Cuban expressed interest in buying both media assets during a wide-ranging interview with Wired magazine’s Lauren Good published Thursday.
“If I had enough money, I would buy it in a heartbeat, but I don’t have that,” Cuban said of Fox News.
Cuban began the interview by saying the Fox News purchase would be an antidote to what he called the “Fox News generation.”
Cuban coined the term in a past interview where he expressed disappointment in his generation, the Baby Boomers.
“My generation was sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I never thought they’d become the Fox News generation,” Cuban told The New York Times’ David Marchese in an interview published in August 2020.
“These are people I know who smoke marijuana, listen to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, protest songs,” he continued. “And to think that these are the same people who are condemning Black Lives Matter and watching Fox News in droves, it pisses me off. You have no idea.”
But Cuban said Fox News would be too expensive an investment if it were to come to market, estimating the net purchase price would be around $15 billion to $20 billion.
“We’re not sitting on $15 billion or $20 billion in cash,” Cuban told Good.
Acquiring X is also a distant possibility for Cuban, who told Goode he believes the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is reluctant to sell.
“I wish he could,” Cuban said, “but there’s no reason for him to sell it.”
Cuban, a frequent user of X, has frequently criticized changes made by Musk to the platform, which Musk bought Twitter Inc. in October 2022 and renamed the company X in July last year.
Cuban’s criticism angered Musk, who responded with an expletive-filled tirade.
But Cuban hasn’t let that put him off, telling Business Insider in June that he’s “fun to spar with Elon.”
“Whoever controls the algorithm controls the platform, controls the world, controls the community,” Cuban told Goode. “And Elon and X have built a very powerful right-wing community. They’re fun to work with.”
Representatives for Fox News, X and Cuban did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.
