Letting the numbers do the talking. Mark Cuban not-so-subtly shaded President Donald Trump with a No. 46 jersey at the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Friday, February 17.
The Dallas Mavericks owner, 58, rocked the tongue-in-cheek jersey in response to his ongoing war of words with Trump, 70, a source told ESPN, particularly the real estate mogul’s recent tweet that Cuban isn’t “smart enough to run for president.”
Cuban told the site initially that the number was coincidental, a double of his favorite number, 23. “23 times 2 is 46,” he told ESPN, before admitting that he had a bigger reason for choosing the conspicuous number.
“It was just to f–k with everybody, because that is what I do,” he said. “You’ve got to have fun with it. You can’t take it too seriously. So, we’ll see.”
Earlier in the day Friday, Cuban sat down with CNBC to slam the 45th president for his poor performance in office so far. “If he had any leadership skills whatsoever … he would be saying to people, ‘I will get this fixed.’” When Cuban’s fellow Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary quipped that Cuban simply doesn’t like Trump’s “style,” the Mavericks owner disagreed.
“You don’t like his style. That’s what I think,” O’Leary said. “Trump has a style — he makes statements — but at the end of the day, my assumption is that for the good of all North America, including Mexico, he is going to be pragmatic.”
At this, Cuban responded simply, “Thank you, Peter Thiel.” (The tech billionaire is a staunch Trump supporter.)
Cuban and Trump’s beef goes back to the 2016 presidential elections, when Cuban dissed the then–Republican presidential candidate on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in June and later called him “bats–t crazy” during a rally in July.
