Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, a registered Republican, campaigned for the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Though a fiscal conservative, Cuban has differed with President-elect Donald Trump over numerous issues, including the societal value of DEI initiatives, Trump’s proposed tariffs, and the MAGA leader’s divisive style of politics.
Cuban has also battled publicly with X-owner Elon Musk, whose takeover and remaking of Twitter — where Cuban has nearly 9 million followers — has lent itself to a downgrade in our public discourse as a place where vituperation and misinformation are widespread and unhelpful.
After influential Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg announced that his platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc. — would drastically curtail efforts to fact-check and otherwise moderate content, a process which Zuckerberg said too often resulted in censorship, Cuban advised his nearly 900K followers on the social media app BlueSky to recruit others to the newer platform. Why?
Because the decentralized BlueSky technology, if it can reach critical mass, is a way to defuse the power of the rightwing media to dictate the national narrative and control what’s understood to be true.
“If Bluesky ends up with more users than the others,” Cuban writes, “you destabilize musk, zuck, trump.”
x X has ~18m daily USA users. @bsky.app, ~1.5m. Is it worth 20 MINS a day to proactively recruit and bring your friends, neighbors,relatives, businesses, anyone who is or could be a user, to @bsky.app? If Bluesky ends up with more users than the others, you destabilize musk, zuck, trump.
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Cuban notes that BlueSky has almost a tenth of X’s daily users at present, stating at once that it has room to grow and that it is far from where it needs to be.
Cuban stresses the obvious: that a social media app is only as valuable as its users. (A reminder of that old Silicon Valley truism: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.)
If you think only billionaires can control social media, You are absolutely wrong. Social media is completely dependent on its users. Think about why you do or did use FB, ThreadsTik tok or Twitter. It's because they have enough users. Take away all the "normies" and they all are worthless
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 5:13 PM
“IF YOU BELIEVE THE MANY SHOULD HAVE CONTROL OVER THE FEW, this is your time,” Cuban writes. “As a decentralized platform, @bsky.app is probably the last, best chance for this to happen This has nothing to do with me. I’m just stating the obvious.”
IF YOU BELIEVE THE MANY SHOULD HAVE CONTROL OVER THE FEW, this is your time. As a decentralized platform, @bsky.app is probably the last, best chance for this to happen This has nothing to do with me. I'm just stating the obvious. It has everything to do with what the 1.2m @bsky.app users do.
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Just as he does when arguing about the business-case positives of DEI policy, Cuban believes the market will signal whether Zuckerberg’s move is a smart one from a business perspective, not an ideological perspective.
Unlike X, which Musk took private making its financials opaque, Meta is a public company and — since another version of free speech is what the market expresses — Cuban points out below that the public’s reaction to Meta’s move will be transparent in future earnings reports.
Meta is a public company. This time next year their user numbers will tell us exactly what consumers think https://t.co/VGZydpO31y
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 7, 2025
.jpg){kind=link}