Mark Cuban has made it clear that he won’t vote for former President Donald Trump this November, but the “Shark Tank” star says he wasn’t always against the GOP presidential nominee.
“I actually started off supporting Donald and then I got to know him better. I was like, ‘He’s great, he’s not a typical Stepford candidate.’ I thought that was a positive, and then I got to know him,” Cuban told former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in an interview released on X and YouTube on Wednesday.
Trump, Cuban said, mainly appealed to him because he was an underdog who could upend and disrupt the US political scene.
“I didn’t think he had a chance, and so I just wanted to kind of, you know, screw things up in traditional politics that I’m not a fan of,” he added.
But Cuban said he soon soured on the property mogul once he looked at his business and political record.
“The bigger point is Trump University. Trump SoHo. Stole $4 million from a friend of mine that had to sue to get it back. Mike Pence,” Cuban said in the interview.
Cuban appeared to be referencing the fraud accusations that arose over his Trump University real-estate training program. The ensuing lawsuits saw Trump paying out $25 million in settlements.
Cuban also mentioned Trump’s luxury hotel, the Trump SoHo, which has since been rebranded to “The Dominick” after The Trump Organization severed ties with it.
Trump SoHo was mired in multiple controversies, whether it be the death of a construction worker during an accident in 2008 or accusations that the property had taken money from Russian backers.
Cuban also mentioned former Vice President Mike Pence. Pence’s relationship with his onetime boss became strained after he certified the results of the 2020 election, to Trump’s ire.
“He was unethical then, and he’s still unethical,” Cuban told Ramaswamy earlier in their interview.
This isn’t the first time Cuban has expressed his disapproval of Trump’s unethical behavior.
Representatives for Cuban and the Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
Back in March, Cuban told Axios that he would vote for “Biden/Harris over Trump all day every day” because he didn’t want a “snake oil salesperson as president.” Cuban echoed those points again during his interview with Ramaswamy.
“You want somebody whose first inclination is not to do what’s in their own best personal interest. You can’t deny that’s Donald Trump,” he said.
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