Mark Cuban Foundation

Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American billionaire entrepreneur, television personality, and media proprietor whose net worth is an estimated $4.8 billion, according to '' Forbes'', and ranked No. 177 on the 2020 ''Forbes'' 400 list. He is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the co-owner of 2929 Entertainment. He is also one of the main "shark" investors on the ABC reality television series ''Shark Tank''.

Early life and education

Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer. Cuban described his mother, Shirley, as someone with "a different job or different career goal every other week."

Cuban is Jewish, and grew up in Mount Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, in a Jewish working-class family. His paternal grandfather changed the surname from "Chabenisky" to "Cuban" after his family emigrated from Russia through Ellis Island. His maternal grandparents were Romanian Jewish immigrants, according to Mark's brother Brian, though Mark has claimed their maternal grandmother was Lithuanian.

Cuban first ventured into business at age 12. He sold garbage bags to pay for a pair of expensive basketball shoes. 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 attending high school for his senior year, he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. He is a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League. 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. 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 started his own company, MicroSolutions, with help from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system 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 (founded in 1989 by Chris Jaeb, who retained 10% of the company), combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosier 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.

After the sale of Broadcast.com, Cuban hedged against the risk of a decline in the value of the Yahoo! shares he received in the deal. The ''Guinness Book of Records'' credits Cuban with the "largest single e-commerce transaction" after purchasing a Gulfstream V jet for $40 million over the internet in October 1999.

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.

Cuban was featured on the cover of ''Best'' magazine's November 2003 premiere issue, announcing the arrival of high-definition television. Cuban also was co-founder (with Philip Garvin) of AXS TV (formerly HDNet), the first high-definition satellite television network.

In February 2004, Cuban announced that he would be working with ABC television to produce a reality television series, '' The Benefactor''. The premise of the six-episode series involved 16 contestants trying to win $1 million by participating in various contests, with their performances being judged by Cuban. It premiered on September 13, 2004, but the series was canceled before the full season aired due to poor ratings.

In 2018, Cuban was no. 190 on '' Forbes'' list of "World's Richest People", with a net worth of $3.9 billion.

Cuban financially supported Grokster in the Supreme Court case ''MGM v. Grokster''. He is also a partner in Synergy Sports Technology, a web-based basketball scouting and video delivery tool used by many NBA teams.

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. Cuban was a partner in RedSwoosh—a company that uses peer-to-peer technology to deliver rich media