Former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban has finally found an assistant to help him maintain a clear inbox, and its name is Mac (Mini).
The billionaire entrepreneur has always preferred email to phone calls, partly because he likes to send more comprehensive responses via email and because it’s searchable even decades later. Plus, when it comes to phone calls, “I’m going to forget half the stuff that we talked about,” he previously has said.
Cuban is also notoriously tidy, aiming to keep his inbox to under 20 unread emails—or 10 on a good day—even if he has to read up to 1,000 emails per day on three phones.
For years, he’s handled this obsessive attentiveness to his communications on his own, saying an assistant would merely “slow things down.” Still, the increase in AI-generated cold emails and unwanted subscriptions have now obligated him to turn to AI for help, he said in an interview on the TBPN podcast published Thursday.
“I do what everybody else does. I bought a Mac Mini,” Cuban said on the podcast, referring to Apple’s compact desktop computer.
The Mac Mini is increasingly selling out in China as people turn to the affordable computer to run AI agents, especially autonomous AI tool OpenClaw. Unlike browser-based AI tools such as ChatGPT, locally run agents like OpenClaw, which OpenAI acquired last month, process commands directly on a user’s own hardware, without routing data through the cloud, which makes the process faster and more private.
While OpenClaw can run on a PC as well, some users prefer the Mac Mini because it is relatively affordable—a new device starts at $599, and a used one goes for even less. The device also has good specs, is small and portable, while alos power-efficient and silent, which is helpful as OpenClaw has to run continuously in the background.
The Dallas Mavericks minority owner admitted he’s still learning, but said he’s taught the AI on his Mac Mini to hit Gmail’s built-in unsubscribe feature to do away with pesky mailing lists he doesn’t want.
“Then, I just review it,” he said. “It’s still a work in progress, but at least I have a path.”
For his part, the billionaire has been experimenting with AI in his email for years. He previously said he used Gmail’s AI recommendations for 10% to 20% of his responses and used AI as a “typing hack” in longer replies, even if at times he jumps in to impart his own style.
Learning to use AI agents is essential for entrepreneurs, Cuban added in the podcast interview.
“Once you figure out how to do agents, then you can do them a little better than most other people, and then you can turn that into what would have been a [software-as-a-service] business in the past,” he said.
Cuban isn’t the only one that has used AI to simplify their work life. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who receives between 700 and 800 emails daily from customers, said Apple Intelligence’s email summary feature in the iPhone’s Mail app has transformed how he reads emails.
While he used to read long emails, now he relies on the summary feature: “It’s changed my life,” Cook told the Wall Street Journal in 2024.
“If I can save time here and there, it adds up to something significant across a day, a week, a month,” he said.
Meanwhile, Cuban said while AI-generated cold emails are surging now, eventually he believes things will go back to normal.
“We’re in that trial and error phase where people are like ‘We’re going to try it, see what happens. You know, maybe we’ll get lucky,’” he said. “And then they’ll get bored and then it’ll drop off.”
