The Pain of Envy, Jealousy? Don’t You Feel Sorry for Mark Cuban?

 

How many billionaires watched the Republican convention with pain and anguish? Imagine a billionaire who thinks he is so much better than Donald Trump, so much smarter, so much more thoughtful and that he would make a far better President. Can you imagine the pangs of envy, of heart-breaking jealousy that might be raking such a billionaire?

We cannot but then we don’t have to. Because we saw it all play out on TV.  Mark Cuban, a favorite billionaire of CNBC, came on that network on Friday and showed his pain to every one. He expressed a complaint about Trump not being analytical and threw dirt on Donald Trump and his entire family. It was a sad sad spectacle; so sad that even Kelly Evans, the 30-year old CNBC anchor, seemed embarrassed about being a part of it.

We were not surprised because we have seen Cuban’s envy get more & more rabid over the past year. As we recall, Cuban began by opining on CNBC.com that Trump didn’t have enough money to fight a presidential campaign. Cuban wrote, as we recall, that Trump might have the net worth but not the liquidity to spend $250 million that Trump would need to spend. 

Cuban proved to be wrong, totally wrong. Donald Trump proved to be far smarter and far more innovative than Cuban. Trump managed to destroy 16 other top-tier well funded Republican candidates without spending more than a fraction of what they spent. Cuban never got it and still doesn’t get it.

Then, as we recall, Cuban began talking about how he would make a better President than Trump. Finally Cuban offered himself as a Vice President to both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Who else but a complete & unfulfilled egotist would conceive of something like that? 

Finally his envy & jealousy must have boiled over at Trump’s triumphant nomination and he poured it out on CNBC on this Friday. He even stooped to being negative about the Trump children and directly attacked Mrs. Melania Trump. It was hard to watch a capable smart successful man like Mark Cuban fall to such lows. 

To be fair, Cuban is probably not alone. Other billionaires must have watched in envious consternation as Trump kept winning & moving towards his nomination as the Republican candidate for President. 

As pure conjecture on our part, imagine what Michael Bloomberg must have felt. Mr. Bloomberg is not only a mega billionaire but he runs a global media company. More importantly Bloomberg won three elections and served as a three-term mayor of New York City. Mr. Bloomberg has also talked about his presidential ambitions. 

In fact, he went farther than just talk earlier this year. Reportedly Mr. Bloomberg commissioned a study to analyze his prospects as a third-party candidate. He decided to not run because,as the study suggested, he would deliver the election to Donald Trump by taking away votes from Hillary Clinton.

But why didn’t Michael Bloomberg run for the Republican nomination? After all, he had won three mayoral elections as a Republican and served as the three-term Republican Mayor of New York City. Because Mr. Bloomberg knew that New York was different than the rest of America and that he could never win Republican primaries across the country.  

Neither Bloomberg nor Cuban understood why they would have failed miserably while Donald Trump succeeded so well. They would have run their campaigns on their beliefs, on the skills, experience they had and how that would benefit the American people. In other words, their campaigns would have been just like the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush et al.  

Donald Trump ran a very different campaign. He did not run to express & impose his beliefs on the American people. He understood the feelings of 80% of the American people, those who felt ignored & discarded. And he ran to fight for them. This profound simplicity is why Donald Trump succeeded where other conventional & analytical billionaires would have failed.

This is really simple. And we assume that a successful man like Michael Bloomberg gets it. But this simplicity has completely eluded Mark Cuban. He would do well to learn something else from Michael Bloomberg – dignity & decorum. 

 

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