Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban (born c. 1962) is an outspoken billionaire who is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Table of contents

1 Early childhood
2 College
3 Computer businessman
4 Basketball owner

Early childhood

Mark Cuban was the stereotypical school nerd, wearing thick glasses and getting good grades. His first foray in the business world was as a garbage bag seller. He would sell garbage bags around his neighborhood.

Cuban earned his way to college by giving disco dancing lessons and by writing a chain letter that made him profits. He chose Indiana University because of the school's cheap price compared to the nation's other top ten business schools. Even in college, Cuban was seen as controversial by some, his principal admonished him for taking advanced courses during his freshman year and he was dissuaded from getting his MBA after getting a bachelor's degree.

Computer businessman

Almost immediately after college, Cuban decided to pursue one of his lifelong dreams by getting a business in the computer field, this despite the fact Cuban had no knowledge of computers. In 1983, he founded MicroSolutions, which became a major company in the industry and was sold by Cuban in the 1990s to CompuServe for an undisclosed amount of millions of dollars.

Mark Cuban moved to Dallas, soon after selling his company. Eager to follow his favorite college basketball team, he had an idea of broadcasting live games and events through the internet, which led to him creating Broadcast.com. In 1999, Cuban earned more than $2 billion dollars when Yahoo bought over his website.

Basketball owner

With the Yahoo payment, Cuban could have retired from business, but he decided to indulge in one of his favorite things and he was able to buy the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million dollars. The sale was finalized on February 14, 2000.

Cuban then went on to become arguably one of the most controversial NBA team owners in history, critizing the league for everything he thought was wrong with it, piling up a total of more than $1 million dollars in fines, and saying that the league's director of officials, Ed Rush, wouldnt be able to manage a Dairy Queen. That comment led to one of the most famous episodes in Mark's life, when he worked for day at a Dairy Queen in Dallas, becoming the employee of the day at that Dairy Queen location.

While he has been outspoken, he has also been an important part of getting the Mavericks to be championship contenders once again. He adquired such players as Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitski, Michael Finley, Nick Van Exel and, before the 2003 season, Antoine Walker and Antwon Jamison.

Cuban is a declared Mavericks fan. He flies in his $41 million dollar private airplane to attend road games, and he always shows up at Mavericks games, whether at home or on the road, wearing Mavericks t-shirts or jerseys. Because of this, many magazines and newspapers have dubbed him as the fans dream (come true), the Cuban missile crisis, and other things. On the November 2003, premiere issue of Best magazine, Cuban was featured on the cover, announcing one of his newest products, high definition tv.