WHEN: Today, Tuesday, January 28, 2025
WHERE: CNBC’s “Halftime Report”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with Billionaire Investor Mark Cuban on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” (M-F, 12PM-1PM ET) today, Tuesday, January 28. Following is a link to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/01/28/mark-cuban-is-in-cash-and-wasnt-buying-the-dip-in-mondays-sell-off.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
SCOTT WAPNER: I hope you will forgive me, Mike, but we have somebody on the phone that I want to bring into our conversation today. It’s the billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who joins us now. Because, Mark, you were listening to our conversation about AI. And I think, as everybody, and yourself included, I’m sure, is sort of trying to get your arms around the DeepSeek story and what it really means and what correlations, if any, there are to back to 1999, which you know better than most, considering you sold your company in April of ’99 for $6 billion and collared it and became the Mark Cuban we all know now. How are you thinking about all this?
MARK CUBAN: So, I think one of the fundamental issues with the market right now is, no companies are going public. There isn’t, back then, Amazon was a new company. Dell was relatively new. You know, there were incumbents that we all looked at as being the default powerhouses. And, but there were new companies coming public that we could look at and say, OK, maybe these guys have something unique. I mean, if it was today, Google probably would not be public. Amazon might not be public. You can go down the list. And there are companies right now that are up and coming in the AI space that are private. And because they’re private, nobody gets to invest in them. Well, at least typical investors don’t. And you don’t really get much conversation about them. And I think I think that impacts the conversations and the market movements that we saw yesterday and today.
WAPNER: Do you think it’s going to change? Does this open the door to more start-ups because of what we witnessed from DeepSeek, the way we sort of think about these open-source models, the way that maybe the incumbents are suddenly put on the defensive, so to speak?
CUBAN: Yes, it was interesting, because you mentioned earlier about an arms race, the Meta, the Amazon, OpenAI all just spending just billions of dollars. And that really reduced the competition because it sent the message that, hey, you have got to raise all this money just to play the game. Now, with DeepSeek, the door is open. And, actually, the door had already been opened for smaller companies that were like companies, Groq, that does an inference processor. There’s — the door has been opened, but I think it’s open wider now. And you will see more companies get more visibility. And I think, with the new administration and the changes at the SEC, I think there’s going to be an incentive and a push for more companies to go public, because the reality is, it’s not a stock picker’s market anymore because the number of public companies continues to decline.
WAPNER: When you watched the sell-off yesterday, as an investor, I don’t know what you’re invested in today in terms of public market stocks. I think you have gone through gyrations over the last five to 10 years of being heavily invested in the US stock market and then perhaps not so much.
CUBAN: Yes.
WAPNER: I mean, how does that look today?
CUBAN: Well, I have gone to cash because I was concerned about tariffs. I was concerned about the uncertainty. How high can this market go? And so, when yesterday hit, I certainly took a look and said, OK, is now the time to dive in and is this just an aberration? And I just don’t get that feel. There — like I said earlier, there isn’t — there aren’t those up-and-coming public companies that you can say, look, this just opened the door for them. Let’s jump on board with them. I think there’s so much uncertainty still on DeepSeek. Is the information we got in terms of their cost to create the models accurate? I mean, it’s still too early to tell.
WAPNER: What impact do you think it’ll have on Sam Altman? I’m not sure how well you know him—
CUBAN: I don’t.
WAPNER: How much you might know about Open.
CUBAN: Well—
WAPNER: But the idea that now he’s talking about, wow, this is really an incredible model, it’s going to force us maybe to be better and earlier in how they introduce some of their new features as well, I mean, it really feels like, Mark, this was a goalposts-moving moment for AI and how we’re all going to relate to it as investors. Do you feel that way too?
CUBAN: Well, it’s certainly been perceived that way. I mean, I think it’s still too early to tell. I try to geek out and learn more about mixture of experts and the way they’re doing their models and all that stuff. So I think it’s still too early. But I think what really changes is, it’s not just a race to raise as much money as you can in order to be a player. And it also impacts regulation, because, before, when we talked about AI regulation, the presumption was, all these companies, the Metas, the Googles, etc., OpenAI, they were so big they needed to be regulated, because there really weren’t up-and-comers that could disrupt them. Now, if all this plays out the way it appears to, the message is, bring on the 12-year-olds, bring on the disrupters who can come in here and change the AI game. There’s an old saying, when you run with the elephants, there’s the quick and the dead. And we finally found somebody quick who can run with the elephants. And now the question is, can the elephants run with the quicker, the quick companies like DeepSeek? And I think you’re going to see a lot more entries into the AI space. I think you will see a lot more private investment into small up-and-coming companies. I can’t tell you how many conversations with private companies I have had, and now it turns out I was wrong, where it was like, well, shoot, you’re going to have to raise billions and billions of dollars just to compete with these guys. Now someone can walk in. I had a conversation with the company last week where we were talking about the thing with TikTok is their algorithm. And they wanted to do algorithms as a service and build models, so they can license what they think will be a better-than-TikTok algorithm to any social media company or other company that wants to use it. And the question was, how big a model and how much of an investment do we need to make? That all just changed. And so I think you will see a lot more companies get funding that otherwise might not have gotten it, because it won’t take as much money to compete.
WAPNER: Interesting. I so very much appreciate the fact that you were not only watching the debate and discussion that we were having, but that you were willing to be a part of it. Mark, thanks so much. We will talk to you soon.
CUBAN: Appreciate it, Scott. Thanks, guys.
WAPNER: Yes, you bet. That’s Mark Cuban joining us there on the phone.
For more information contact:
Jennifer Dauble
CNBC
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m: 201.615.2787
Stephanie Hirlemann
CNBC
m: 201.397.2838
