Born on the 31st of July 1958 in Pittsburgh, Pennylvania, Mark Cuban started his life in a Jewish working-class family with the Russian grandparents changing their name from Chabenisky to Cuban when they came to America.
His parents were Shirley and Norton, who was an automobile upholsterer. Mark started to enter the world of business at the age of 12 when he began selling garbage bags to have enough money for a pair of basketball shoes and while at the Mount Lebanon High School he had different other jobs as well, such as a disco dancing instructor, party promoter, stamp seller or bartender.
During his senior year at the high school he enrolled as a student at the University of Pittsburgh, joining the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity and after a year here he transferred to the Indiana University where he graduated with a Business Administration bachelor in 1981 from the Kelley School of Business. The choice for the Kelley School was done simply for its lower tuition fees from the ones that were still considered prestigious. To pay for school he had several business ventures, like a pub or disco lessons.
He was hosting parties at the Bloomington National Guard armory during college and once he graduated he returned to Pittsburgh to work at the Mellon Bank at the time when the company was bringing computers into the office. He began to study networking and machines but in 1982 he left the city for Dallas where he began as a bartender, then sold software for Your Business Software and finally, when he got fired from this job, he started his own company called MicroSolutions with the aid of some of his previous customers.
The field of networking and computers was really familiar to Mark Cuban at this moment and he also discovered his talent for creating and running a profitable business, so he began as a system integrator and reseller of software. After a few years he managed to sell the company (in 1990) to CompuServe for the sum of $6 million and he then oriented toward the Internet, starting AudioNet in 1995 with a fellow from Indiana, Todd Wagner.
The concept of the company was simple; they wanted to listen to the basketball games of Indiana Hoosier online. This led to a lot of criticism, many people sensing that a thing of this sort isn’t sufficient for a successful project, but the company was clearly a hit and it went public in 1998 under the name of Broadcast.com having 330 employees by 1999 and revenues of 13.5 million dollars. The company was acquired by Yahoo! The same year for almost $6 billion in Yahoo! Stocks and the large wealth led Mark to seek ways of diversifying his investments.
He was featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest single e-commerce transaction for his Gulfstream V jet which he bought in October 1999 for the sum of $40 million. He continued to work with Todd Wagner at 2929 Entertainment, a company providing vertically integrated production of films and videos as well as distributing them.
This is the time when he became involved in sports, purchasing the Dallas Mavericks NBA team in 2000 for $285 million, fulfilling one of his long awaited dreams, although the team was quite in shambles at the time due to poor personnel decisions and mediocre players that led to a long decade of failures. Taking the team from Ross Perot, Jr. he began to bring his enthusiasm and ideas to the table and erected a new stadium, trying to boost morale and put the team back on its feet.
He used to stay with the fans during games and his zeal paid up when they qualified for the playoffs in 2001, setting a team record of wins with 57 in the next year and then reaching the NBA Finals in 2006 which they unfortunately lost to the Miami Heat. The title would be won in June 2011 when the final was again with the Miami Heat.
Aside from basketball he was involved in wrestling, Major League Baseball, mixed martial arts, the NHL and he is a panelist at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference since 2009.
In 2002 he married his longtime girlfriend Tiffany Stewart and they have two daughters together: Alexis, born in 2005, and Alyssa, born in 2007. His passion for the sport led him to create his own blog, being the first owner to do so, and here he combined the thoughts on NBA basketball with insights about technology, making it highly popular and receiving a large number of emails each day. He wrote an e-book called How to Win at the Sport of Business which is a chronicle of his experiences and his views on the fields of sports and business, or life in general.
The 2929 Entertainment company bought a chain of 58 arthouse movie theaters in 2003 and updated the TV show Star Search. Cuban was the co-founder of AXS TV which is the first high-definition satellite television network and he is a partner in Synergy Sports Technology which is a web-based basketball scouting tool used by a lot of persons in the business. The film distributor Magnolia Pictures is also owned by him and the film Redacted was financed by him as well as Goodnight and Good Luck and Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
In 2005 he invested into Brondell, Inc. to make a high-tech toilet seat named Swash, working as a bidet but being mountable on a standard toilet and he said that “people tend to approach technology the same way, whether it’s in front of them or behind them”. On a more serious note, a year later he financed Sharesleuth.com which is a website initiated by the investigative reporter Christopher Carey to uncover fraud and misinformation in traded companies.
His outspoken manner and unconventional way of thinking, inspired by the philosopher Ayn Rand made him be fined several times (for over $2 million from NBA alone) but he commented that “Before you guys were writing about me in the sports page, people were calling me crazy in the computer industry. People were calling me crazy in the systems integration industry. People said I was lucky… The more people think I’m crazy and out of my mind, typically, the better I do.”
