Ashton Jackson

If Mark Cuban were a kid again, he’d do two simple things to set himself up for success as an adult, he says.

“When I talk to kids today and they ask me what I would do if I were 12 today, my answer is always the same, read books and learn how to use [artificial intelligence] in every way, shape and form you can,” the 66-year-old billionaire entrepreneur wrote on social media platform BlueSky last week. “It is a living library that gives you responses and can help no matter who you are or where you live.”

″[It] just takes a smartphone, curiosity to experiment and a mindset to learn,” Cuban wrote in a follow-up post.

The first part of Cuban’s advice isn’t new: He’s preached the value of voracious reading for years. “I read everything I can. I don’t care what the source is,” he told CNBC Make It in 2018, adding that he dedicates “four to five hours a day” to it. That habit is a commonality among many highly successful entrepreneurs, including fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson.

As for the AI element, 70% of the skills used in most jobs could change due to the technology by 2030, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Work Change report. But few young Americans use AI regularly right now — 11% of Americans ages 14 to 22 say they use generative AI once or twice per week, found a 2024 report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Common Sense Media and Hopelab.

Cuban has previously likened the technology to the early days of personal computers, particularly for future entrepreneurs. “You don’t necessarily have to be great at AI to start a company, but at some point, you’re going to have to understand it,” he told “The Colin Cowherd Podcast” in 2022. “It’s just like the early days of PCs. You didn’t have to be good at PCs, but it helped. Then networks, then the internet, then mobile.”

Notably, Cuban has a financial interest in popularizing the technology: He’s an investor in multiple AI companies, including search engines DIRT and Samaya AI. But he’s not blind to at least some of its flaws, telling Wired last year that a puppy would be a better problem-solver than current AI systems.

“A dog can sense issues,” said Cuban. “Nothing about a self-driving car understands what’s adversarial or not. If it hasn’t seen it, it has no idea. Whereas a dog is going to understand. I think smart puppies are smarter than AI is today or in the near future.”

Longer term, the future of AI in business is unclear. It could range from the creation of more AI-infused services to a simpler rise in the number of employees who use chatbots to write first drafts of their emails or presentations.

Kids can benefit from getting ahead of those developments, Cuban told CNBC Make It last year. If he were a teenager in need of extra cash, he’d start a side hustle around learning how to write AI prompts, he said.

“Then, I would go to businesses, particularly small- to medium-sized businesses that don’t understand AI yet,” said Cuban. “Doesn’t matter if I’m 16, I’d be teaching them as well.”

CNBC