Cuban says he ignored notes from Harris campaign

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban said he ignored notes that Vice Presidential Harris’s campaign was giving him while he was their acting surrogate on the trail.

“I would go into immigration and, you know, I was honest, I would not let the Harris campaign tell me what to say. They would try to give me notes and I would say, ‘I don’t care,'” Cuban said during his Thursday appearance on comedian Jon Stewart’s podcast “The Weekly Show.”

One of the few areas where Cuban publicly broke with Harris during the campaign was over a proposed 25 percent minimum tax on total income exceeding $100 million, including unrealized gains on assets that haven’t been sold.

Cuban on Stewart's podcast suggested the Harris campaign privately agreed with his criticism about the idea, which was part of President Biden's 2025 budget proposal.

“I talked a lot about unrealized gains and, you know, when I went out there for the first time and said that was ridiculous and I went back and spoke to them and said, you know, I’m not hearing you guys challenge me at all, and they were like, well, you’re saying things that we would like to say, but we can’t say, so I kept on going with it,” Cuban said.

“So I took that as asset approval and went with it, so that was one area,” he added.

Cuban was one of the most visible campaign surrogates, especially from the business world, traversing the country and promoting Harris’s economic proposals. While he offered scathing criticism of her rival, President-elect Trump, Cuban congratulated the Republican candidate on his general election win, as well as fellow billionaire Elon Musk, a major Trump backer.

Cuban also told Stewart during the episode that he warned the Harris campaign that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) head Gary Gensler, who will step down next month, could be detrimental to gaining support among younger men and ultimately play a part in losing the 2024 presidential election.

The billionaire pointed to Gensler’s skeptical stance on cryptocurrency, and fraught relationship with that industry.

“And I said it to Gary Gensler directly, I said it to Kamala, I said it to her team, that Gary Gensler could cost her the election and there’s an argument to be made when you look at the numbers, you know, a whole lot of young men voted against Kamala Harris and I think crypto had a lot to do with it,” Cuban said.

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