Battle of the 'sharks': Kevin O'Leary responds after Mark Cuban claims 'woke' agenda is good for business

"Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary rebuffed billionaire businessman Mark Cuban on Wednesday for claiming the woke agenda is good for business.

Wait, what did Cuban say?

In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cuban defended companies that are going "woke."

"There is a reason almost all the top ten market cap companies in the U.S. can be considered 'woke.' It's good business," he said

The remarks come after Cuban invited participants at a conference last month to label him "woke."

"Call me woke — you don’t need to call it DEI, you can call it whatever you want — I call it good business," Cuban said. "It means taking the people that you’re selling to and making sure your workforce looks like them, and making sure you can reflect their values and being able to connect to that. That’s what works for me."

How did O'Leary respond?

Speaking on Fox News, O'Leary revealed that he and Cuban discussed the "woke" issue on the set of "Shark Tank" just this week — and he believes Cuban is just plain wrong.

According to O'Leary, when businesses participate in the culture wars, they alienate customers.

"When you're Disney or you're a beer company or you're Target, you have customers of every kind: Republicans, Democrats, gender-specific or gender-neutral. It doesn't matter," he began. "You want to sell everybody everything all of the time. When you get involved in partisan issues, you basically lose 50% of your constituency.

"Why you would do that when you're a consumer goods or service company? Makes absolutely no sense," he added.

Kevin O'Leary responds to 'Shark Tank' co-star Mark Cuban: 'We don't agree on much'www.youtube.com

After all, businesses aren't started with a mission to participate in partisan issues, O'Leary explained, but to serve customers and employees.

"Their role is not to educate society on the social issue of the day. They're learning that very quickly," he said, referring to Disney, Target, and Anheuser-Busch.

"And in the case of business, you can measure it by the second when they're public by the stock price. When you lose $9, $10, $11, $12 billion of market cap — you know that you've offended somebody and that person is your customer," he added. "That's bad business. Really bad business."

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