“I gotta tell you, I’ve had a rough week,” said Mark Cuban, shortly after sitting down with Bill Gates on stage at the Eisemann Center in Richardson Friday night. The sold-out audience burst into applause.
The conversation between Cuban and Gates, the Microsoft founder and author of the new memoir Source Code, had long been on the Arts & Letters Live calendar, but the date happened to fall six days after the trade heard ‘round the world. Last Saturday evening, news broke that the Dallas Mavericks — once famously owned by Cuban, though he sold his majority stake in 2023 — had swapped phenom Luka Doncic for LA Laker Anthony Davis. If an actual bomb went off in Dallas, it probably wouldn’t have made as many headlines.
Since then, the outspoken Cuban had mostly stayed silent. “MFFL,” he texted Dallas Morning News reporter Brad Townsend, the acronym that means “Mavs Fan For Life.” On a basketball show called Run It Back, former Mav Chandler Parsons said he’d texted Cuban that he was confused about the trade. “That makes two of us,” Cuban apparently responded.
The tsunami of fan outrage, and Cuban’s uncharacteristic reticence, raised the stakes on Friday night’s event, which would be Cuban’s first public appearance since the trade. On a Dallas Museum of Art Facebook post promoting the event (the DMA runs Arts & Letters Live), one commenter had written, “Will they be doing a Q&A? I have questions.”
They would, in fact, not be doing a Q&A. Instead, the two titans stayed locked in conversation for 80 minutes, talking about stories in Source Code including Gates’ precocious boyhood and the Wild West of early personal computing. Before they delved in, though, Cuban addressed the elephant in the room.
After the opening comment about his rough week, Cuban told Gates he loved Source Code, but he had a question for the billionaire entrepreneur.
“If after you left Microsoft, you found out that Steve Ballmer traded Windows 11 — like, the new hot operating system — for Windows 10, the Hall-of-Fame but older operating system, what would you do?”
Audience laughter punctuated Cuban’s delivery, and after the question, the packed room applauded. Gates played the moment straight. “I might have to hide from the press,” he said.
Cuban nodded. “I know a couple of other people that are in that situation,” he said.
This story will be updated with additional information in the morning.
