‘What Makes Me an Oligarch?’ — Mark Cuban Asks After Laying Out a Plan to Raise Taxes on the Rich and Cut Federal Spending 1% a Year

Most billionaires don't log on to ask for higher taxes on the wealthy. Mark Cuban posted an entire checklist.

Billionaire and Cost Plus Drugs co-founder Mark Cuban laid out a plan to shrink the federal deficit by raising taxes on top earners and big corporations while cutting federal agency budgets every year for five years. Within hours, someone called him an oligarch.

"Actually it means that we have run out of time believing Ideology is a Strategy," Cuban wrote in a post on X on Nov. 7. "We have to take steps that are not based on slogans."

Cuban said the country has to "drive down spending and drive up revenues," and he took a swipe at both parties along the way.

"Remove regulation is not a strategy. More government is not a strategy," Cuban wrote. "The math is the math. We have to reduce the deficit and spending."

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The Tax Bill Comes Due at the Top

"We need to raise taxes on the wealthy without diminishing investment that creates jobs, raises and improve[s] productivity," Cuban wrote.

From there, he got specific:

• A 44% top tax bracket on earned income. Today's top federal rate is 37%.
• Higher top corporate income taxes, plus an AMT. The federal corporate rate currently sits at 21%.
• Social Security tax on earnings from $1 million to $5 million. Right now, the 6.2% tax stops at $184,500 in 2026, rising to $192,300 in 2027. If the standard 6.2% employee rate applied to that $4 million band, someone earning $5 million could owe up to $248,000 more a year, with employers paying a matching share.
• A 4% buyback tax for public companies that don't pay at least $25 an hour. That's four times the 1% excise tax on stock buybacks created by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Companies that don't like it, Cuban added, can invest the money instead.

Cuban also wants a $20 minimum wage for companies above a certain level of sales or EBITDA, "indexed by dma." That's likely a reference to designated market areas, the regional markets used to measure local media audiences. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009.

The Spending Side Gets a Haircut, Too

Cuban didn't stop at taxes.

"Require across the board spending reductions for all federal agencies of 1pct a year for the next 5 years," he wrote.

The backdrop is a deficit that hasn't been shrinking. The Congressional Budget Office's preliminary data showed a $1.993 trillion deficit for fiscal 2026, which ended in September.

Healthcare made the list, too. Cuban called on Congress to pass the Break Up Big Medicine Act, a bipartisan bill from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). It would bar companies from owning both healthcare providers and an insurer or pharmacy benefit manager.

Cuban has been pushing the bill for weeks. In a September exchange with Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), he wrote, "If this Hawley/Warren bill passes, we would reduce the deficit. We would cut costs for patients. Drug pricing would drop like a rock."

Enter the Oligarch Accusation

Cuban saw the backlash coming. "Hate on this all you want," he wrote near the end of his post.

The backlash arrived quickly. One X user replied that an "Oligarch wants to 'drive down spending' is next level gaslighting."

Cuban's response was five words long. "What makes me an oligarch?" he wrote.

He has a paper trail on the tax side of that argument. In April 2024, Cuban posted that he would wire the IRS $288 million, writing "This country has done so much for me, I'm proud to pay my taxes every single year." He later corrected the total to $275.9 million.

A Verdict on the Midterms

Cuban posted the plan days after Democrats swept the midterm elections, and he offered his own read on what voters were saying.

"The midterms were not a confirmation or rebuke of Dems or Republicans. It was a rebuke of the way we do politics and run this country," Cuban wrote. "We need to be honest. Transparent. And stop pushing ideology."

It takes a special kind of internet moment for a billionaire to get called an oligarch while asking to raise taxes on billionaires. Whether any of Cuban's checklist ever makes it into a bill is a different question, but his five-word reply is still hanging over the thread.

On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not directly have a position in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.