“It’s the people who dream that make this country special”: Mark Cuban Criticizes DOGE and Amplifies Innovators While Accepting the 2025 SXSW Innovation Award
By Meg Richards & Payton Cavanaugh
On Monday, March 10, entrepreneur, ‘Shark’, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was awarded the SXSW 2025 Hall of Fame award at the Innovation Awards. Cuban used the opportunity to not only recognize and appreciate the work of the various students, innovators, and creatives in the audience, but also to call out the current role the federal government plays in withholding funds and privatizing various public government agencies to limit their access to American citizens.
“It bothers me that we have people at the top of this country that pretend to be entrepreneurs, who have never started anything from scratch,” Cuban asserted as he critiqued the current presidential administration.
Cuban is an American businessman and television personality, famous for his role on “Shark Tank,” a reality television show where beginning-entrepreneurs pitch their company and products to titans of various industries. The show has been running for 16 seasons, since 2009.
The 2025 SXSW Innovation Awards is a forum where budding entrepreneurs and innovators from all over the world showcase their products at exhibitions during the conference, and finalists attend the awards show to receive their accolades.
“It’s the people who dream that make this country special,” said Cuban as he discussed the importance of innovators and entrepreneurs as the lifeblood of America.
In an interview with WEBN-TV, Cuban spoke candidly about the effects federal funding cuts will have on college students specifically.
“Universities do budgets, and they expect the money that they’re contracted for to show up in those budgets, and when it doesn’t, they have to make cuts to counterbalance that,” he said. “It’s not to say that there’s [no] waste, there is waste, but negotiate it with them, let them make a presentation to figure out what’s waste and what’s not, and then you can do something that’ll have longer lasting effects.”
“You see it particularly with [graduate] students, where that money goes to pay for graduate programs, and then to a lesser extent with undergrads,” Cuban said. “But still, it’s unfair to colleges.”
This comes amid news that the federal government has sent a letter threatening to pull federal funds from colleges and universities not in compliance with the Trump administration’s policies regarding protests occurring on college campuses.
During his speech, he spoke fiercely about finding hidden gems in smaller universities and colleges.
“You know that you are the ones that aren’t going to the coolest and most expensive schools to recruit,” Cuban said as he addressed the crowd of award-winning entrepreneurs, “you’re going to the state colleges, the small schools, the HBCUs because you know that when you’re looking for people where other people aren’t looking, that’s where you find the best undiscovered talent that you will ever find.”