Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban is an American businessman and television personality. He is the former principal owner and current minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association and co-owner of 2929 Entertainment. From 2012 to 2025, he was also one of the main "sharks" on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank. As of January 2026, Forbes has estimated his net worth to be US$6 billion.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cuban was involved in ventures from a young age, from selling garbage bags to running newspapers during a strike. He graduated from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington and embarked on a diverse business career that included founding MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com, both of which he sold at substantial profits. Cuban's investments span various industries, from technology and media to sports and entertainment. He has been a prominent figure in the NBA, known for his active involvement with the Mavericks and disputes with the league's management. In his side ventures, Cuban has been involved in philanthropy, political commentary, and reality television.
Early life and education
Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 31, 1958. His father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer. He described his mother, Shirley, as someone with "a different job or different career goal every other week."Cuban is Jewish, and grew up in Mt. Lebanon, an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh, in a working-class family. His paternal grandfather changed the surname from "Chabenisky" to "Cuban" after his family emigrated from Russian Empire through Ellis Island. His maternal grandfather was a Bessarabian Jewish immigrant and his maternal grandmother was from Lithuania.
Cuban first ventured into business at age of 12. He sold garbage bags to pay for a pair of expensive sneakers. A few years later, he earned money by selling stamps and coins. At age 16, Cuban took advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by running newspapers from Cleveland to Pittsburgh.
Instead of completing his senior year of high school, he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he became a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. After one year at the University of Pittsburgh, Cuban transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in management. He chose Indiana's Kelley School of Business without even visiting the campus because it "had the least expensive tuition of all the business schools on the top 10 list". He had various business ventures during college, including a bar, disco lessons, and a chain letter.
After graduating, Cuban returned to Pittsburgh and took a job with Mellon Bank, where he immersed himself in the study of machines and networking.
Business career
On July 7, 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas, where he first found a job as a bartender for a Greenville Avenue bar called Elan and then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the earliest PC software retailers in Dallas. He was fired less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.Cuban co-founded MicroSolutions with support from his previous customers at Your Business Software. Initially, MicroSolutions operated as a systems integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems. The company grew to more than $30 million in revenue, and in 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe—then a subsidiary of H&R Block—for $6 million
. He made approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.
Audionet and Broadcast.com
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner joined Audionet, combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosiers college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and an ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter. In 1999, Broadcast.com helped launch the first live-streamed Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. That year, during the dot com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock.Yahoo!'s costly purchase of Broadcast.com is now regarded as one of the worst internet acquisitions of all time. Broadcast.com and Yahoo!'s other broadcasting services were discontinued within a few years after the acquisition. Cuban has repeatedly described himself as very lucky to have sold the company before the dot-com bubble burst. However, he also emphasized that he hedged against the Yahoo! shares he received from the sale and would have lost most of his fortune if he had not done so.
Cuban continues to work with Wagner in another venture, 2929 Entertainment, which provides vertically integrated production and distribution of films and video.
On September 24, 2003, the firm purchased Landmark Theatres, a chain of 58 arthouse movie theaters. The company is also responsible for the updated version of the TV show Star Search, which was broadcast on CBS. 2929 Entertainment released Bubble, a movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, in 2006.
Investments in startups
Cuban has also assisted ventures in the social software and distributed networking industries. He was an owner of IceRocket, a search engine that scours the blogosphere for content.In 2005, Cuban invested $1.7 million in file-sharing company Red Swoosh, co-founded by Travis Kalanick, providing much-needed capital to the company after the early 2000s recession. Red Swoosh was acquired by Akamai for $19 million in 2007. Kalanick later approached Cuban in 2009 to invest in his next venture Uber at a $10 million valuation. Cuban proposed a $5 million valuation, but never heard back from Kalanick.
He was also an investor in Weblogs, Inc., which was acquired by AOL.
In 2005, Cuban invested in Brondell Inc., a San Francisco startup making a high-tech toilet seat called a Swash that works like a bidet but mounts on a standard toilet. "People tend to approach technology the same way, whether it's in front of them, or behind them", Cuban joked. He also invested in Goowy Media Inc., a San Diego Internet software startup. In April 2006, Sirius Satellite Radio announced that Cuban would host his own weekly radio talk show, Mark Cuban's Radio Maverick. However, the show has not materialized.
In July 2006, Cuban financed Sharesleuth.com, a website created by former St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigative reporter Christopher Carey to uncover fraud and misinformation in publicly traded companies. Experimenting with a new business model for making online journalism financially viable, Cuban disclosed that he would take positions in the shares of companies mentioned in Sharesleuth.com in advance of publication. Business and legal analysts questioned the appropriateness of shorting a stock before making public pronouncements which are likely to result in losses in that stock's value. Cuban insisted that the practice is legal in view of full disclosure.
In April 2007, Cuban partnered with Mascot Books to publish his first children's book, Let's Go, Mavs!. In November 2011, he wrote a 30,000-word e-book, How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It, which he described as "a way to get motivated".
In October 2008, Cuban started Bailoutsleuth.com as a grassroots, online portal for oversight over the U.S. government's $700 billion "bailout" of financial institutions. It no longer exists as a website.
In September 2010, Cuban provided an undisclosed amount of venture capital to store-front analytics company Motionloft. According to the company's CEO Jon Mills, he cold-emailed Cuban on a whim with the business proposition and said Cuban quickly responded that he would like to hear more. Mills credited that sentence for launching the company. In November 2013, several investors questioned Cuban about Mills' representation of a pending acquisition of Motionloft. Cuban denied an acquisition was in place. Mills was terminated as CEO of Motionloft by stockholders on December 1, 2013, and in February 2014 was arrested by the FBI and charged with wire fraud; it was alleged that Mills misrepresented to investors that Motionloft was going to be acquired by Cisco. Cuban has gone on record to state that the technology, which at least in part is meant to serve the commercial real estate industry, is "game changing" for tenants.
In 2019, Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, Steve Watts and Watts' wife Angela acquired a 50% stake in Veldskoen Shoes' United States business. In 2021, Cuban, Pantera Capital, BlockTower, Hashed, Cadenza Ventures, CMS and QCP Capital backed a layer-2 decentralized exchange protocol, Injective Protocol and their CEO Eric Chen. Also 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 "I don't know what if anything I will do with it."
Cuban has served as a spokesperson and investor in ZenBusiness, an online platform for business formation and compliance, since 2021. He participated in the company's $200 million Series C funding round that year and has appeared in promotional content and events on behalf of the company.
''Shark Tank''
Cuban has been a "shark" investor on the ABC reality program Shark Tank since season two in 2011.As of May 2015, he has invested in 85 deals across 111 Shark Tank episodes, for a total of $19.9 million. In 2022, Cuban stated that his portfolio of Shark Tank investments had made a net loss, saying "I've gotten beat".
The actual numbers may vary because the investment happens after the handshake deal on live television and after due diligence is performed to ensure the accuracy of the information presented in the pitch room. For instance, Hy-Conn, a manufacturer of fire hose adapters, after agreeing to a deal of $1.25 million for 100% of the company with Cuban, did not go through with the deal.
Cuban's top three deals, all with at least $1 million invested, are Ten Thirty One Productions, Rugged Maniac Obstacle Race, and BeatBox Beverages.
Since Cuban joined the show in 2011, the ratings for Shark Tank have increased, and also during his tenure, the show has won four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Structured Reality Program. Before the category came into existence it won the award for outstanding reality program for two consecutive seasons, all of these awards came after he joined. Cuban was the richest of all Sharks to appear on the show, until Michael Rubin and Todd Graves came onto the show in seasons 15 and 16 respectively. He announced in November 2023 that the show's 16th season would be his last.