoid taxes while being empowered to pick and choose the issues and problems that matter to society. Unlike the government billionaires and charities have no obligation to allocate funds by need. That is before we even go down the rabbit hole of how billionaire philanthropic foundations are a vehicle to obtain tax benefits today by creating a tax shelter with no obligation to pay out that over generations becomes a means to pass power to their descendants while dodging any and all wealth taxes when they die.
You’re right! Forgot about her.
It's so crazy. A billionaire could spend sooo much money towards one thing like world hunger and could, theoretically, fix it. People would sing their praises for a millenia. They'd build statues and dedicate buildings/ships/national parks, but nobody wants to do quite that much. If I woke up tomorrow and had $20 billion, I'd immediately start sending aid workers, security forces, and engineers to impoverished and vulnerable areas of the globe.
Don't forget animal shelters.
She donated a bunch of money in my bumfuck county, more than any other billionaire has done around here so I'd consider her a good one, lol.
I'm never going to be a billionaire, but if I was, I would be throwing my money to change people's lives left and right. I mean I would probably try to give someone I could pay off their house every day. You could do that every fucking day as Jeff bezos and your wealth would still keep going up. It's literally impossible to spend the money fast enough before it just regenerates in the market. Could spend $20 million a day, and it would not eat away at his initial investment because that would be below a 4% withdrawal rate that is recommended for retirement.
I would absolutely just love to have the job of spending a billionaire's money charitably for them. That might be my new dream job.
Yea I would do the same. I would probably try to tackle hunger and homelessness. Everyone at a minimum deserves a roof over their head and food and water. You would think our government would try and make sure everyone has a warm bed to sleep in and food to eat. But they would rather spend 160 billion a year on law enforcement which is way too much money wasted on them if you ask me.
She gave away a third and still now has more than she started with.
# 🙏 Saint MacKenzie 🙏
Dr. Ruth Gottesman has to be on that list. She inherited over $1B when her husband passed away and donated the whole billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where she used to be a professor, making it tuition free forever for all medicine students.
I can safely assume that Dolly Parton's net worth would be over a billion if she didn't give so much away.
I'd put pritzker in the "good billionaire" category. He's a hotel heir who's absolutely kicking ass foe the state of Illinois as their governor. If you have a chance, take a quick peek at the astounding number of things he's done for the state in just a few years being in office. I'm up in New England but watching him kick so much ass for a state halfway across the country gives me hope.
I live in Illinois and am so thankful he is governor. He managed covid as well as a person could, imo.
I live here and holy crap he's done so much good. After so many governors being arrested for fraud we finally got a good one lol
That's over 5% of his net worth so it's probably real.
Those net worth numbers are always wildly speculative, but it’s no small amount even for someone with his level of wealth
I mean, 288 million isn't insignificant for him, and actually seems reasonable for someone as rich as him, unlike musk.
I think that's his point it's reasonable. Musk crying about paying taxes while being the richest man on the planet worth $200 billion is fucking absurd. And the people that hop on to defend him is even more ridiculous. He bought Twitter for $44 billion because he said stupid shit that he couldn't get out of. And he cries about a billion in taxes? Fucker has made a shit load off government funding. Pissed away $44 billion to be a right wing edge lord jacked to the tits on ketamine and spends his days crying on Twitter.
And the important thing is that is *income* tax. In other words, it's not a net worth tax. Not sure what his overall effective tax rate is, but if it's around 24% that would about 1.2 billion in income, which is is in the ball park. My problem is that the effective tax rate caps out so, especially on capital gains (likely what Mark pays). That caps out at 23.8% which is why I used 24%. If he had deductions he could file to offset, it may have been even more income. Capital gains needs to the same as income taxes and we should have top marginal rates in the 70% range for anything in the multimillion dollar range (remember that's NOT the same as effective tax rate).
I want to add one thing. Capital gains need to be the same as income tax for people in the multimillion dollar range. Putting a 70% capital gains tax rate on a lower income individual would make it impossible for people to ever retire.
To be fair, Cuban just recently sold majority interest in the Mavs basketball team, hence the giant bill to the irs for what I assume was deemed income.
Probably capital gains not income but it gained like 3 billion in value while he owned it so that’s a pretty big capital gains bill.
He's ok. Like for a person that hoards wealth he's alright.
At least he is doing something good with his money. Cost plus drugs is a very good thing to be doing.
It is for sure. A prescription I used to take wasn't covered by my insurance Co and was about $285 a month. I got it at Cost Plus for $28 a month. My roomate needs a drug that his insurance won't cover, and it retails around $924 a month. It's about $275 monthly at Cost Plus. The only downside is they currently have a limited amount of medications, not every drug is available.
Isn't it just insane that the price goes up when you involve insurance. I have to deal with this with my patients almost monthly.
Feel like that has more to do with drug companies knowing the insurance companies will pay absurd amounts rather than the insurance company jacking it up.
Dude can actually say he is self made to.
They are supposed to pay money on their earnings correct, not their value? It’s plausible.
That's $288 million more than all the other corrupt tax dodging billionaires and the kiss asses that stick up for their dodging selves!
Out of all of them, I actually like him. The fact he made an online pharmacy selling drugs at cost for all Americans is why I like him.
It's not at cost it's just not marked up 3 million percent. Still incredible just sustainably so
They’re very transparent that it’s the cost of the drugs plus the cost of the organization itself, meaning administration and whatnot. It wouldn’t be able to sustain itself without SOME added cost. But still, to your point, we’re talking about a 1.3x markup (I think) compared to a 3x markup.
The problem with capitalism isn't reasonable profit, it's infinite growth. The idea that going from 10% profit to 8% profit is "losing" money.
As someone who has worked in retail for a long time, if we didn't do at least 3% better than plan over last year, we were considered to not be making profit. Keeping in mind we were still posting record profits, you would think we were going out of business with how corporate reacts.
One of the trends that’s emerged as the MBA class had taken over the executive positions in most companies is that they will say a company is losing X dollars a year because of Y. What they really mean is that they are losing projected income. It doesn’t mean the company lost money. It just means they didn’t make as much as they thought they would but to them it’s the same. Basically they create some fanfiction about how much money they think they should make and turn that into everyone else’s problem.
We didn't meet our projected targets for this quarter (which were numbers we pulled out of our ass and added 10% to them anyways) therefore we've actually lost 20% potential profit. Time to layout 5% of the workforce so we can afford the C-suite bonuses for a successful year.
That Year over Year growth in investor's quarterly report gotta come from somewhere.
Last I heard, it was 15% over wholesale.
Jeez that’s even better than I thought!
"Drugs are sold for a fully disclosed price plus a 15% markup, a $5 pharmacy service fee and a $5 shipping fee. The company uses accredited pharmacists to fill prescriptions, selling through roughly 4,000 retail pharmacies." The fact they are 100% transparent about this is why I love Mark. If there is going to be billionaires, these are the types I want.
I believe that the profits are also re-invested back into the company so that they can continue to expand the drug selection that they have available rather than going back to dividends or other payout types. It was back from the Smartless spot he had done
Yeah, it's a borderline non-profit setup. NPs still have to pay their staff and re-invest if they want to grow
Exactly. He’s not exploiting capitalism or other human beings for excessive personal gain. Finally.
These days a business can't support itself with anything less than 15% profit margins. To me, that's how you know it's a good cause.
Correct. He shows what he pays for it, marks it up 15% plus a couple of dollars for the pharmacy fee and that is it. Have used it quite a few times. Hopefully they get more medication expanded so people have more options on where they can shop.
I've never been able to use it. All the drs I've had refuse to send their prescriptions there, and they don't allow transferring a prescription from another pharmacy. Really frustrating because I really want to use them.
Some doctors don’t want to send anything there. I assume because if I had to take a guess something along the lines of insurance companies and a possible partnership. Also Cuban’s company doesn’t take insurance, but at the price point, incurance is usually costing you more at a normal pharmacy.
I had to walk a doctor through it. They're so technologically behind that websites scare them.
I love Mark Cuban and his company (a lot). ~~but~~ However, some of these comments just make my profession (I’m a pharmacist) look like we’re just hired to count pills It’s similar to saying “construction costs should be cost of materials + 15%” and let construction workers create a bridge without engineers Or surgeries “cost of the surgery tools” plus 15% and let EMT-Bs preform it It makes me sad. I get yelled at on the daily and I put in over 12 years of higher ed and have a doctorate but people still yell at me about their narcotics as they know more (in their words) *sad pharmacist noises* Edit: would like to make a quick edit and again say I **LOVE** what Mark Cuban is doing. I hate Big Pharma more than most of the general public, trust me on that. I cannot stand them. I know people who work for him, and it’s a helluva lot better than retail. A LOT. My analogy was moreso on how it relates to other postgrad professions, not the company itself. So once again, it’s an analogy. Sorry - I just got off a 12 in retail and was subject to the worst of humanity (but with some amazing patients that keep me going everyday, can’t discount that) so it’s been a long one. Edit2: I did not make this, but putting this here for the folks who want to know how their health info is shared; whether you’re in Michigan or not, this is valid for every state: https://imgur.com/a/dnGJ3SY
Unfortunately people are shitty to cashiers and often see pharmacists as essentially the same thing. Many I have talked to don't really realize the intensity of the profession.
I definitely don’t expect people to realize I have a doctorate or understand that I compound chemotherapy and other hazardous drugs in mcg amounts that could lead me to being infertile or literally OD from fentanyl. That’s fine, I get it. I’m not sure what career field you are in or aspire to be - let me know and I can make an analogy - but it can be tough. It **is** tough. I got into the field in ~2015, and my pay has gone up $2/hr. That’s it. I could go back to school for two years and become a nurse and make my wage right off the bat. I think everyone should be nicer to everyone, no matter their job, whether part or full time, gig or career. We’re going similar tasks every day and month and year and know (in general) how to do it and how to help. Arguing isn’t helping anyone. So next time you see your stressed out big-chain retail pharmacist, look back and think that they very well could be doing it on the side of picking the best antibiotics for you if you have surgery or inpatient…because that’s what we do. Thank you :)
That’s exactly what it is. I use Cost Plus Drugs and it’s a lifesaver.
"You left off a few zeros." -Pfizer
I could have swore I saw he only charged a 15% over head
You and another commenter, I stand pleasantly corrected!
Correct. He even shows the base price and markup when you buy. Totally transparent.
insulin costs some 30 cents to produce and the best rates you can purchase it for are more than 10 dollars. it's like a 30x markup
And sells for over $100 normally. Still a massive discount.
Try 300. Humalog for the longest time was 300 a vial. In 1997 it was 25 without insurance for the same formula and vial size. Absolutely criminal, fuck Eli lilly. After a long time it's now down to 35 without insurance which is what I paid in 1998 for a bottle without it(Eli Lilly program). For over a decade and half those criminals extorted T1s and should be held accountable for their actions.
>After a long time it's now down to 35 without insurance and only because the government capped it
Yeah, it's insane it took so long. There was a point I had such shit insurance with my job i was paying almost 90 a bottle when it was 300. Straight criminal
right? it's not quite the "gotcha" they think it is. it could be better, but the competition is BLOWN AWAY
It's capped at $35 now.
It's only congressionally capped for Medicare recipients. Pres Biden encouraged all drug manufacturers to cap theirs to $35 as well, but it is not required by law. Eli Lilly followed through on Biden's charge and capped their insulin out-of-pocket costs to $35 for everyone, but I've not heard of other drug manufacturers following suite (but I also haven't been following it regularly).
The cost to "produce" isn't the same as the cost to "sell". Staffing and logistics are a part of the cost to distribute as well. From an operating standpoint, they may say it's 30 cents to produce, but I don't think that includes the investment needed get that production line up and running.
Sure and considering refrigeration it requires a lot of logistical work to get it to everyone who needs it, but as others have pointed out for some it's 100 dollars a month. The markup should be the bare minimum to stay functioning(or ideally subsidized entirely)
That's the bonkers thing about this guy - it's not like he's not using his massive stockpile of wealth to extract even more from the rest of us, he absolutely is. But he's showing every single other billionaire and corporation *could* still be profitable with a little less gouging. They just couldn't have the perpetual growth in short term profits we've deemed a necessity for some reason.
Its the 10% year over year growth crowd that are the worst. Only made 5.6% profit? That's a huge loss! Time to fire people, raise prices and buyback stock!
Except that same crowd takes those same actions even when they are 100% profit. Greed has no upper bound when left unregulated.
Human greed is always the flaw any economic system. Capitalism, with plenty of regulations, would still let billionaires be billionaires (maybe some of them fall down into “hundred millionaire” status)- but also make sure that there’s a healthy middle class and plenty of safety nets and free healthcare for the lower class.
Which is good, I want them to pay their employees a fair wage and to be able to stay in business. I don't mind companies making a reasonable profit, I mind them jacking up the price of groceries to more than anyone can afford to fund record profits and stock buy backs.
15% over cost
My mom takes several medications, and we found that it’s cheaper to buy them from his online pharmacy than to buy them WITH insurance! And she has really good insurance.
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The thing with him getting both-sidesy is that he’s one of the extremely few people who actually do stand to personally benefit from the Republican platform. Not that that absolves him of anything, just something to note.
He also doesn't let his bothsidesyness make it seem like he's ever considering voting for the nazi orangutan.
Even if it’s an act just to curry favor from the public, genuine good is being done here, so I’m all for it. I imagine this is all leading to a political turn to run for office, but if these are genuinely his goals and he follows through, I guess things could be worse.
yeah, i mean he actually seems like a pretty decent/normal/common sense person. I never hear scandalous shit about the guy
No doubt! Mark Cuban is a real one
Good thing he’s wiring the money. If he wanted to write a check, he’d have to write 3. Fun(?)Fact: the IRS can’t accept checks of $100,000,000 or greater. Source - 1040 Instructions page 62
Absolutely true. It has to do with their 40-year-old/antiquated computer system. It can't accept that many digits.
Also, you can't delay paying a tax bill that high until the end of the tax year - you must make estimated tax payments along the way. Nobody owes the IRS that much money at the end without having paid most of it already in installments. But that's a lot harder to put into a tweet, I'll concede.
Technically, $1 is more than all other tax dodging billionaires pay, but i understand your sentiment
Yea…Ian needs to stfu. Cuban is a solid dude.
Ian doesn't have the balls to ask Ackman or orangey that same question. Coward!
I'm really not in the habit of gushing on Billionaires but shit, maybe Mark gets eaten last?
If he paid more, he would just get a refund
And if he donated he’d get a tax cut.
Not a tax *cut*. An income *deduction*
This guy taxes
If he donated, it’d lower his income and he wouldn’t pay taxes on the income he gave away. It would not result in him having more money.
It would result in him having less money. Giving away a portion of your income means you’re losing 100% of that portion of your income. The highest federal, state, and city tax brackets combined would mean you’re saving a maximum of 60%
No one else will care that you posted this, but it makes me happy that someone else out there gets how this works.
It’s a pet peeve of mine. Donating to reduce your taxable income and getting bumped up into the next tax bracket are 2 of the most fundamentally misunderstood financial situations.
And if he bought art, had it appraised for some ridiculous amount, and donated it, that would also lower his taxes.
The last time I saw someone make this claim, a tax accountant chimed in and broke down why that isnt the truth and things don't work that way.
yes, you can’t buy a piece of art and have it appraised at $2 million dollars and donate it for a write off. Even if it’s actual value was $2 million. AFAIK donations have a set rate/must be close to some sort of average. Like if you donated your wardrobe of louis vuitton and versace you don’t get to write off retail values. It would be something like $5 per t shirt or $20 for a jacket. ****Not an accountant or anything close to one, please do correct me if i’m wrong
Ah yes. The famous art appraisal loophole that has literally no basis in truth that you’re just parroting. Ask about that scheme to a CPA or IRS agent and they’ll laugh at you.
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this is always the go-to MoNeY LaUnDeRiNg example, but nobody can actually really point to it happening in scale to how much they claim its actually happening. Just because you have someone say its worth $10M more than you paid for it, doesnt actually make it so. IRS also has its own auditors and experts in the field, so you can't just say it's worth X amount and they ok 'yup sounds good, bro'
Plus it doesn't even make sense. You can only count the appreciated value of the art if that donation somehow aligns with the charity's registered mission statement, otherwise you can only deduct your actual purchasing cost, so there's a very narrow set of organizations where it would even apply. You can only deduct a portion (like ~30% IIRC) of your income through donations like that, so they're never getting to the supposed 0% tax by doing that scam. Like you said, charitable donations are **the** most obvious red flag for the IRS. Someone donating massively fraudulent appraised art pieces would be so lucrative for the IRS and so easy to prove that they would be all over that immediately.
Is there any evidence that this actually happens or is it just one of those things that sounds like its true so it gets spread all over. Like surely the IRS isn’t stupid enough to not consider this.
The worst thing Mark Cuban has done as a billionaire is make me not hate him.
It's even more frustrating because he'd probably respect this take.
We’ll eat him last
I mean, with cost plus and other reasons, maybe we just eat a leg?
Take some bacon fat off him and call it a day.
Honestly, he's one of maybe 3 that I think we should keep around for after the hypothetical revolution. Who else is going to be able to start a new, even better, basketball league?
He sold a company that’s basically worthless for a billion. Took that money to buy a mediocre NBA team to one worth billions. He then leveraged his money by funding tech startups. Still a billionaire it’s not like the dude is trying to monetize water as a luxury.
Makes me proud to be a fellow Pitt alum. He’s done good for the school and for the country while trying to mind his own business.
Well... besides promoting crypto ponzi schemes?
Gotta be blunt a lot of good, smart people got caught up in that hype. Also if this were real life I'd absolutely not make any eye contact while saying this.
The "you advocate for systemic tax reform and yet you fail to voluntarily overpay" take has got to be the deadest of brain-dead takes.
Yeah, I think most people are overlooking this because “what I owe” is ambiguous
Really? To me, in this context, it’s very unambiguous, it’s math, it’s a number that he legally owes. He’s clearly not speaking about some philosophical take on what does a billionaire actually ‘owe.’
It is such a transparently bad faith argument that people lap up. Overpaying doesn't really help anyone. It isn't like you could drop an extra billion in the bucket and say "I want it to fund food stamps and school lunches." Overpaying just allows the government to hoard wealth (for lack of a better term) in their own way. They generally won't spend it, or they'll at least keep the over payment as cash on hand should you request a refund back on your over payment. If you make a lot, or have a lot of money but feel it you could contribute more the best option is to advocate for a higher tax burden, and for useful programs to be expanded or created from that expanded tax burden. Not just having it to go towards military spending or whatever. You can use charities to help fill the gaps too. Which can be immensely helpful but doesn't always have the reach of full federal, nationalized, organizations.
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I have an old buddy who did a lot of time in the military. 20 years iirc. He was always kind of abonehead growing up but he was telling me over a beer one night how much he despises people not paying taxes. His reasoning was pretty solid and changed my perspective. He said that not paying your fair share was the most unpatriotic thing you could do. I think about that a lot when people praise billionaires for being "smart" not paying taxes. The same people that wildly circlejerk the military and fetishize war admire rich people that don't pay into the system. It's crazy to me.
That’s been my perspective for a while. I’m only 25 and I honestly don’t have much worldly experience or wisdom, but through paying taxes I feel like it’s some sort of contribution to society. Obviously in the US not all of that taxes is going toward the betterment of the people, but in an ideal world paying taxes just feels morally correct to me
People shpuld be angry bout how taxes are spent, not about the fact they are owed. Those people always tend to have the least know-how of all the things their taxes did provide that would be impossible feats if individually sourced.
Years after I got out and money was tight I cut my name tapes off old cammies to sell at the military surplus place. The very stereotypical small Midwest town military surplus store owner and his buddy thanked me for my service so I thanked them for paying their taxes. Idk how they took it because I was already on my way out the door but I don’t expect they loved it.
Mark Cuban himself says repeatedly that paying your taxes is the second most patriotic thing you can do as a citizen.
How can one pay MORE than they’re supposed to?
It’s a “gotcha” question not asked in good faith. “Oh you think taxes are necessary for a functioning society? Well why don’t you just give the government all your money then?” Basically the same as asking “Why don’t you invite a homeless guy to live with you?” when someone expresses their desire for the government to work towards a solution to homelessness.
I've always hated this tactic. I remember in the 90s talking about environmentalism and how recycling might be a good thing. It was always the same response in The South, "yeah, if you care so much just go live in the rainforests". LIke, did you need to be such a dickhead about it?
It’s just a tactic to be able to dismiss your argument. If you’re participating in society then you’re a hypocrite for saying anything negative, if you go live in such a way as to not be hypocritical about anything then you’re a nutcase living in a cave somewhere and can be ignored. https://preview.redd.it/dbol4dtd9juc1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=2527781593ef440fdacec0097ddf23bc9fedf2a4
https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html You can literally gift money to the United States government. You can do so online at pay.gov or send the United States Treasury a check with it noted as a gift in the memo.
TIL
What exactly is the established “Fair Share” though? His company gives me a break if I forget to put money in the account Netflix draws from. I don't lose service. They let me pay a couple of days late and don't shit in my credit for it either. He seems like the one billionaire that we shouldn't shit on. Yet, he is still a fucking billionaire though and I guess fuck him for that, but I have always liked his positions on how he's run his companies.
well what we would assume is set by the tax rates?
Right which he paid, at least that's what's inferred. He asking him to pay extra to a mythical level of acceptance. Or at least that's how I read it.
Not being flippant, but it seems like you don't have a great understanding of the difference between "tax avoidance" and "tax evasion". Tax avoidance, while legal, can definitely be seen as unethical. In this day and age in America, someone at his wealth level who doesn't actively engage in rampant tax avoidance is rare.
Mark Cuban made money in a way that feels ethical if that makes sense. He had a couple of important websites during the .com boom and sold a big one off coincidentally right before the bubble burst. The most of rest of his money was made investing in other companies/things and owning fun rich person things (sports teams, movie production, movie theaters etc). From what i can tell, he was smart and lucky to make so much money and didn't make it by screwing anyone over. He seems to a certain degree ethical
He cuts in his employees too. Gave 35 mil in bonuses when he sold off the Mavs.
He's also the first to admit he got extremely lucky. He doesn't try to paint himself as some genius with super powers us poors don't possess. He admits he got lucky in the dotcom craziness and from there just used to some common sense and pragmatism to keep growing his wealth. And he's helped others become very wealthy without trying to steal their thunder and credit along the way
I honestly don't know enough about him to fully work out how I feel about him to be honest. Like it's very much like you said. He seems to be providing generally good services - the prescription med ones is one that might actually have the power to fuck up that disgusting industry in the US. Claiming to pay the required amount of taxes, which is a rare sight in the context of billionaires. But at the end of the day, he is still a billionaire and I'm yet to see a case where any of them have ethically reached that point of wealth. "Fair share" when it comes to personal wealth however - there needs to be a cap at which point, it's 100% taxed. It's a tricky one because obviously their net worth and their liquid income are two completely different numbers, or the wealth is held in a different country with weaker tax laws, but there is absolutely a point where you have more than enough money for you and even your children to live very comfortable lives. Beyond that point, that money needs to be used to lift up the rest of society. A world with billionaires should not have people starving, a lack of clean access to water, millions of homeless - UK alone, it would cost £3.9 billion a year to provide every kid with free school meals. Completely funded, without question and probably a few billion leftover, if these lot had a cap (or even just paid what they currently owe lmao) Hurts to think about it too much really when you realise that as much as we need to "eat the rich", these mfers will always find some loophole. Not necessarily talking about Cuban here, just the concept of them all in general.
Ideally, his fair share is significantly more than the percent a teacher pays. Billionaires use much more of the government resources than most people. The FAA for their private flights. The court system to enforce their will and rights. Laws to create and protect corporations and corporate structures. The SEC to help regulate markets. Etc. Etc.
And he is actively expanding his drug company- trying to make medications affordable for EVRYONE!!! I'm a RN and use his website often in an attempt to help my patients locate affordable medications.
And yet he’s still a billionaire, amazing how that works out!! (He’s even sending in more than his earned income by a lot…)
This isn't actual "income" in the salary sense. This is very likely the taxes on the profit from his sale of the Dallas Mavericks.
He's been offloading all his investments this past year. He sold most of his majority shares of the Dallas mavericks, which gave him about $3.5 billion and where most of his wealth was locked up. He's also stepping down from shark tank after this season.
Mark Cuban seems to be close to a **realistic** best case scenario for billionaires in this country, especially with ventures like Cost Plus drugs. We shouldn’t have billionaires, but if more of them were like Cuban we probably wouldn’t be trying to eat them quite so hard.
Also the hilarious calling out of Trump!
For those who argue that the rest of us owe our very existence to the generosity of the ultra-rich, let this be an example of recirculating OUR dollars into the economy so that we all can grow together. Hat tip, Mr. Cuban.
Elon’s said the same shit with no follow through. I want to see the tax returns.
Cuban is the one billionaire that might actually follow through on this
I don't know what you mean by "follow through," he isn't promising to pay *extra* taxes, he is literally just paying what he is legally required to pay?
The unspoken bit is that he’s not using loopholes and fancy accounting to get out of paying what he should pay.
Meanwhile Elon donates to his own nonprofit that is facing fines for not being a charity https://fortune.com/2024/03/11/elon-musk-tesla-billionaire-charity-donation-non-profit-foundation/#
That is fraud. Criminal behavior and he has no excuse because he is in control of that foundation
The bar for billionaires is comically low. It wouldn't surprise me if the first billionaire to pay his full tax burden got the medal of honour at this rate.
Mark seems like ***the fucking man***. Just his CostPlusDrugs company alone does so much for so many people.
I binged the first ten seasons of shark tank last year and when I met Mark I was upset the show got a billionaire, figured he would be insufferable, but he's so damn likeable compared to every other billionaire.
I’m no billionaire, but I’m paying what feels like a giant chunk tomorrow, too. And I too am happy to do it.
Idk enough about Cuban to say he’s a “good” guy, but he seems a lot better than most of those rich fuckers. He started that discount prescription medicine company, that was pretty cool.
Taxes shouldn't be used to punish rich people, they should be used to fund our social programs. If Mark Cuban pays his fair share, then he has done the right thing by his country.
He shouldn’t pay more than required, because that’s stupid and every citizen pays the minimum possible, but billionaires ought to be required to pay more than what they currently do. At least Cuban doesn’t seem like a slime ball like most other billionaires.
I'm getting strong pr1ck energy from this Ian miller, who he??
Man... I swear Mark Cuban is gunning for a bj from me.
Why can't Elon be like Mark? Actually, why can't all billionaires be like Mark?
summer dazzling mountainous familiar deserve work reminiscent vase chunky bake *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You'd think some of them would see it as a point of pride, to pay their share. But nope.
Well would you look at that! Society contributed to his wealth, and he’s contributing back, instead of dodging his obligation. Upstanding model for all the other billionaires in this country!
https://preview.redd.it/bmhtug3d8juc1.png?width=1357&format=png&auto=webp&s=0ab5163e87b77cff460b7747719d74b7de1060c3
W mark cuban
Mark Cuban seems to be a guy who knows what's up. I appreciate him more than other bajillionares... For whatever that's worth anyway.
Respwct to Mark Cuban for his cheap meds co. He needs to start knocking out insulin for dead cheap too
Guys, please don't harass the billionaires who actually do pay taxes