Does Mark Cuban really matter?

And the answer is…not really.

Here’s why.

In our culture, we attach a preternatural importance to wealth. We are all about wealth. Truth be told we have devolved to the point where not much else matters.

Sure: Mark Cuban is talking at 6:30 Tuesday night with Aspen Institute president and chief executive officer Walter Isaacson about our digital future, and he is without a doubt a seminal figure in the growth of the Internet. As the boss at Broadcast.com, he sold his stake for a billion or so to Yahoo! and never looked back. As an entrepreneur of the moment, he is a vocal proponent of both high-definition television, digital production techniques, and the simultaneous release of movies on DVDs, iPods, cell phones—and movie theaters.

But Mark Cuban is also famously the billionaire owner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) Dallas Mavericks—an owner who practically sits in the lap of his coach—and that means he is literally in our face on national television early and often when the Mavs are in the hunt for a title. In the season just past, when the franchise he revived disintegrated on the verge of greatness in unprecedented fashion, his mug was the visual equivalent of a laugh track. When he is not on camera, he seems to be even more visible thanks to the fines he attracts—millions so far—for criticizing the referees in the league.

The refs first. He’s right. If you Tivo sports, you learn quickly that baseball umpires and football refs are almost always right in their calls, and that basketball refs are almost always wrong. Roundball is difficult to begin with, but the calls go so obviously in favor of superstars that they can’t figure out what has hit them when things are more fair and balanced at the Olympics.

So Cuban is right about the refs. But you couldn’t help but think his constant complaining and caterwauling cost his beloved Mavs at least one game in the NBA Finals won by the Miami Heat. You can’t help but think that the refs absolutely despise him. With his seats at the end of the floor by the bench, there’s absolutely no way he’s in position to be objective about the refs until he goes to the videotape after the game. Cuban complains about call after call that he can’t actually see.

Even so, he’s been a stupendously successful owner running a first-class operation. He gets tons of kudos for that. But the real kudos come from selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for that billion-plus. And here’s the problem. Yahoo! spent all that money on a business that does not exist five years later. That’s right: Broadcast.com turned into a complete bomb, and Cuban laughed all the way to the bank.

Too bad for Yahoo!—right?

Does that make him an expert on all things digital? Maybe so. But at Yahoo! his name is a dirty word that bespeaks enormous waste. Is he right about HDTV? Of course. Movies are going digital and high-definition. But that’s not exactly rocket science.

Does Mark Cuban really matter? He does if you’re a basketball fan. If not, our advice is to pass before you shoot. He’s famous, of course, and made for television. But so are the stars from “Love Boat.”