Mark Cuban is one of the exceptionally successful American entrepreneurs who has net worth of $2.6 Billion according to the Forbes. Popularly known as “Shark Tank”, he lives a life that the most people envy.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has always been enthusiastic and sports fanatic. At the age of 12, he was selling garbage bags with the only purpose to buy a new pair of high-end basketball sneakers. However, this dealing sowed the seeds of business dealing to come. Through out his high school, he continued to work anything like promoting disco parties and bar-tending.
After completing his graduation from Indiana University. He got his first job in the early 80’s in a software company named, Your Business Software. During his time in a company, PC’s were growing swiftly and he relationships with multiple software clients. He started began meeting the clients on the side to seek the business opportunity to grow his own business. Seeing this, Company fired him but his clients came with him.
After getting fired from his job, he launched his own company named, MicroSolutions, without wasting any time. The company was based on software reselling which gained a lot of publicity in a very short time.
Few years later, in 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe for $6 million. After clearing all the taxes, Cuban ended up with $2 million in his pocket.
In the mid 90’s he was busy trading in stocks. He became the investor and at that point, Cuban had turned his $2 million into $20 million.
His passion for Sports curved into a huge profitable business. In 1998, along with his college friend, Cuban, started another company named, Audionet.com. Both were huge fan of basketball; their business was online portal merging basketball and webcasting. Later, he changed the company’s name to Broadcast.com. The Broadcast.com expanded to over 300 employees and $100 million in annual revenue by late 90’s.
When dot com was booming, he decided to sell, Broadcast.com to Yahoo. Finally, in 1999, Yahoo picked it up for $5.9 BILLION in Yahoo stock. When the deal was officially closed, it was the peak time of dot com and Yahoo’s stock was trading at $163 per share.
After six months, when he had full access to his stocks share, he gambles all his shares and dumped entire stake on the open market. Within a week, he sold every single share of Yahoo and was left with $2.5 BILLION in cash to his side.
And the most interesting part is, the share that he sold for nearly $160 crashes within the next 18 months to $8.11 PER SHARE.
Today he owns, a basketball team-Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters, film distribution company- Magnolia Pictures, 24,000 square foot mansion in Dallas and a private jet worth $40 million.