“Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.”

Mark Cuban

The billionaire owner of Dallas Mavericks is anything but quiet. From living with six roommates to his 24,000 square foot mansion, Mark Cuban has been buying, trading, profiting and smiling his way to success all his life. His businesses and smart investing have made him about $4.5 billion, as of January 2022, at the age of 63.

Early Life:

Cuban grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At 12, he started a business selling garbage bags for new basketball shoes. He then sold stamps door-to-door, making $50 from an initial investment of less than $1. At the University of Indiana, while studying business administration, he gave disco dancing lessons to sorority girls, charging $25 an hour. Later, he procured a $15,000 loan to buy a bar called Motley's Pub in Bloomington. It instantly became a student hotspot. Mark’s professor stated that he was the only student he ever had, that was already running a business while in school. Motley's went down after an underage girl won a wet t-shirt contest.

On graduating college, he moved to Dallas in 1982 and worked at a software company that he was fired from within a year for closing a $10,000 sale instead of opening the store. Mark founded his first company MicroSolutions, which was a system integrator and a software reseller. The company raked in $30 million in revenue and in 1990, he sold it to CompuServe for $6 million. Mark netted $2 million from that sale.

Party like it's 1999:

Mark Cuban retired. He purchased the lifetime membership at American Airlines and flew around the world in a quest to see as many places as possible. Skip to ‘95. Mark came back into business with his college friend Todd Wagner and took control of Audionet, a webcasting service stemming from their mutual interest in streaming Indiana Hoosier games. The site streamed broadcasts of sports games, apolitical conventions and other events.

Their first breakout event was Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Livestream, which was self-dubbed as the ‘first sold-out online event’. This site was renamed Broadcast.com and when it had its IPO, the stock price soared 249% on its first day of trading, a record for a newly issued public stock. In less than 9 months since the IPO, Yahoo! announced its purchase of Broadcast.com for a whopping $5.7 billion in stocks. He foresaw the dot-com crash and liquidated his stock options to walk away with over $1 billion.

Cuban purchased his first business jet, the Gulfstream V for $40 million online. To this day, it holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest purchase ever conducted over the internet. Cuban called the plane one of the smartest purchases he’s ever made. “It’s obviously brutally expensive, but time is the only asset we simply don’t own. It saves me hours and hours”, said Cuban. He believes meetings to be a waste of time and has remarked that the only way he comes to a meeting is if you write him a check. But his next purchase would add another prefix to his name.

Mavs:

On January 4 2000, Cuban purchased a majority stake in the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for $285 million. Prior to Mark’s acquisition, the Mavs won only 40% of their games in the previous two decades. Not only did that number rise to 69% in the following 10 years, but they also made their first trip to the NBA Finals in 2006. Under Mark’s management, the team won its first NBA Championship in 2011. The Mavericks are worth $2.4 billion as of February 2020. Mark often dons the jersey sitting courtside and has drawn attention for his media outbursts. The NBA has fined him over $2 million for his demeanour, with over $500,000 in the first year itself. Whenever he gets fined by the NBA, he matches the punishment with a donation to charity for the same amount.

Entertainment:

When not watching his team from the sidelines, Mark is running 2929 Entertainment, a company that produces and distributes movies and TV shows. Its movies have a mixed reception record. Cuban also owns film distributor Magnolia Pictures. The production company comes in handy if he ever needs content for his national theatre chain Landmark Theaters playing art films or his satellite TV channel (the first one in HD) AXS TV.

Shark Tank:

Having appeared in various shows and movies over the years, Mark is also a prolific media personality. His 2004 show ‘The Benefactor’ was short-lived and panned as a rip-off of ‘The Apprentice’. He has appeared on Dancing with The Stars, Entourage, and even Sharknado. How fitting, for he went on to become a regular on Shark Tank (US) in which hopeful entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to prolific investors and entrepreneurs. Over the years, he’s made close to 100 deals on air and has enjoyed some hefty returns. Here are some of Mark Cuban’s best deals on Shark Tank.

• Tower Paddle Boards: In 2012, Cuban invested $150,000 for a 30% stake in this standup paddleboard startup. Cuban's confidence in the company has paid off. As of 2018, according to GOBankingRates, Tower Paddle Boards has made more than $30 million in sales.

• Nuts 'N More: In 2013, Cuban and fellow Shark Robert Herjavec partnered up to invest $250,000 for 35% of the company that creates nut butter and other protein-rich products. As of 2018, the company had more than $30 million in total sales, according to GOBankingRates.

• Gameday Couture: Gameday Couture is a fashion apparel company that works with NBA and NCAA teams to create clothing with team logos. Cuban invested $100,000 in 2014 for a 30% stake in the company, on one condition: it had to design a line of apparel for his team the Dallas Mavericks. Gameday Couture was projecting total sales of $20 million by the end of 2018 and $12 million in 2018 alone. 

• Simple Sugars: Cuban invested $100,000 for 33% in 19-year-old Lina Lazzari’s company because she reminded him of his younger self and, like him, came from Pittsburgh. Simple Sugars had just under $2 million in sales in 2017 and expects to reach $5 million in annual sales within the next couple of years.

• Rugged Maniac: Mark invested $1.75 million in obstacle course company Rugged Maniac during their Shark Tank appearance. An investment group purchased an 80% stake in the company in 2018. According to the Boston Globe, Cuban sold his stake for double the original amount of his investment in the company.

Investing:

Mark has numerous investments ranging from startups to giant corporations. His two biggest holdings are Netflix and Amazon. The Amazon stock is worth over $1 billion. He is also a bondholder in Zuffa, UFC’s parent company. In June 2015, Cuban invested in the eSports betting platform Unikrn. Previously an outspoken critic of Bitcoin, he later invested in it and also in tokens offered by Unikrn. He also backed the cryptocurrency fund 1confirmation. In 2018, the Dallas Mavericks started accepting Bitcoin for matchday tickets.

In February 2016, Cuban purchased a principal ownership stake in the Professional Futsal League. Cuban spoke at CODE 2015 about how tech companies have to pay in stocks to all employees. “If you are getting paid by the hour, you will always be paid by the hour”, Cuban said at CODE. In response to an NBA investigation into the Mavericks being a hostile work environment for women, Mark Cuban pledged $10 million in women’s causes and domestic violence awareness. He is an investor in 35 female-led companies, as of April 2020. 

Mark remains frugal despite everything, apart from the plane. He advises buying consumables in bulk on sale, advocates for people to achieve financial independence by paying off debt, stashes six months worth of income for rainy days and endorses reading books. He’s an avid reader spending at least a couple of hours every day, reading on pretty much everything he can learn.

Philanthropy:

Cuban has given to numerous charities over the years, including Autism Speaks, Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. He founded the Fallen Patriot Fund to help families of U.S. military personnel killed or injured during the Iraq War in 2003 and donated the use of his Mavericks plane to fly in food and supplies to hurricane-hit Puerto Rico.

In 2015, Cuban made a $5 million donation to Indiana University at Bloomington for the "Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology". With him investing in streaming, crypto market, AI and future technologies, the tech mogul is poised to be at the biggest stage for a long time.