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You might see him in several NBA playoffs with a little temper issue on the side most of the time, but neither do you know he had a pretty much long and substantial career in business at the dawn of the internet.
In this article, we’ll get to know how Mark Cuban earned his wealth. Is it by luck, hard work or a combination of both?
Mark Cuban is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, owner of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team of the NBA, a tv personality and a billionaire whose net worth is an estimated $4.5 billion and currently ranked at #662 on the Forbes Real-time Billionaires list. He co-owns 2929 Entertainment also one of the main “shark” investors on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank.
Born in 1958 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in a suburb called Mount Lebanon, Mark Cuban started making money selling trash bags, newspapers and even postage stamps.
Cuban was only 16 when he started his stamp company which helped him pay for college tuition by collecting and re-selling valuable stamps.
According to Cuban, “collecting stamps is an amazing way to start to understand business. Each stamp has its own level of scarcity, of demand, of price, and as a collector you have to make decisions on when to keep a stamp, trade or sell it, and when to invest in a new stamp for your collection,” and added that this experience has taught him as much about business as any class he’s ever taken.
Brian, his younger brother, remembered Mark being given $5,000 by one of their neighbors to go buy stamps in New York with his father. Among the family, he was always the entrepreneurial one.
His skill only grew so much more taking a business course at Indiana University, where he found a few side hustles at a bar on campus and another that pays him $25 per hour teaching sorority students how to disco. Yup, you heard that right. He even started a chain letter that asked recipients to submit money and decided to run a bar if he could come up with $15,000 and with a help from a friend, his business, which he named “Motley’s Pub”, was up and running on September 29, 1981 and lasted until February. “We had a wet T-shirt contest, and there were pictures of the contestants in the Bloomington newspaper. Unfortunately, a probation officer recognized a picture of one of her parolees, who happened to be a 16-year-old on probation for prostitution,” which ended Motley’s Pub.
Cuban graduated and went to Dallas to work and within a year launched Micro-solutions, a company providing software, hardware and training to businesses at the dawn of technology revolution. He learned the computer business quickly and in seven years, he sold his company for $6 million. His biggest purchase was a lifetime pass on American Airlines and he had one mission in mind: to go to as many countries around the world as he could and get drunk with as many people as he possibly could.
His next move was when his college friend brought him the concept of reinventing radio streaming using the internet. “I was sitting with a buddy, and he was like, ‘You know this Internet thing is just starting to happen. There’s going to be a way to listen to Indiana basketball online. You’re the geek; you figure it out.” Cuban bought a Packard Bell computer, set it up in the second bedroom of his house, and started trying to figure out streaming. They started it off as AudioNet, which turned into Broadcast.com, one of the very first sites to stream events that’s anything from sports, radio, tv stations and product launches including the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
In 1998, they positioned the company to go public when the internet’s popularity was in full swing and on July 17th the stock hit the market priced at $18 a share. Cuban then sold his company to Yahoo! for a staggering sum of $5.7 billion in stock and the rest is history.
In January 2000, sports fanatic Mark Cuban bought majority ownership in the Dallas Mavericks from Ross Perot Jr. It was the ultimate purchase for the billionaire with his unquenchable desire to win, except that the franchise had one of the worst win-loss records of any team in the NBA.
The moment Cuban saw the traditional wood-paneled locker room in the Mavericks new arena, he said “You’ve got to blow this up. This is not what I want. I want open ceilings. I want a place they could hang out and we got to get a pool table in here and we got to get the DVDs. Rip everything out and start again.”
Cuban immediately made sure that the team started staying at nicer, first-class hotels for road games and quickly bought a better team plane.
Despite Cuban’s massive support for the team, he often makes headlines on sports news for his unique personality. Our favorite one would be when he said that the NBA director of officials, Ed Rush, wasn’t even qualified to manage a Dairy Queen but Dairy Queen got upset and challenged Cuban to come down and serve ice cream and see how difficult the work actually is and they wanted Cuban to know that their managers were highly trained and skilled. On that day, there were probably six helicopters hovering above Dairy Queen, and there were probably 3,000 people outside the store, and he was there serving ice cream.
With Cuban’s negative statement that turned out to be a very effective and positive marketing impact on Dairy Queen, he’s had his fair share of courtside criticism from David Stern, the longtime Commissioner of the NBA from 1984 to 2014. Stern thinks that Cuban was very impatient when he first became an owner because he strives for perfection, and he expressed his views in that regard. Publicly criticizing the NBA officials is prohibited by their rules and those rules resulted in Cuban’s first fine of $5,000 followed by fines of $15,000, $25,000, $250,000, $100,000, $10,000 and $100,000 again all in his first full season as an owner. “My job is to stand up for my guys,” Cuban said in defense. “I think something’s wrong, I’m gonna do something about it.”
Cuban’s hands-on involvement brought immediate success. Attendance shot up more than 35% and the Mavericks went to the playoffs in 2001 for the first time in over ten years. Before he owned the Dallas Mavericks they were the “laughingstock” of the NBA according to some. They were winning 15 games a year once Cuban took over and their winning percentages got higher.
Despite their surging success that year, the Mavericks fell short of the championship and success for Cuban in the film and TV industry was also proving quite elusive at the height of HDTV in 2001.
He launched the first high-definition television network called HDNet in 2001 and sold a majority stake to Leonard Asper’s Anthem Sports & Entertainment where the channel was relaunched as AXS TV in 2012 as a partnership among Cuban, AEG, Ryan Seacrest Media and CAA.
Cuban took a pause long enough to marry longtime girlfriend Tiffany Stewart in September 2002 and is currently blessed with 3 children, Alexis Sofia, Alyssa and Jake.
In 2003, he teamed up again with college friend Todd Wagner, the idea behind online radio streaming, and plunged into the movie business buying Landmark Theatres, which was a national independent theater chain, invested in and then bought Magnolia Pictures, a theatrical distribution company, later engaged in releasing films in theaters, on DVD and TV simultaneously.
Cuban had more troubles approaching the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit filed against him. Cuban stated the claims were false and the suit was dismissed in District Court but the SEC appealed and the case was reinstated in 2010.
And there was disappointment again on the basketball court. Dirk Nowitzki led the team into the finals in 2006 where the Mavericks were up two games to none when momentum suddenly changed gear and the team dropped three straight. After their collapse in the championship, Nowitzki publicly called out Cuban to control his temper. The loss was pure devastation and reports said Cuban didn’t leave his house for three weeks.
While Cuban continuously battled in the courtroom for the SEC lawsuit, he also prepared for battle on the basketball court. And in 2011, the Mavericks fought their way back to the finals surprising everyone and all of a sudden, a chant broke out which said “Thank you, Mark” repeated over and over and over.
Cuban then rebranded HDNet calling it AccesTV and partnered with two of the most powerful names in music and entertainment and of course, sports.
In April 2010, Cuban lent the newly formed United Football League (UFL) $5 million. He did not own a franchise and neither was he involved in day-to-day operations of the league nor of any of its teams, but in January 2011, he filed a federal lawsuit against the UFL for their failure to repay the loan by the October 6, 2010 deadline. He also invested in the E-sports-betting platform Unikrn in 2015 and in February 2016, Cuban purchased a principal ownership stake in the Professional Futsal League.
In late 2021, Cuban purchased the entire town of Mustang, Texas, a 77-acre town in Navarro County. He told the Dallas Morning News that a friend needed to sell it and he even doesn’t know anything to do with it.
Despite his many controversies and drawbacks, Mark Cuban still could be regarded as one of the sought-after entrepreneurs in his time.
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