Mark Cuban

At twelve, wanting money for basketball sneakers, Mark Cuban went door to door in his Pittsburgh suburb with one line: "Hi, I'm your neighbor Mark. Do you use garbage bags?" He bought them for three dollars and sold them for six, on a weekly subscription.¹

Cuban is an American entrepreneur, investor, and media personality best known as the co-founder of Broadcast.com, one of the first companies to stream audio and video over the internet, and as the long-time owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise. He built and sold two companies before turning forty, then spent later decades as an investor, television personality, and founder of a pharmacy company built around transparent pricing.

Background

Cuban was born on July 31, 1958, in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. His father Norton worked sixty-hour weeks as an automobile upholsterer, and Cuban has said the lesson he took from watching him was that his father's time was never his own, not any particular trade skill. His paternal grandfather was a Russian immigrant whose surname, Chabenisky, was changed to Cuban at Ellis Island.

The garbage-bag route was the first of many: as a teenager he sold baseball cards and laid carpet. He finished high school early through night classes, then enrolled at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, chosen for its low tuition among top business programs. He paid his own way through disco-dance lessons and co-running a bar underage, graduating with a management degree in 1981.

Getting started

After college Cuban took a job at Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, found it unfulfilling, and quit. On July 4, 1982, he drove to Dallas with $60 and no job lined up, sleeping on a friend's floor and tending bar to get by. He talked his way into a sales job at a computer retailer, Your Business Software, despite having almost no computer background, and taught himself the industry by reading every software manual in the store, manuals his competitors left on the shelf. He was fired for leaving the store without authorization to close a sale, one of three jobs he was fired from in that period.¹

Concluding that he kept losing jobs because he prioritized results over compliance, Cuban started his own company. In 1983 he co-founded MicroSolutions, a computer consulting and systems-integration business, with a $500 advance from its first client, applying the same manual-reading habit as an edge. The company grew for seven years without a vacation and reached roughly 80 employees and more than $30 million in annual sales without a losing month. He sold it to CompuServe for about $6 million in 1990, at age 31.¹

What he built

After MicroSolutions, Cuban spent several years as a private investor. In 1995, over lunch with a college friend, Todd Wagner, he began discussing a way to listen to Indiana University basketball games over the nascent internet, something that did not yet exist as a product. The two built it themselves, starting a company called AudioNet and broadcasting from the second bedroom of Cuban's house; there was no market for streaming media at the time, and Cuban has described being told the idea would not work.

AudioNet was renamed Broadcast.com and expanded into video, webcasting live events including a 1999 Victoria's Secret fashion show that drew hundreds of thousands of viewers, one of the first large-scale commercial webcasts. The company went public in July 1998; its stock rose from an $18 offering price to $62.75 on the first day, at the time the largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, valuing Cuban's stake at roughly $300 million. Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com in April 1999 for approximately $5.7 billion in stock, making Cuban a billionaire at 40.¹

Cuban used part of his wealth to buy the Dallas Mavericks in 2000; the team won its first NBA championship in 2011. He joined Shark Tank as a panelist in 2011, staying for fourteen seasons before departing in 2024 and 2025, citing time with his teenage children. In 2023 and 2024 he sold majority ownership of the Mavericks to the Adelson and Dumont families, retaining a minority stake. In 2022 he founded Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy that discloses its actual cost per medication and adds a fixed 15 percent markup plus a flat shipping fee, instead of the opaque, rebate-driven pricing typical of pharmacy benefit managers. A companion service, costpluswellness.com, later let self-insured employers and hospitals contract directly for care at a transparent reference price tied to Medicare rates, a model extended to thousands of providers.²

How he operates

Cuban has described his own method as reading the manual no one else would bother with, at a software store early on and later in pharmacy pricing, and turning that closer attention into an edge. He has also described being dismissed as unrealistic when he started streaming games from a spare bedroom, and has said he had no doubt the idea would work.

Cuban remains an active investor and has spoken about artificial intelligence and robotics from a builder's vantage point. He believes large language models lack a working model of cause and effect, contrasting them with a toddler's intuitive grasp that pushing an object off a high chair brings a consequence, and he is skeptical that humanoid robots will remain the dominant form factor, arguing that robots and their environments should be redesigned together, pointing to Amazon's warehouse robots as an example.² He has advised students to learn AI tools directly and sell that skill to small businesses that lack it.²

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Cuban is a minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks after selling majority control to the Adelson and Dumont families, has exited his Shark Tank role, and runs Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs as his primary active venture alongside a broad investment portfolio. Forbes placed his net worth at roughly six billion dollars in 2026. He lives near Dallas with his wife, Tiffany Stewart, whom he married in 2002, and their three children.

Key facts

• Founded MicroSolutions in 1983 with a $500 advance and sold it to CompuServe for roughly $6 million in 1990.
• Co-founded AudioNet, later Broadcast.com, in 1995 to stream college basketball online from a spare bedroom, then sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999.
• Bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000, won the franchise's first NBA title in 2011, and sold majority control to the Adelson and Dumont families in 2023 to 2024.
• Served as a Shark Tank panelist for fourteen seasons, 2011 to 2024/2025.
• Founded Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs in 2022, a pharmacy with a fixed 15 percent markup, later extended into direct hospital and employer contracting via costpluswellness.com.
• Forbes estimated his net worth at approximately $6 billion in 2026.