Mark Cuban blasts San Francisco tech bros with Bill Maher – SFGATE
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban speaks to reporters on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, at American Airlines Center in Dallas.
Mark Cuban — of “Shark Tank” and Dallas Mavericks ownership fame — really, really does not care for Silicon Valley tech bros (or San Francisco itself).
In an hourlong appearance on Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast released Sunday, the billionaire lambasted the workers of the Bay Area’s defining industry for being insular and arrogant, and San Francisco itself for pushing out tech.
“Pretentious as f—k, right?” Cuban told Maher. “Being in the tech industry, everybody is the smartest motherf—ker in the world if you live in the Silicon Valley.”
“The attitudes. I mean, it’s just like, ‘We’re tech bros, we’re tech bros, of course we’re smarter,’” he added. “‘We went to Harvard, we went to MIT, we’re in tech. You just can’t hang, you don’t know what the f—k is going on.’ I do all I can not to let any of my investments work out of Silicon Valley.”
“Just because you’re good at tech doesn’t mean you’re the smartest person in the world. You’re good at that one thing,” Maher responded.
“But they’re not even that good at it,” Cuban quipped back. “They’re just there to pretend that they’re good at it, right? … There’s a lot of capital there, so people follow the money. I get that, right. But the pretentiousness and the attitude and the expectations and the arrogance, like, it’s just a business and you can be good anywhere in the world.”
But he also took San Francisco to task, saying that he believes the city is unwelcoming to the tech industry at large.
Maher, to his credit, defended the city despite making basic jabs about the city’s cleanliness and its “political correctness”: “I don’t want to add to the s—t on the street and take a dump on San Francisco. [laughing] I love San Francisco; I think we all love San Francisco, no?”
“I’ve never been a big San Francisco fan,” Cuban said, later saying, “I’d rather start a business in Dallas, all day, every day.” (Maybe he’s still peeved that the Warriors beat out his Mavericks last playoffs.)
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Joshua Bote is the tech editor at SFGATE. He grew up in the Los Angeles area, went to UC Berkeley and has previously worked as a news reporter at USA Today and SFGATE and a music writer at NPR. Email: joshua.bote@sfgate.com