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- Mark Cuban said billionaires will exist as long as stock markets do.The billionaire said forcing the rich to sell their stocks would "wipe out" Americans' savings.He said taxing billionaires won't fix inequality and urged finding ways to help others earn more.
Mark Cuban says the only way to eliminate billionaires would be to destroy the stock market — and doing so would wipe out the savings of ordinary Americans.
In a string of posts on BlueSky on Thursday night, the billionaire investor and former "Shark Tank" star rebuffed users who argued that wealth inequality could be solved by taxing or capping billionaires' wealth.
Cuban — whose $6 billion fortune from tech startups, investing, and owning the Dallas Mavericks makes him one of the world's richest people — said that extreme wealth is an inevitable byproduct of the market system.
"Billionaires will exist as long as stock markets exist," he wrote. "Should we get rid of the stock market?"
When one user said they'd like to see the market go if it meant preventing "disgusting examples of extreme wealth," Cuban replied: "What should people do with the money they save?"
He warned that dismantling the market would have catastrophic effects for everyone, not just the rich.
Cuban was responding to another user who said that roughly 90% of the stock market is owned by the richest 10% of US households — a figure in line with Federal Reserve data showing that the top 10% hold about 93% of all stock market wealth.
He agreed with the statistic but argued that forcing those investors to sell would hurt everyone, not just the wealthy.
"Absolutely true," he wrote. "But that 90 percent is trillions and trillions of dollars, owned by everyone else. If you make the top 10 pct sell 90 pct of the market, how close to zero value do you think the ownership of the 90 percent goes? You would wipe out the savings of more than half the country."
While Cuban argued that billionaires are a necessary byproduct of thriving stock markets that benefit savers, organizations like Oxfam and the World Bank say ultra-rich accumulations are mainly driven by inheritance, monopoly power, and worsen inequality.
The billionaire tax debate
Cuban also argued that even if governments seized every dollar owned by billionaires, it wouldn't significantly improve public finances.
"You can take every penny that every billionaire has, and other than making a lot of people on here feel better, it wouldn't pay for the interest of the federal deficit or single-payer [healthcare]," he said.
"And doing so would probably tank the markets and cause a depression. But other than that, the rich would be tasty!"
Still, Cuban said he would support a "windfall tax" on people earning $1 billion or more in taxable income in a single year.
He also questioned the feasibility of wealth taxes based on stock valuations, asking: "If it's the value of their stock, will you refund the tax if the stock market corrects or crashes?"
Make capitalism fairer
At the same time, Cuban offered a glimpse of what he thinks fairer capitalism might look like.
Responding to a user who suggested capping CEO pay, raising worker wages, and changing laws so companies prioritize employees over shareholders, he said: "I think every employee should be the same percent of their earnings in company stock as the CEO."
And when another commenter suggested that public anger stems from billionaires acting selfishly, Cuban agreed, replying simply with three checkmarks.
"I'm more concerned that no one is trying to figure out how to help everyone else make more," he wrote.
