The bold statement was made by billionaire Mark Cuban.
Billionaire Mark Cuban – famous investor and former judge of the American Shark Tank program – recently made a bold statement: the first person in the world to own a fortune worth 1,000 billion USD may not be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or any of the tycoons on the Fortune 500 list, but simply “someone sitting in a small basement, using AI creatively”.
The statement was made by Cuban on the High Performance podcast , then quickly became a controversial topic in the technology, finance and global media world.
According to Mark Cuban, artificial intelligence is at a stage similar to the early days of the internet or smartphones – the potential is clear, but much of the world has yet to fully grasp the revolutionary change it could create. “We’re still in the early stages,” Cuban said, “AI hasn’t really come into play yet.”
With this perspective, he believes that there will be an individual – not necessarily from a large company or with huge investment capital – who can build an AI product so useful that the whole world has to use it, thereby creating an unprecedented amount of wealth.
Mark Cuban isn’t just talking. He’s one of the most active investors in AI startups in healthcare, sports, finance, and media. He’s also using AI to help make videos, manage his calendar, and track his personal health. According to Cuban, AI will open up limitless opportunities for those with bold ideas and the ability to turn technology into useful products for billions of people around the world.
But alongside the glamorous visions Cuban paints, the AI narrative also contains many risks and concerns. One of them is that AI can cause widespread job loss. Many technology leaders, including Amazon CEO and experts from OpenAI, have acknowledged that AI automation will fundamentally change the global labor structure, especially in industries such as finance, law, education, and even content creation. Without a proper management strategy, artificial intelligence is likely to create greater inequality between those who own the technology and those who are replaced by it.
In May, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, nearly 4,000 people lost their jobs in the US due to AI, accounting for about 5% of the total layoffs. According to a survey by PwC (Global AI Jobs Barometer), AI is also changing employers’ views when 41% of global businesses intend to reduce staff due to AI in the next 5 years, especially repetitive positions.
Billionaire Mark Cuban – famous investor and former judge of the American Shark Tank program
Additionally, a World Economic Forum (WEF) report and recent data suggest that around 92 million jobs could be displaced by 2030, while 170 million new jobs could emerge. Jobs such as secretaries, cashiers, data entry accountants, and administrative staff are considered “high risk” to the impact of AI.
Mark Cuban acknowledges that AI will disrupt every industry, but he believes that workers will have to learn to adapt rather than resist. However, not everyone has access to the technology, knowledge, and resources to leverage AI for personal or business purposes. This leads to a worrying reality: AI may create new “ultra-rich” people, but at the same time, it will leave millions of workers unemployed or left behind in the digital age.
In addition, the cost of developing and operating today’s powerful AI models is also very high. Companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have to invest billions of dollars in supercomputer infrastructure and data centers to train models like GPT or Gemini. That makes the idea of “a man in a basement” becoming a trillionaire, although inspiring, somewhat unrealistic without financial and technical support at an industrial scale.
In fact, the biggest beneficiaries of AI today are tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Google—all of which have the infrastructure, capital, and access to massive amounts of data. Nvidia’s stock has skyrocketed as the dominant GPU maker for AI; while Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI and is integrating AI into everything from Office to Azure.
Mark Cuban’s statement is not a financial forecast, but a call to action: the world should not let AI be monopolized by a few corporations. Instead, AI needs to be explored by creative, bold, and different thinkers who can see opportunities where others see only risks. That person could be learning to program in a developing country, starting a business in a small garage, or creating a new AI tool to help solve homework for rural children…
In the era of AI, the question is no longer “Who will become the richest person in the world?”, but “Will technology be used as a tool to create common value, or just a machine to accumulate wealth for the few?”. Mark Cuban’s prediction is a warning to everyone, that if not careful, AI can create not only a “trillionaire”, but also a society deeply divided between those who control technology and those who are controlled by technology.
Theo: Business Insider, Reuters
