Former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban claimed that he was courted as a potential running mate for presidential candidate Kamala Harris during the 2024 election.
The Dallas Mavericks minority owner, 66, told the “Bulwark” podcast on Friday, June 20, that he was in touch with the Harris campaign before Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz was picked as her running mate in August 2024.
Host Tim Miller said he’d heard “green room gossip at MSNBC” about Cuban’s negotiations with Harris and asked if Cuban declined to send in “VP vetting papers” because “the list would be too long.”
“Yeah,” Cuban replied. “The second part of that, my response, was I’m not very good as the Number Two person.”
Cuban continued, “The last thing we need is me telling Kamala, you know, the president, that, ‘No, that’s a dumb idea.’ Right? And I’m not real good at shaking hands and kissing babies.”
The mogul agreed with Miller’s assessment that the 2024 presidential campaign would have been completely “different” if he’d ended up as the V.P. candidate.
“Obviously, it would have been different,” he said. “My personality is completely different than Tim’s. My experiences, my background is different. I think, I cut through the s*** more directly. I’m not a politician.”
He then joked, “It would have been different but it would have been awful! She would have fired me within six days.”
Us Weekly reached out to Cuban and Harris’ representatives for comment.
While Cuban is a registered Independent, he has long been a political and business foe of President Donald Trump. Cuban endorsed Harris and campaigned with her, prior to her loss to Trump in the November 2024 general election.
“You want a president that’s positive, who is going to inspire you to do great things.” Cuban said on the campaign trail last year. “You don’t want a president who’s calling America a trash can.”
The billionaire investor has flirted with presidential politics in the past. He told the New York Daily News in 2019 that he was “strongly considering running” as an independent presidential candidate in the 2020 election.
He later confirmed on the “Ax Files” podcast in June 2020 that he went so far as to commission a sample poll pitting him against Trump and Joe Biden, but results showed he was “only able to get up to 25%” in a hypothetical three-way matchup. As a result of this polling, Cuban stopped exploring an independent bid for the White House.
Cuban is fresh off his exit as a Shark Tank investor. He announced in March that he was leaving the ABC reality competition after 15 seasons.
“I remember thinking this show is not going to last,” Cuban said in May’s season finale “Just go on there, tear it up, raise hell, cause trouble. I really didn’t expect there to be a third season and then boom. It just blew up.”
He added, “What I’d like to say is thanks to everybody who took a chance on me, all the entrepreneurs that said yes to me. Who knows how many millionaires we’ve created, how many people we’ve inspired? I’m proud of what we’ve done.”
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