The billionaire investor and Shark Tank host didn’t hold back.
Topline: Famed investor and Shark Tank host Mark Cuban became the latest billionaire to criticize Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax in a series of tweets over the weekend, calling her the “smartest of all candidates” but also comparing her to President Donald Trump for “divert[ing] attention from reality” when it comes to her own wealth and funding Medicare For All.
- Cuban is the latest big-name figure to enter the Warren-billionaires debate, saying he is “fine” with paying more taxes but that Warren’s wealth tax is designed to hide her own wealth and income from the public.
- At a net worth of $12 million, Warren is the fourth-richest Democratic candidate in the 2020 field, behind the likes of Tom Steyer, John Delaney and Michael Bennet, according to Forbes’ estimates.
- Cuban said that qualifies her as being “filthy rich,” placing her within the richest 1% that she is targeting with her policy proposal.
- While Cuban declared her the “smartest” of the 2020 candidates, he also accused Warren of “intellectually misleading the public” on funding for her Medicare For All plan, drawing parallels with Trump’s tactics: “She is selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality.”
- Warren says her Medicare For All plan would cost $20.5 trillion over the next decade, while other policy experts put that closer to $32 trillion. Cuban said getting the funding approved within four years for the ambitious plan would be “nearly impossible.”
- Under Warren’s new calculator, which shows how much each billionaire would have to pay under her proposed wealth tax, Cuban would take a $205 million-per-year hit.
Big number: Cuban, who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, has a net worth of $4.1 billion, according to Forbes.
Key background: Cuban is just one of many billionaires to recently criticize Warren’s platform of taxing the ultrarich. He joins an ever-growing list of names, including Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and billionaire investor Leon Cooperman—who was the first to publicly sparr with Warren on the topic. Several have even shared gloomy predictions of what a Warren presidency would mean for the stock market: Anywhere between a 10% to 25% drop.
Tangent: Warren’s wealth tax isn’t only causing panic among billionaires. It’s also starting to alarm major Democratic donors—some finance executives have warned that they’ll sit out, or back Trump, if Warren clinches the nomination in 2020, according to CNBC.