Mark Cuban, Photo by Gage Skidmore
Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, has gotten into a war of words with his fellow billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk over the changes Musk made to Twitter since his recent acquisition of the social media giant. At issue is how Elon Musk now wants to charge for its “verified blue checkmarks” that let users know when an account really does belong to a certain celebrity or prominent personality. And last Thursday, Twitter ended the legacy verifications for all of its users who had them.
So, what did Mark Cuban do?
Well, Mark Cuban, of course, slammed Twitter for a move that he said would go down in history as a bungle as big as the introduction of New Coke was back in the 1980s.
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“There were 100 ways @elonmusk could have asked legacy checks for $100. Egalitarianism was the worst of all of them. It’s Diet Coke level. Let me give some examples,” tweeted Mark Cuban using Elon Musk’s own business’ platform to criticize him.
As some responders pointed out, he really meant to refer to New Coke. That was the sweeter version of Coca Cola the company introduced in the 1980s in order to compete with Pepsi. Coke fans hated it and the company was forced to quickly shelve the new product and return the old.
But Mark Cuban also felt the need to qualify these comments. He later tweeted, “That said, Twitter still is the best game in town for so many different types of communications. Its scale and type of interaction is unique and right now irreplaceable. If you look at Twitter on a 20 yr horizon, the past 6mos are just the preseason and it’s not hard to recapture what was.”
According to his official bio, since the age of 12 Mark Cuban has been a natural businessman. Selling garbage bags door to door, the seed was planted early on for what would eventually become long-term success. After graduating from Indiana University – where he briefly owned the most popular bar in town – Mark moved to Dallas. After a dispute with an employer who wanted him to clean instead of closing an important sale, Mark created MicroSolutions, a computer consulting service. He went on to later sell MicroSolutions in 1990 to CompuServe.
In 1995, Mark Cuban and long-time friend Todd Wagner came up with an internet based solution to not being able to listen to Hoosiers Basketball games out in Texas. That solution was Broadcast.com – streaming audio over the internet. In just four short years, Broadcast.com (then Audionet) would be sold to Yahoo for $5.6 billion dollars. His trade to collar his shares of Yahoo! stock received in the sale of Broadcast.com in advance of the popping of the Internet bubble has been called one of the top 10 trades of all time.
