- Mark Cuban tried to invest in Musical.ly, the platform that would become TikTok.
- Cuban says the platform lost its spark, becoming “corporate.”
- In an interview, Cuban said focusing on monetization often harms the user experience.
Mark Cuban tried to invest in TikTok’s precursor years ago, but said the company turned him down.
Cuban told content creator and journalist Jules Terpak in an interview on her YouTube channel that he enjoyed using TikTok when it was called Musical.ly.
The platform rebranded to TikTok in 2017 when it was acquired by its current owners, ByteDance.
“I loved it because I could just turn it on and there would be 15,000 people live immediately that I could talk to,” Cuban said of Musical.ly.
“It was insane. I loved it. And then, as it got into the dances and everything, it was fun.”
Cuban told CNBC he tried to invest in Musical.ly but was unsuccessful because the company wasn’t looking to raise more funds at the time.
Cuban told Terpak he thinks TikTok is less fun than it used to be and “more corporate.”
He said that the dance-focused version of the app was losing billions of dollars, “and so at some point, they had to start trying to make some money.”
“I liked it better when it was dances and music,” Cuban said. “Now it’s a business.”
Cuban said TikTok’s early beauty was that its algorithm served users with more of what they liked than any other platform.
“Now it’s corporate,” he said. “It’s how many followers can you get and how can you engage those followers.”
There’s “a diminishing return” for users when platforms monetize, Cuban said, driven by business realities.
“At some point, if you’re there to make money, you have to figure out how to make money,” he said.
Cuban’s thoughts hit on an increasing frustration many users have with TikTok, where they are flooded with ads and many see the platform as a pseudo-shopping channel.
Cuban has a TikTok account himself, where he has 1.1 million followers — though he doesn’t post often.
In 2023, he faced some backlash for a “tip of the day” on making money, in which he told people to cut back on extra lattes and streaming services.
“You want to put that in a money market account earning five, maybe more, percent and watch that sucker grow,” he said. “That’ll make you feel a whole lot better than that extra latte that you had that day.”
Some criticized the advice for being unrealistic and out of touch with the majority of people.
Cuban didn’t address the critics, only posting another tip of the day to “be nice” and “smile.”
According to Bloomberg, Cuban has a net worth of around $8 billion. In 1990, he sold his first tech company, MicroSolutions, for $6 million and went on to invest in several successful businesses through “Shark Tank.”
In October, Cuban announced he would be leaving “Shark Tank” after its 16th season to spend more time with his kids.
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