Mark Cuban Says He Was Dizzy for Months, So He Built a VR Fix That Does at Home ‘Much Of What A 180k Machine’ Does

Defending his record on healthcare costs in a post on Bluesky on Aug. 28, Mark Cuban volunteered a number he has not put in public before. "I had a damaged otolith. I was dizzy for months," he wrote. "You can read the story here, but effectively I created a VR solution that allowed people suffering from dizziness to do at home much of what a 180k machine could do. I loaned money to a clinic so they could offer it across the country."

The illness is a decade old. Cuban first wrote about it in July 2016, in a post titled "Virtual Reality Gave Me My Brain Back," and it was covered at the time by MedCity News and UploadVR. What is new in the 2026 post is the $180,000 figure and the loan, neither of which appears in any of that coverage.

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The original account, in his own telling, starts on May 20, 2015, with a long walk in New York. He woke the next morning dizzy and stayed that way for months. He was eventually diagnosed with a damaged otolith, a component of the inner ear's balance system, at the Newport-Mesa Audiology Balance and Ear Institute in Southern California, and treated by the audiologist Howard Mango in a rotational chair housed inside a dark enclosure, with cameras tracking his eyes. Cuban wrote in 2016 that there were only about 20 such chairs in the entire country, most of them in veterans' hospitals.

That scarcity is the entire reason the workaround exists. Rather than traveling to a chair, he rebuilt the visual part of the protocol on a Samsung Gear VR headset and ran it at home.

Cuban also has money in this category. He is a prior investor in Otolith Labs, a Washington-based company developing a wearable device for vertigo, which announced a $20 million Series A led by Morningside Ventures in September 2022 and appears in the portfolio list on his own company site. That venture is separate from the VR protocol he describes, but a piece about him promoting a cheap alternative to expensive vestibular equipment should say that he holds a stake in vestibular equipment.

Notably, in 2016, Cuban wrote that "Dr Mango and I are now patenting the entire protocol and program." No patent has been issued. A 2020 press release announcing a home version of the system still described it as patent pending. A continuation application, US 2024/0312356 A1, titled "System for the treatment of vestibular dysfunction" and naming Howard Mango, Brooke Pearce, Jennifer Grace, and Mark Cuban as inventors, was filed in May 2024 and published that September. Its status is pending. Cuban does hold granted U.S. patents, but they belong to other ventures entirely.

He does not say which clinic he lent money to, how much, or whether the treatment is available nationally now. The 2016 coverage names the clinic that treated him, but nothing establishes that it is the same one.

It is a version of an argument Cuban has been making for years, whether he is arguing that the way to fix healthcare is to remove insurance companies from the equation or pointing out what a surgeon is actually paid on a $25,000 heart transplant. The difference this time is that he is the patient in the example, and the number he chose to put on it is one nobody else can currently check.