Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and chairman of HD
Net a HD TV cable network. 

Mark Cuban was born on the 31st of July 1958 in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in a middle class family. At only age 12 Mark sold packs of garbage bags for $6 to save for expensive shoes. High school saw Mark involved in a variety of jobs such as bartending, teaching disco dancing and party promotions and by the end of high school had also made money by collecting and selling stamps. Amazingly he earned about $1,100 from starting a chain letter which paid for a semester at University.

Cuban enrolled as a fulltime student at the University of Pittsburgh instead of returning to school for his senior year, and then transferred to Indiana University after the first year because Pittsburgh didn’t run an undergraduate business school. While at Indiana he received high grades but was eventually stopped from taking graduate level classes as a freshman and because of this only went on to receive his bachelor’s degree and never returned for his MBA. 

July 1982 saw Cuban move to Dallas, Texas and started job hunting, which landed him work as a salesperson for Your Business Software, a PC software retailer. Less than a year into his job Cuban was finalizing a large software purchase with a customer and was unable to open the store on time which resulted in him losing his job. So he decided to start his own company calling it MicroSolutions and then used some of Your Business Software’s customers to get the ball rolling.

MicroSolutions became a software reseller and system integration company, selling products such as Compuserve, Carbon Copy, and Lotus Notes, with the company’s biggest client being Perot Systems. Cuban sold MicroSolutions to Compuserve for $6 million in 1990. In 1995 Cuban and friend Todd Wagner became interested in the early stages of the internet along with their interest in basketball resulted in them starting broadcast.com which grew to revenues of almost $100 million and 330 staff. The internet company Yahoo brought Broadcast.com with Cuban earning himself just over 5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. Luckily Cuban diversified his stock and saved himself a lot of money when the dot-com bubble burst and stock prices fell.

Now loaded with money Cuban went on a spending spree and landed himself a mansion in Dallas, a $41 million jet and to top it off in 2000 he paid $285 million to become the new owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Having been a basketball fanatic his whole life he set to work on revamping the team and making them competitive. He started by creating new uniforms and advertising schemes and then went about acquiring talented players, which worked wonders and made the Dallas Mavericks playoff contenders in only one season. 

Cuban regularly sits alongside fans in his team’s jersey and obviously gets very passionate having paid well over $1 million in fines for lashing out at officials and referees. Cuban also matches his NBA fines with charitable donations of equal amounts. One such court side incident where he criticized the league’s manager of officials Ed T Rush of not even being able to manage a Dairy Queen resulted in him working at the local Dairy Queen for a day. In the 20 years before Cuban owning the Dallas Mavericks they had a win-loss record of 644-964 (40%) and in the six years after Cuban taking control there win-loss went to 340-152 (69.1%).

Cuban has also started another two ventures, the first being a high definition TV network called HDNet which shows sports, movies and various other shows. Cuban works with his old broadcast.com partner Todd Wagner in another business called 2929 Entertainment which produces and distributes films and video. 

2004 saw Cuban host an “Apprentice” style reality show called The Benefactor but it was soon dumped after failing to pull ratings. 2005 saw Cuban buy another business called IceRocket, a search engine for blogs, and become a partner in RedSwoosh a company that uses peer to peer technology to deliver media to user’s PC’S. 

Weblogs. Inc was another investment for Mark Cuban’s ever growing portfolio and 2006 also saw him finance Shareleuth.com which uncovers fraud in publicly traded companies. 

Cuban married Tiffany Stewart, an advertising executive in 2002 in Barbados with them having a daughter in 2004. Mark also started the Fallen Patriot Fund to help those killed and injured in the Iraq War with him matching the first $1 million with funds from his Mark Cuban Foundation. Cuban Also leads a very casual life by never wearing watches and rarely wearing suits.
                                                                              
                                                       Mark Cuban Biography (NBA basketball team owner)