Mark Cuban is keeping an eye on Mary Jo White.
Cuban, the reality TV star and colorful owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, took time out of his busy schedule on Friday to remind the Securities and Exchange Commission that he hasn’t forgotten its recently bungled efforts to ding him for insider trading.
Less than six months after a Dallas jury cleared Cuban of the charges, the billionaire judge on ABC’s “Shark Tank” popped into an open meeting to hear SEC chief White and other top officials speak about the agency’s upcoming agenda.
Wearing a gray hoodie and jeans, according to Bloomberg News, Cuban popped into the meeting without prior notice and then tweeted about what he saw.
As might be expected, it wasn’t always pretty.
“There is a shocking lack of self-awareness at the SEC. Nothing is their fault,” Cuban tweeted at one point.
“Scary,” he wrote in a second tweet, referring to whether errors in computer coding should trigger an SEC enforcement case.
The 6-foot-3-inch businessman’s presence in the Ronald Regan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue wasn’t lost on the SEC staff in attendance. SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar, a Cuban by birth, for example, joked that there was buzz about another Cuban in the room and said, “Mr. Cuban” was welcome.
“It’s pretty obvious lots of folks at the SEC are freaked out I’m here,” Cuban told The Post. “But everyone has been very nice. It’s a process,” he said in an e-mail.
Cuban has been circling the watchdog since a Dallas jury cleared him of the civil charges in October.
The SEC said Cuban wrongfully sold his $7.9 million stake in Internet company Mamma.com in 2004 after learning of an investment deal that would send the shares lower.
Cuban argued that the deal was public and denied that he promised Mamma.com’s CEO that he wouldn’t sell. The Dallas jury agreed.
Cuban said he attended the SEC’s meeting on Friday because he is “learning as much as I can” about the agency. To what end remains unclear, but Cuban clearly wants a hand in helping to reshape what he views as flaws in the system.
A day before his SEC meeting drop-in, Cuban gave a talk at an event hosted by a Washington law firm where he said the SEC should stop focusing on insider trading and start looking at black box computers that use algorithms to trade millions of stocks in milliseconds.
So-called high-frequency-trading has been a pet peeve of Cuban’s, who fears that mighty trading bots undermine market confidence by taking away power from investors who buy stocks based on the fundamentals.
Cuban also recently said he’s considering posting SEC trial transcripts on his blog to highlight tactics that he considers suspicious.
In an interview with The Post after the Dallas jury verdict, Cuban said he thinks the SEC should strive to make securities laws less complex so that there are more “bright line rules” about financial wrongdoing.
He also blamed the SEC’s competitive culture for the charges against him.
“They’re not looking for justice. They’re looking to win,” he said.