“It’s really simple. Our Robots and AI vs their Robots and AI,” Cuban wrote. If the U.S. can close the gap, he sees “zero reason manufacturing won’t come back, or initiate here.”
Cuban pointed to his own company, Cost Plus Drugs, claiming that fees are the only thing preventing it from manufacturing generic medications in Dallas more cheaply than buying them from Asia.
His comments came in response to Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, who challenged claims that building consumer products in the U.S. would make them prohibitively expensive.
“Stories about iPhones costing $37,000 or laptops costing $100,000 are psy-ops, sometimes pushed by foreign adversaries but more commonly by American corporations that want anything but an upset to the status quo,” Luckey wrote on X.
There’s a reason so many American manufacturers moved production overseas. Countries such as China, Mexico, Vietnam and India offer significant cost advantages, along with established supplier networks and manufacturing infrastructure. Bringing production back to the U.S. means overcoming those advantages, even as automation makes domestic factories more competitive.
The U.S. manufacturing exodus: By the numbers
The scale of America’s manufacturing exodus shows what’s at stake. U.S. manufacturing’s share of gross domestic product fell from more than 25% in 1947 to just 9.7% in 2026, according to government data.
Factory employment has declined even more dramatically. The U.S. lost 6.6 million manufacturing jobs between 1979 and 2025, even as employment across the broader economy grew by 68 million, according to Stephan D. Whitaker, a senior policy economist at the Cleveland Fed. Globally, however, manufacturing employment increased by a net 71 million jobs between 2000 and 2025.
While automation and productivity gains explain part of America’s factory job losses, moving production overseas has also contributed to the decline. A 2017 Census Bureau study found that U.S. multinational corporations accounted for 41% of the decline in employment between 1993 and 2011. The research identified increased sourcing of foreign-made components as one contributing factor.
The growth of overseas manufacturing has roots in the aftermath of World War II, when countries began lowering trade barriers and expanding international trade. A San Francisco Fed study noted that trade grew from roughly 20% of global GDP in the early 1950s to 60% by the late 2010s, allowing companies to spread production across multiple countries and take advantage of lower costs.
Over time, American companies built extensive overseas production networks. Apple, for example, relies heavily on Asian manufacturers to assemble its products, while Nike sources much of its footwear and apparel from factories in countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia.
