Billionaire business magnate Mark Cuban has been dancing around the idea of running for president for close to a decade now, since he first suggested in 2015 that he could beat both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election. As such, speculation reached a fever pitch this week amid news of Cuban announcing that he's stepping down from Shark Tank after 16 seasons, as well as selling his majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks.
After all, if Cuban were to decide to run for president in 2024, now would indeed be the time to start getting his ducks in a row. But it seems as though the rumors are unfounded, at least for now.
As the 65-year-old unequivocally told TMZ on Wednesday, there's "no chance" he's making a play for commander-in-chief. He added that any kind of presidential campaign trail was "galaxies off," adding that his family would "disown" him.
His reasoning shouldn't come as a huge surprise, either, considering that Cuban claimed he was leaving the popular ABC entrepreneurial reality series to spend more time with his family.
"I just want to have a couple summers with my teens before they go off on their own," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "Nothing to do with the show. I love it. I love being on it. I love what [it] represents and how it motivates entrepreneurs around the world."
Cuban last floated the idea of a presidential bid leading up to the 2020 election, telling attendees of a business conference in 2017 that he was "seriously considering" running for president. "If I was single, I’d definitely be running," he said at the time. Yet, he continued to consider the idea, even going so far as to commission a three-way poll in 2020 to see how he'd fare against Joe Biden and Trump.
However, after receiving just about 25 percent of the overall vote, he abandoned the idea.
"If the numbers were to come back significantly higher, and I would have been able to take more away from either or both candidates, then I probably would have tried to convince my family," he told political strategist David Axelrod on The Axe Files podcast in June 2020. "But given where they were, it just wasn't worth it."
On the @AxeFiles, @mcuban also revealed that he hired a pollster this spring to explore the possibility of mounting an independent challenge to @realDonaldTrump & @JoeBiden. Two things stopped him: His family...and the numbers!https://t.co/PEAX6ajt5j pic.twitter.com/kL2tDaoqqd
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) June 4, 2020
Of course, that doesn't rule out 2028 or even 2032, so stay tuned.
