IT’S a billionaire smackdown!
Mark Cuban is fuming that Donald Trump called him a “loser” on ESPN Radio last week and taunted him about Cuban’s beloved Dallas Mavericks being knocked out of the first round of the NBA playoffs last week.
Trump said, “Mark Cuban is a guy who . . . puts so much pressure on the players. He wants to win so much, ya know, he wants to put himself in the position of the players. He wants to be a player, I guess. And he’s not a player . . . [Cuban] probably always wanted to be a winner all his life, and if ya look like him, you can’t be a winner. So he wants to put himself in the place of the players, so what happens is, the team choked.”
Trump then slammed Cuban about the Internet billionaire’s short-lived reality show, “The Benefactor.”
“Mark Cuban was extremely embarrassed when he copied ‘The Apprentice’ and failed,” Trump raged. “They threw him off television like a dog.
“I wrote him a note and I said, ‘Mark, you have absolutely no television persona. I wish you would have spoken to me previously or before you did this. I could have told you it was gonna fail.’ And he failed.
“Same thing with the Mavericks. The Mavericks have a great team. They’ll never win with Mark Cuban as the owner because he is not a winner.”
Cuban responded to Trump’s digs by e-mailing Page Six: “I guess Donald is still upset that he can’t afford to buy an NBA team. No doubt the cash requirements of more than $10,000 created a problem for him. Hopefully he will sell enough Trump Steaks, Trump Perfume and Trump Dolls to save some money and buy a team. Then we can see how he does. Until then he is a wannabe that needs to get a new spiel.”
Over the past year, the feisty Trump has feuded publicly with Rosie O’Donnell and Martha Stewart.
Cuban is a worthier opponent. While Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.9 billion, Cuban hints that most of it is tied up in real estate, not ready cash. Cuban, who sold broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999, is said to be worth $2.3 billion.
(Via pagesix)