Mark Cuban jokes with Bill Gates about Luka Doncic trade: ‘I’ve had a rough week’ – The Dallas Morning News
Arts & EntertainmentBy Sarah HepolaStaff Writer Staff Writer “I gotta tell you, I’ve had a rough week,” said Mark Cuban, shortly after sitting down with Bill Gates on stage at the Eisemann Center in Richardson on Friday night. The sold-out audience burst into applause.The conversation between Cuban and Gates, the Microsoft founder and author of the new memoir Source Code, had long been on the Arts & Letters Live calendar, but the date happened to fall six days after the trade heard ‘round the world. Last Saturday evening, news broke that the Dallas Mavericks — once famously owned by Cuban, though he sold his majority stake in 2023 — had swapped phenom Luka Doncic for Los Angeles Laker Anthony Davis. If an actual bomb went off in Dallas, it probably wouldn’t have made as many headlines.Since then, the outspoken Cuban had mostly stayed silent. “MFFL,” he texted Dallas Morning News reporter Brad Townsend, the acronym that means “Mavs Fan For Life.” On a basketball show called Run It Back, former Mav Chandler Parsons said he’d texted Cuban that he was confused about the trade. “That makes two of us,” Cuban apparently responded.The tsunami of fan outrage, and Cuban’s uncharacteristic reticence, raised the stakes on Friday night’s event, which would be Cuban’s first public appearance since the trade. On a Dallas Museum of Art Facebook post promoting the event (the DMA runs Arts & Letters Live), one commenter had written, “Will they be doing a Q&A? I have questions.”Catch up on the day’s news you need to know.Or with: By signing up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy PolicyThey would, in fact, not be doing a Q&A. Instead, the two titans stayed locked in conversation for 80 minutes, talking about stories in Source Code including Gates’ precocious boyhood and the Wild West of early personal computing. Before they delved in, though, Cuban addressed the elephant in the room.After the opening comment about his rough week, Cuban told Gates he loved Source Code, but he had a question for the billionaire entrepreneur.“If after you left Microsoft, you found out that Steve Ballmer traded Windows 11 — like, the new hot operating system — for Windows 10, the Hall-of-Fame but older operating system, what would you do?”Audience laughter punctuated Cuban’s delivery, and after the question, the packed room applauded. Gates played the moment straight. “I might have to hide from the press,” he said.Cuban nodded. “I know a couple of other people that are in that situation,” he said.Source Code covers Gates’ origin story, from his childhood in ‘50s Seattle to the early days of Microsoft. Cuban was an ideal conversation partner, being one of the few people who could personally relate to such an astonishing narrative arc. The two laughed about not being cool kids but alighting to the possibilities of emerging technology. Cuban, who developed and then sold MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com earlier in his career, asked how Gates balanced being the CEO of a company with fatherhood.“I played the role that my dad played. I was always calm, and I was pretty busy,” he said, adding he was lucky that Ballmer eventually stepped up to become CEO.“Now he’s got the Clippers,” Cuban said, with a little spice in his voice. Ballmer bought the LA Clippers in 2014 after retiring from Microsoft. “They don’t make trades like that to us!” Cuban said, eliciting a big laugh, since he seemed to be referring to the Doncic trade. It was the kind of week when any use of the word “trade” got a crowd reaction.Another interesting moment came when Gates talked about the race to win the early personal computing market. Commodore PET, Radio Shack’s TRS-80 and Apple II were competing with Texas Instruments, which had dominated personal calculators so thoroughly that its team entered the fray with high expectations. “For a variety of reasons, it wasn’t super successful,” Gates said of TI’s personal computer venture.“You’re in the home of Texas Instruments in Richardson, Texas,” Cuban reminded him, to laughter.“I know, I know,” Gates said.The conversation grew deep when the subject turned to AI. “In some ways it’s more profound than what you and I were a part of,” Gates told Cuban. Gates is a champion of AI, which he says will take us from a world of scarcity, “where there’s never enough medical care, there’s never enough good education, food, mental health services,” to a world of abundance. “Then you’re faced with this almost philosophical problem,” said Gates. When robots and software do the work, what does a human life look like?“This is in the far future,” Cuban clarified, and Gates agreed, to which Cuban quipped, “Like six, seven months.”Once the bleeding edge of culture, these two men are elder statesmen now. Gates turns 70 later this year, and Cuban is 66. Both remain active in shaping the way we live; the Gates Foundation has invested in developing countries, while Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs is disrupting Big Pharma. Both have stayed political, with Gates donating a reported $50 million to support Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, and Cuban beefing with Elon Musk on X. If you hoped to hear about that, you were out of luck.Cuban made a segue toward the end of the evening. “And that leads us right to politics,” he said. “Oh no, we only have 90 seconds left!”Who can blame them for not wanting to go there? Instead they spent the last minute or so talking about how lucky they were to be a part of history.“Is the American Dream alive?” Cuban asked Gates.Gates answered, “It was for me.”Sarah Hepola is a features staff writer. She has more than 25 years of journalism experience including with the Dallas Observer, Austin Chronicle, Salon.com and Texas Monthly. She is the author of the 2015 best-selling memoir “Blackout” and was the host/creator of the Texas Monthly podcast “America’s Girls,” about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
