Mark Cuban Tells Jon Stewart Harris Campaign Tried To Give Him ‘Notes’ To Stick To As Surrogate, But ‘I Would Say I Don’t Care’

Mark Cuban told Jon Stewart he avoided “notes” from Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and revealed he warned them that the SEC head and his antagonistic attitude towards crypto could cost them the election.

Cuban joined Stewart this week on his The Weekly Show podcast and partly discussed his role as a campaign surrogate to the Harris campaign. The billionaire entrepreneur said his influence mainly came down to economic policy, but he avoided “notes” from the campaign on what to say about certain issues.

“I would go into immigration and, you know, I was honest, I would not let the Harris campaign tell me what to say. They would try to give me notes and I would say, ‘I don’t care,'” he said.

“That’s what they always want from a surrogate, for them to go like, hey, man, screw your notes,” Stewart responded, laughing. “Were you able to have any influence on policy at all? I know there was some discrepancy on unrealized gains and that was something you kind of thought was a non-starter. Did you have some influence on policy there?”

Cuban publicly went against the Harris campaign on a plan to tax unrealized capital gains for anyone with a net worth of more than $100 million, predicting such a plan would “kill” the stock market and negatively impact a number of small businesses.

The Shark Tank investor revealed that oddly the campaign told him he was saying things they “wanted to say” publicly, but couldn’t on issues like capital gains.

“I think I did. I talked a lot about unrealized gains and, you know, when I went out there for the first time and said that was ridiculous and I went back and spoke to them and said, you know, I’m not hearing you guys challenge me at all, and they were like, well, you’re saying things that we would like to say, but we can’t say, so I kept on going with it. So I took that as asset approval and went with it, so that was one area,” he said.

Cuban did find himself facing blowback briefly during the campaign when he appeared on The View and claimed you never see President-elect Donald Trump around “strong, intelligent women,” a comment he quickly apologized for and said was a mistake.

Cuban told Stewart he also warned Harris directly that outgoing SEC head Gary Gensler could cost her the election because of his views on crypto. Gensler cracked down on the crypto industry during his time at the SEC, expanding regulatory power and assessing billions of dollars in fines. Where this hurt the campaign, Cuban argued, is with young men who are more invested in the crypto market than the stock market.

“Another area was crypto. I was very clear early on that there was data from Pew Research that said at least 40% of young men were into crypto,” he said.

Cuban explained he gave his warning to Harris, her campaign, and Gensler himself.

He said:

If these young men have their entire net worth tied up in crypto and you have an SEC head, Gary Gensler, doing everything possible to reduce the value of their net worth, and if everything they read in those apps about what’s happening to the price of their crypto is driven and talked about is driven by Gary Gensler, they’re not going to vote for you. And I said it to Gary Gensler directly, I said it to Kamala, I said it to her team, that Gary Gensler could cost her the election and there’s an argument to be made when you look at the numbers, you know, a whole lot of young men voted against Kamala Harris and I think crypto had a lot to do with it.

Watch above via The Weekly Show.