The billionaire who made his fortune betting on disruption just told AI companies to stop acting like conquerors and start paying reparations.
The Summary
- Mark Cuban says AI companies should spend billions helping cities and towns hit by job losses, calling it a "cost of doing business" for an industry losing the PR war with ordinary people.
- "The big LLMs have lost the PR battle," Cuban wrote on X. "Why? Because they all suck at putting people first."
- Cuban's prescription: face-to-face meetings with creatives in LA and NYC, direct financial support for affected communities, and listening tours instead of celebrity endorsements.
- His bottom line: being hated is not good for business, and AI companies are currently very hated.
The Signal
Mark Cuban isn't known for telling tech companies to slow down. But his Thursday post on X reads like a field manual for an industry that's winning the technology race while losing the legitimacy war. The diagnosis: AI companies have built incredible models and terrible relationships with the humans whose jobs those models will replace.
Cuban's prescription is specific: billions of dollars flowing to towns and cities before the job losses hit, not after. This isn't corporate charity. It's insurance against the kind of backlash that turns regulatory sentiment from cautious to punitive. Across the major LLMs, Cuban argues, these sums are rounding errors. Across affected communities, they're the difference between managed transition and political revolt.
"Billions of dollars is a lot of money across towns and city programs. Across the major LLMs, it's a cost of doing business."
The creatives angle is particularly sharp. Cuban notes that every creative he knows is terrified about AI's impact on their profession. His advice: go to LA and NYC, meet artists face to face, provide financial and creative support. Then comes the kicker: "You must meet them face to face and basically do what they say."
That's not how Silicon Valley usually operates. The Valley builds products, ships features, and measures adoption. Cuban is describing something closer to community organizing, a door-to-door campaign where the AI companies play the role of supplicants, not saviors. He explicitly contrasts this with paying famous people for endorsements, suggesting the industry has already tried the easy path and it hasn't worked.
The Implication
If Cuban is right, AI companies face a choice: spend billions now on goodwill and transition support, or spend tens of billions later fighting regulatory battles in a climate where they're the villains. The cost-benefit analysis isn't subtle.
For people watching this space, Cuban's intervention matters because it comes from someone who usually sides with the builders. When a pro-tech billionaire says the big LLMs "all suck at putting people first," that's not progressive criticism. It's a warning from inside the house. The AI companies that figure out community engagement before Congress forces them to will have meaningful advantages when the political weather changes. The ones that keep acting like the future is inevitable will learn what happens when you build amazing technology that everyone resents.