Business

We’re halfway through the first season of Compound Interest, our show about the big but often subtle ways that the world of business and finance is changing. In each episode, we’ll pick up a business or industry — smart rings, robotaxis, health insurance, cloning — and poke: Why does it work the way it does? How are the incentives changing? What’s the next opportunity or danger?

Here are some of my favorite recent conversations; and we have a great lineup for the back half of the season. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and reply to this email with suggestions for who we should have on!

Mark Cuban is coming for insurance

Mark Cuban has left Shark Tank, given up control of the Dallas Mavericks, and poured more than $100 million into his prescription-drug startup, which is taking on pharmacy middlemen. Now he’s coming for health insurers.

The billionaire is working on an alternative to employer-run insurance plans, he said. His project — its skunkworks name, “The 10 Plan,” taken from the percentage of customers’ income it would be capped at — would replace insurance premiums with personal contributions into bank accounts that can only be spent on medical bills. The idea grew out of Cost Plus Drugs, his pharmacy startup that sells prescription drugs (mostly generics, though it’s working with TrumpRx to add name-brands straight from big drugmakers) at a flat 15% markup. Cuban says the company is “about breakeven right now,” hasn’t taken outside investment, and that an IPO is not part of his plan.

“I’m rich as f*ck. I don’t need the money,” he says.