If he didn’t have a family, then “yeah, absolutely” he would run for President of the United States in 2020, says billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
“If I was single, I would do it. For sure,” says Cuban, during a court-side interview at his Dallas Mavericks team practice on Monday.
But given that he’s married with three children, Cuban says he is not ready to formally commit one way or the other. He fears how his family would fare under public scrutiny.
“I haven’t decided yet, but [politics is] so tribal right now and it’s so mean in so many respects, why would somebody want to put their family through that?”
And he sees no way he would be able to keep his private life separate, especially when two of his kids will be teenagers in 2020. “Are you kidding me?” says Cuban. “On social media … the stuff she is going to see. Would you want to put your kids through that?”
Cuban, who is also an investor on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” has been thinking about making a run for political office because he is unsatisfied with the way the current administration is being run, he says. He feels a sense of responsibility to do what he can.
“On one hand, it is patriotism. I do think I could do some of the right things. I wouldn’t be a traditional politician, I am certainly not politically correct, but I think I have solutions,” Cuban says.
In particular the tech investor is frustrated by the way President Donald Trump is passing the responsibility of action to Congress.
“The current administration — they try — but it’s always about, ‘What has congress done?’ And I don’t think that is the right approach. I think there is absolute solutions and I think I would walk in trying to deliver some of those,” says the entrepreneur.
He’s already working on a health care plan, he says. And he is “more than happy” to share that with the current administration when he has it ready. “I have talked to people there to tell them, and it is getting scored,” he says, referring to the process of government officials estimating the costs and implications of a legislative proposal.
“If I did [run for President], it would be because I had something that I thought was a good solution. If I don’t do it, it would be because I wouldn’t want to put my family through that.”
In addition to being frustrated by the lack of action from President Trump, Cuban says he thinks Trump is not focused on leading the country.
“If President Trump just tried his best at being President, okay. I mean if he wasn’t the ‘Campaigner in Chief,’ if he wasn’t a Twitter troll, then maybe we’d look at it and say ‘OK maybe he’s not doing a bad job,'” says Cuban.
Instead, we have a President who mocks North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on Twitter and doesn’t see the problem with doing so, he says.
“If he just did his job, I might not agree with some of his stuff, but at least I wouldn’t be worried about something he tweeted causing someone to drop a bomb,” Cuban says. “Stick to doing your job, and we all, we might think he’s a good president.”
Another case of Trump being too impulsive on Twitter, according to Cuban, is when Trump threatened an end date to the hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico, saying that the federal government cannot keep emergency responders in the U.S. territory “forever.”
“We don’t have one president, we have a guy who has three different personalities: The guy who is trying his best — even though I might not agree with a lot of it — to be President, the guy who is the Campaigner in Chief and the guy who is a Twitter troll.
“You take off the last two and he might be a decent President, but until then, and I don’t see that stopping, somebody else has got to go and try to change the game.”
See also:
How Mark Cuban went from a working-class family in Pittsburgh to a self-made billionaire
Billionaire Mark Cuban says never stop learning: Here are the 2 things he is studying now
Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
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Source: Tech CNBC
Billionaire Mark Cuban on running for President in 2020: ‘If I was single, I would do it. For sure’