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Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur Mark Cuban revealed he is planning to leave “Shark Tank” after filming one more season of the show.
Since 2011, Cuban has appeared on ABC’s “Shark Tank” as a permanent investor, or “shark,” hearing pitches from small business owners to invest in their companies.
“This is our 15th year. Next year, 16th year, is going to be my last year,” Cuban said last week on Showtime Basketball’s “All The Smoke” podcast, hosted by former NBA players Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes. “So one more year to go. It’s time.”
This comes as Cuban is also in the process of selling a majority stake in the Mavericks to casino magnate Miriam Adelson, according to a report in The Dallas Morning News Tuesday. Under the terms of the deal, Cuban would still maintain full control of the team’s basketball operations. It’s unclear if that move played any role in his decision to depart “Shark Tank.”
During his time on the show, Cuban said he has invested in hundreds of companies, including BeatBox Beverages and DudeWipes — two companies he said are performing well.
The 65-year-old billionaire said he loves that the show is able to help regular people kickstart their business ventures, inspire viewers and remind its audience that the “American dream is alive and well.”
“In doing ‘Shark Tank’ all these years, we’ve trained a generation of entrepreneurs, multiple generations of entrepreneurs, that if somebody can come from Iowa or Sacramento or wherever, and show up on the carpet on ‘Shark Tank,’ and show their business and get a deal, that’s going to inspire generations of kids, right?” Cuban said on the podcast.
The entrepreneur said his “Shark Tank” investments have, for the most part, been successful. However, he said they are currently “down a little bit” on a cash basis, but “way up” on a mark-to-market basis, which measures the current fair value of a company.
Cuban stars on “Shark Tank” alongside Robert Herjavec, Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John and Lori Greiner.
In a world filled with conflict and hostility, one of the most important skills we can learn in life is conflict resolution and our ability to negotiate peacefully and effectively.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban have teamed up to voice their opposition against Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler.
Crypto YouTube channel Crypto Banter explained in an Oct. 19 livestream that, in an amicus brief filed this week, Musk and Cuban supported an overhaul of the SEC’s current use of administrative law judges in enforcement actions. The existing system allows the SEC to both bring cases and preside over them, denying defendants the right to a jury trial.
Musk has a contentious history with the SEC. In 2018, he settled a lawsuit brought by the agency over his tweet about potentially taking Tesla private. As part of the settlement, Musk agreed to have his Tesla-related tweets pre-approved by the company.
Earlier this year, Musk criticized the SEC, saying “I do not respect the SEC. I do not respect them.” Cuban also settled a high-profile insider trading case with the SEC in 2008.
The amicus brief states that Musk and Cuban “have an acute interest in SEC enforcement actions [and] in the protection of due process” in such cases. The brief argues that the current SEC administrative proceeding system is unconstitutional.
Musk and Cuban are the latest high-profile figures in the business and tech space to challenge Gensler’s leadership. The SEC chair has drawn criticism from the crypto industry over his hesitance to approve a Bitcoin ETF.
Earlier this week, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz predicted the SEC would approve a Bitcoin ETF in 2023, stating that “Gensler needs a win” given the mounting pressure.
The Musk-Cuban amicus brief signals continued pushback against Gensler’s SEC from the tech and crypto community. Their high profiles could lend momentum to efforts to reform the SEC’s enforcement procedures.
Mark Cuban has always been vocal about his humble beginnings and his struggle with being “broke” before his career as an entrepreneur and investor took off.
In a new interview with GQ, Cuban talked about how important luck and timing were to his success, and how he’s redefined what retirement means to him — and why he never plans to fully get there.
Mark Cuban on luck and timing:
Cuban told the outlet about the struggle that came before starting his software company, MicroSolutons.
“I was broke, like, on my a** life broke, I was terrified. I was having fun, I enjoyed my life. But you’re not two, three years out of college, sleeping on the floor, just having gotten fired, and thinking, ‘This is exactly the way I planned it,’” Cuban said. “I always tell people life is half random. And that’s just a reality for everybody. I got lucky … You gotta have timing. I was really lucky in that.”
Cuban later sold MicroSolutions for $6 million at age 32 before joining his friend as a partner for Broadcast.com, which sold in 1999 to Yahoo for $6 billion.
“I was a tech guy who understood networking when the internet stock market blew up,” he told GQ. “And I was an entrepreneur who was willing to invest his own money to try to take this new thing called the internet and see if we could put audio and then video over it.”
On budgeting:
Cuban told the outlet he still keeps a tight budget to this day, something he learned from the early days of selling his first company when he had around $2.5 million in his bank account.
The billionaire explained that there’s a “huge difference” in being a millionaire and a billionaire, even going from $10 million or $25 million.
“I went back to Dallas, but I was trading stocks. I was starting to make a lot of money trading stocks,” Cuban recalled of the time right after selling MicroSolutions. “But even then, I didn’t feel like, ‘Okay, whatever I want, I can be extravagant.’ Same house, same everything, same car … It wasn’t when I was a billionaire on paper because that was just on paper. It really was when I was able to monetize it.”
Cuban says he plans to keep buying, selling, and investing in companies — until he gets bored.
He said retiring means picking “exactly what you want to do,” and while for many that may mean relaxing and exiting the corporate world, to Cuban, it just means shifting gears. Cuban said taking time to party and fly around the world early on in his career made him realize that he was “bored just having fun.”
“You’re not old until you act old. Being able to compete just keeps the juices going, keeps my mind sharp,” Cuban said. “I remember when I was the youngest kid walking in and trying to sell to people three times my age. Now I’m on the other side of the spectrum. I’m competing with kids a third of my age, and I love it.”
Cuban is a star of “Shark Tank,” owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and healthcare company Cost Plus Drugs (among other entrepreneurial pursuits), and has an estimated net worth of $6.55 billion, per Bloomberg.
Billionaire Mark Cuban recently told LinkedIn’s “The Path” podcast his three keys to success — and why what’s in his bank account isn’t one of them.
Cuban, 65, most widely known for his role on “Shark Tank,” boasts a net worth of $6.72 billion, according to Bloomberg. His journey into affluence began at 32, when he sold his initial business, software firm MicroSolutions, to CompuServe for $6 million. Eight years later, he climbed the billionaire ranks with the sale of his subsequent endeavor, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion.
Today, Cuban is the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and the cofounder of Cost Plus Drugs, a company he launched last year with the objective of lowering prescription drug prices.
Here, Cuban offers advice to entrepreneurs about how to be successful in business — and in life.
1. Have goals
When it comes to success, Cuban believes it’s less about monetary gains, and more about setting intentional goals and feeling a sense of purpose in what one does.
“Success isn’t necessarily how much money you have,” Cuban said on the podcast. “Success is just setting a goal and being able to wake up every morning feeling really good about what you’ve accomplished.”
2. Keep learning and stay curious
“I think what I do that probably separates me is that I’m infinitely curious,” Cuban said. “There’s nothing I’m not interested in learning about.”
Cuban has long been vocal about his commitment to lifelong learning. In 2020, he told Men’s Health that “learning was truly a skill” and continuing to learn is how he’s “able to compete and keep up and get ahead of most people.”
Fellow billionaire Bill Gates also emphasizes reading to wind down — a habit that a 2019 study of over 200 self-made millionaires found to be a common practice, with 86% saying they turn to books instead of television to decompress.
3. Don’t stress it
Problems will arise in any workplace, but how you handle yourself (and those around you) will set you apart, and lead to more opportunities in the long run.
“Reduce the stress of people around you,” Cuban said. “If you’re a stress reducer, everybody wants you, so there’s always going to be something for you to do.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban is just like us. Well, sort of.
In a candid podcast interview with TikTok creator Bobbi Althoff, the Shark Tank star revealed that he tries to lead an ordinary life despite the trappings of his fortune.
“I just try to be the same person as I was when I was poor and middle and rich,” he said. “I mean, when I was broke, I had a blast. I loved my life. I could wake up smiling, and back then, you just had to not answer the phone because it’d be a bill collector.”
Cuban appeared on The Really Good Podcast sitting on the floor of a parking garage. Althoff explained that she couldn’t afford a real studio and that Cuban did not want her filming in his home.
“His feet are dirty because there was oil all over the floors, and I did not have time to clean them all up,” Althoff told her audience before starting the interview.
The video of the podcast currently has 1.6 million views on YouTube.
Cuban doesn’t have billionaire friends
Althoff bombarded Cuban with personal questions about being rich in a deadpan comedic style reminiscent of Zach Galifianakis on “Between Two Ferns.”
“When did you stop being poor,” she asked.
“Probably when I was 28 or 29,” Cuban said. “But when I was 27, I…went to the ATM, and it showed me a big old zero. So that’s when I was 27. And then got past that, and then bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”
Althoff asked Cuban if he hangs around with other billionaires.
“I know some others,” he said. “I’ve done events and stuff where there’s been others there, but most of my friends are like guys that I moved to Dallas with or were friends in Dallas or friends in Indiana where I went to school or friends from Pittsburgh. All my friends that have been my friends my entire life are still my friends.”
Talking about the assumptions people make when you’re a billionaire, Cuban said, “People think you gotta make new friends or you got butlers.”
Shocked, Althoff replied. “You don’t have a butler?”
“No,” Cuban said.
“Do you cook your own meals?”
“I have somebody who will, like, when I’m in Dallas and trying to eat healthy, I have a chef,” he conceded. “But that’s just for my stuff. My wife will cook for the family.”
When asked if he does his laundry, Cuban said, “I’m capable, yeah.”
“That’s wild. I don’t think I’d do my own laundry if I had that much money,” Althoff said.
“It takes two seconds. It’s just easier,” Cuban explained, admitting that he draws the line at doing laundry for his kids. “The kids are now supposed to do their own.”
He keeps cash in his car
Cuban said that he doesn’t carry cash anymore. Asked how he tipped people like valets who only accept cash, Cuban revealed that he keeps $20 in his car for such occasions. But this doesn’t always work out.
“The other day, someone stole my $20,” he said. “I was so pissed. I forget where I was, but like, I went in, and I went right in the console where I keep it in my car, and someone stole my $20.
“Oh, my goodness. I’m sure that really hurt you financially,” Althoff joked.
He doesn’t have a driver
When asked if he had a chauffeur, “No, I like to drive myself. I drove myself here,” Cuban said. “I’ve been around people who like have to hire somebody to do everything for them, and that’s just like, no privacy.”
His one indulgence
While Cuban dismissed the stereotype of billionaires owning to own a yacht, he did admit that he has a weakness for planes.
He has a 757 for the Mavs, a G5, and a Bombardier Global 6000.
Mark Cuban has Tweeted at Elon Musk for years, often to criticize the Twitter owner over his business decisions. But most of the arguments have been one-sided.
Musk has remained uncharacteristically quiet about it until this past weekend when he decided to respond to one of Cuban’s Tweets — unleashing a storm from Cuban.
Cuban was going back and forth with the “Twitter Daily News” account about the idea of free speech and whose Tweets are promoted on the platform while accusing Musk of choosing to “support and influence the positions he wants to support and influence.”
“It stands to reason that the person with the greatest number of followers will have the greatest influence on the most number of For You timelines,” Cuban pointed out. “And For You candidates include, as stated above, tweets that people you follow engage with. So who @elonmusk engages with on Twitter has an ENORMOUS impact on what an indeterminable number of people see in their For You Timelines.”
Despite asking for his suggestions, Musk did not reply.
Cuban has previously publicly bashed Musk about his decisions since taking over the communications giant.
Last November, after Musk began changing Twitter’s legacy verification system that gave blue checkmarks to notable users, the “Shark Tank” star criticized the plan.
“The legacy blue checkmark meant that someone took the time to decide that the user might be able to contribute something more,” Cuban argued. I found that valuable. It saved me time and because Twitter did a decent job of it, it opened my eyes to new people that I didn’t know about.”
Musk recently stepped down from his interim position as CEO of the company after appointing former NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino earlier this month.
When billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban recruited and hired Mavericks’ CEO Cynt Marshall in 2018, there were risks involved for both parties. Marshall didn’t have any basketball or sports industry experience and expressed her doubts to the “Shark Tank” star.
But Cuban’s positive mindset and encouraging words made the offer hard to pass up, she said. Marshall recalled her initial conversation with Cuban in a video interview for LinkedIn’s “The Path.”
At the time, Marshall was working at her own consulting firm, having previously come from AT&T, where she held several executive roles such as Chief Diversity Officer and Senior VP of HR over a 30-year career.
“I thought twice about it because I was loving what I was doing with the consulting,” Marshall recalled. “But here was an opportunity to serve, to have an impact.”
Marshall said she “did not know the business of basketball” and was on the fence about what to do. But when she expressed her concerns to Cuban, she was met with understanding and the sense of support she needed, she said.
“You don’t worry about that. I will teach you the business side of basketball, and others will do the same,” he told her.
At the time of her hire, there were women or people of color in leadership positions in the Mavericks organization. Marshall is the first female CEO in Mavericks’ history. Per LinkedIn, the organization now consists of nearly half women and half people of color.
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Marshall explained. “I will never know what some of these people know about the business of basketball, but I don’t need to know it. I learn from it every day. What I need to do is lead these people, learn from these people, and love these people.”
She also added that Cuban has kept true to his promise.
When drugmaker Eli Lilly announced Wednesday it will slash the list price for some of its insulin products following years of criticism from lawmakers and activists that the price of the lifesaving hormone had become unaffordable, the news raised questions about what will happen to other efforts to provide low-cost insulin.
Civica, a nonprofit drugmaker based in Utah, for example, has said it plans to begin selling biosimilar insulin for roughly $30 per vial by 2024 — $5 more than the new price of Eli Lilly’s generic insulin.
In December, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said his new company, the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co., planned to sell low-cost insulin. And California is poised to launch an ambitious program to manufacture its own brand of the hormone, as well as generics of other high-priced prescription drugs.
Drug pricing experts welcomed the Eli Lilly news, predicting the move won’t undercut those efforts. And these other initiatives to bring lower-cost insulin to market, in turn, would put pressure on Eli Lilly to keep its prices down. Together these will help, not hamper, what could become a race to the bottom on insulin prices.
“The more competition, the more stable this solution will be so that five to 10 years from now the prices won’t go up again,” said Dr. Vincent Rajkumar, a Mayo Clinic oncologist who has been a critic of high drug costs.
The pressure could cause further ripples. Following Eli Lilly’s news, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent letters to the two other major insulin makers, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, calling on them to follow suit.
People with diabetes, especially those with Type 1 who need the drug to survive, will benefit. Yet even while some of Eli Lilly’s persistent critics praised the move, they noted work remains to make insulin widely affordable.
“Additional competition and other accountability moves are still incredibly necessary because the companies can raise their list price again at any time,” said Elizabeth Pfiester, founder of T1International, a nonprofit that advocates for people with diabetes. “That’s why the government also needs to regulate insulin manufacturers to hold them accountable.”
Cuban’s company did not respond to requests for comment on how the Eli Lilly cuts might affect its efforts. But Civica’s plan remains unchanged following the news, said spokesperson Debbi Ford.
“From the beginning, we have said we are not entering medicine markets for market share,” Ford said. “We are participating for market impact.”
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted Wednesday that “sky high prices for insulin have put it out of reach for too many” and his state will manufacture its “OWN insulin and ensure all who need access to this medicine” can afford it.
“Now, Eli Lilly is lowering their cost,” Newsom wrote. “Let’s keep it up.”
Last year, California lawmakers approved $100 million for the state to contract for cheaper insulin and make the lifesaving drug, cutting out drugmakers and go-between companies that add to the price consumers pay. Newsom has said that California’s insulin would be available “at a cheaper price, close to at cost.” Officials haven’t said when the state’s insulin will be available, though, or exactly how much it will cost.
“California’s goal was to get competition into the market however they can manage it,” said Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California College of the Law-San Francisco who studies the insulin market. “If California’s entry results in bringing prices down from other manufacturers, that will be a good thing.”
Eli Lilly’s price cuts apply to what it described as its “most commonly prescribed” insulins, but Feldman noted those are older insulin products. Although California officials haven’t released details about which insulin products would be included in its program, Feldman said she expects the state will offer a variety to cover the market.
“It’s not aimed at any one company or any one drug,” she said. “It’s aimed at making affordable insulin available to market and putting pressure on other companies.”
Washington and Maine are also exploring ways to bring cheap insulin to consumers, and large insurance companies pledged millions in an agreement with Civica to manufacture cheaper insulin.
The cadre of newcomers aim to break open the insulin market because three pharmaceutical companies — Eli Lilly and Co., Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk — have long dominated the U.S. insulin supply and allowed their prices to escalate. The price of one of Eli Lilly’s products, for example, rose from $21 to $255 per vial between 1996 and 2016.
St. Louis University law professor Dr. Michael Sinha said Eli Lilly may have seen a threat from the discount insulin initiatives.
“This might be a response to some of those initiatives and the looming threat of really steep losses in terms of market share,” Sinha said.
Beginning in 2024, Hernández said, drugmakers could be on the hook to pay fees, known as rebates, to Medicaid for drugs like insulin that have had steep price hikes. By lowering the list price of insulin, Eli Lilly could avoid those costs, Hernández said.
Hernández said that understanding the incentives behind Eli Lilly’s decision to cut list prices could help lower the price of other drugs that patients have trouble affording. If the makers of those other drugs also slash their list prices ahead of 2024, it could show the effectiveness of the new federal policy. If they don’t, it might underscore the importance of factors unique to insulin like public pressure by politicians and activists or market competition from initiatives like California’s.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
Online misinformation “is only going to get worse” as artificial intelligence platforms evolve and spread, the billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor said on a recent episode of comedian Jon Stewart’s podcast, “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
Right now, misinformation tends to spread through social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter — and that’s with some semblance of human guardrails in place, Cuban said. But with ChatGPT and other similar platforms, the machines are in control.
“Once these things start taking on a life of their own … it will be difficult for us to define why and how the machine makes the decisions it makes, and who controls the machine,” Cuban said.
Hundreds of millions of users have tried ChatGPT to write poems, offer advice and recite recipes since the platform launched in November. But so far, the technology isn’t showing itself to be smarter than the average human.
Posting the chatbot’s simplistic errors is a popular social media trend. At times, ChatGPT incorrectly answers math problems, refuses to answer basic riddles and even “hallucinates”— or completely makes up historical figures, events and other details that seem like facts.
ChatGPT can also contradict itself, sometimes providing different answers when repeatedly asked the same question.
Similarly, shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet dropped more than 9% this week after Bard incorrectly answered a question about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in one of Google’s first ads for the AI platform.
A raft of Google employees have blamed CEO Sundar Pichai for Bard’s “rushed, botched” release, with the company feeling pressured to compete with ChatGPT, CNBC reported on Friday.
“Rushing Bard to market in a panic validated the market’s fear about us,” read one post on an internal Google forum reviewed by CNBC, alongside a photo of a face-palming bird.
The errors show that the technology is still in infantile stages. That’s a problem, especially for large swaths of people who don’t always fact check claims they see on the internet, Cuban said.
“Our generation, Gen X and older, doesn’t get it,” Cuban said. “Gen Z and younger, they’re not only native to it, they know how to block things out … They’re more in tune to all these issues.”
Microsoft, for its part, acknowledges that the technology behind ChatGPT isn’t perfect — even as it plans to incorporate it into an upcoming version of its search engine, Bing.
“Bing will sometimes misrepresent the information it finds, and you may see responses that sound convincing but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate,” the company’s recently updated FAQ page says.
In the short term, that could be a problem — a concern Cuban shares with fellow tech billionaire Steve Wozniak. But other industry luminaries have expressed excitement about the technology’s longer-term possibilities.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, for example, thinks platforms like ChatGPT represent a burgeoning technological revolution that’ll make a “huge impact” on health care and education, he told German-language business newspaper Handelsblatt’s “Disrupt” podcast on Thursday.
“Today, they require too much computation, they’re not always accurate … But even this week, you’ll have announcements from Microsoft and Google, where they’re competing to lead in this space,” Gates said. “The progress over the next couple of years to make these things even better will be profound.”
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Mark Cuban may be a billionaire entrepreneur now, but his humble beginnings taught him how to make ends meet when times got tough on his wallet.
Getty Images
Cuban recently appeared on the “Club Random with Bill Maher” podcast when the two men began discussing wealth and how their lives have changed since making it big in their respective industries.
The duo talked about how having money has offered them the opportunity to do what they want, when they want, something Cuban points to as a gift.
When speaking about what the “best part” of being wealthy is, Cuban said that the answer is “time.”
“I get to control my time,” he said.
Still, he wasn’t always rich. When Cuban was in his 20s and first moved to Dallas from Indiana, he told Maher he didn’t have much to his name, so he came up with a money-saving grocery hack.
By eating at off-hours, he could score lower prices on easily perishable items. Since most grocery stores can’t put items like cooked poultry back on shelves that will be expired by morning, some vendors will slash prices during later hours.
“I used to go to the grocery store at midnight because they lowered the price of chicken and these big French fries to $1.29,” Cuban explained to Maher of his late-night shopping. “And I would buy a bunch of them.”
Always looking to unlock hidden value, multi-billionaire Mark Cuban apparently finds none in either “shy” or “retiring.” The owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, whose unrestrained dress-downs of league refs have cost him millions in fines; a panelist on “Shark Tank” for the last 13 years; the kind of guy who loved playing himself on HBO’s “Entourage” – Cuban is one high-functioning multi-tasker.
Axelrod asked, “Is it impossible to stay connected to what most people think of as a ‘normal’ life?”
“Yes and no. It’s not like my friends are rich; they’re not. At the same time, if you’re jumping on a plane, it’s your plane.”
But these days, if you want to know what’s grabbing his attention, check out his latest venture: Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, that aims to change the way we fill our prescriptions – as big a potential disruptor as the industry has seen.
When asked how much of his head is being eaten up by Cost Plus right now, Cuban replied, “About 99.99%. Financial, emotional, intellectual, all that bandwidth is going to Cost Plus.”
Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, now aiming to disrupt the half-trillion-dollar prescription drug market.
CBS News
Prescription drugs are a half-trillion-dollar market in the U.S. Cuban wants more transparency into how prices are set – an opaque and complicated process, he says, that’s largely controlled by middlemen.
Cost Plus deals directly with manufacturers and consumers, offering more profits for those who make drugs, and lower prices for those who take them. His prescription for pricing = the drug’s cost, plus 15% for Cost Plus, plus a $3 pharmacy fee, plus $5 shipping.
Cost Plus offers 1,100 medications right now, mostly, but not all, generics, like atorvastatin (the generic of the cholesterol drug Lipitor), whose retail price is $55.08 for 30 pills. Cost Plus? $3.60 for the same amount.
Cuban said, “When I was in my 20s and my 30s and my early 40s, it was all about, ‘How much money could I make?’ But at this point in my life, where the next dollar that I bring in isn’t gonna change my life, my kids’ life, their kids’ lives, the capitalistic reward comes from having an impact.”
At the age of 64, Cuban has been focused on the next dollar for close to 50 years, since he was a kid in Pittsburgh. “Selling garbage bags door-to-door, selling magazines, selling candy door-to-door. ‘Hi, my name is Mark. Do you use garbage bags? If you just call me every time you need garbage bags, they’re only $6 per a hundred, I’ll come and I’ll just drop ’em off at the house.’ Once you’re a salesperson and you know how to sell, there’s nothing you can’t do.”
That salesmanship developed alongside a certain toughness in his working-class Jewish home. “The first time I ever got into a fight, some kid walked up and just punched me and started calling me a kike. And of course, I had to beat the hell out of him! But I go in to my dad and say, ‘What’s a kike?’ Every generation has a reason to have fear. But every generation has a reason to have hope.”
He took those qualities with him to Indiana University, along with a penchant for risk-taking and thinking outside the box. He bought a bar, Motley’s Pub, before he was old enough to drink. “That was the first time I had to try to get things organized and actually run a real business. And I realized I wasn’t that good at it; there were a lotta mistakes that I made.”
After graduation he worked at a bank; that lasted 9 months. Cuban had too many other things to try, like acting, grabbing parts in a bunch of B-movies.
His first big money came at the age of 30, selling a software company he’d built called MicroSolutions, while still not ready to settle down. “I netted about $2 million after taxes,” he said. “I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines, and I’m not gonna work, I’m just gonna party like a rock star in as many countries as I can.”
His ever-churning mind was focused on and investing in the emerging sector of technology and computers. “My net worth just kept on goin’ bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam along with that. By the time I’m 35, I was worth, you know, $15, $20 million. Life was good.”
Millions became billions. When he and his college buddy Todd Wagner, also now living in Dallas, wanted to listen to Indiana University basketball games on their old campus 900 miles away, they came up with a solution: AudioNet, which later became Broadcast.com.
Cuban said, “I go buy a computer, upgrade my phone line, downloaded Netscape software for server, and started looking at different alternatives to try to put audio and eventually video on the internet. Nobody was doing it at the time. We were the first.”
“I feel like I’m listening to the origin story of streaming,” said Axelrod.
“It is the origin story of streaming, for sure. There was nobody doing it. Nobody. People thought I was an idiot!”
He wasn’t. The company would be sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock. “It was the craziest thing ever. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I could be worth a billion. I was ready to retire when I had $2 million, you know?”
Axelrod asked, “If you were worth a tenth of what you’re worth, you would be just as happy?”
“Yeah.”
“One percent of what you’re worth?”
“Yes. If I had my same family and everything, for sure.”
“And to people who say, ‘That’s easy for him to say’?”
“Yeah, of course. But if you talk to my friends from back then who are still my friends, they’ll tell you, I’ve got stuff. But hopefully I haven’t changed all that much.”
“Sunday Morning” took him up on his idea, and went to talk with some of Cuban’s oldest pals, at a lunch spot in Pittsburgh. They all agreed, Cuban is still the same guy. One, Jerry Katz (nickname Big Man), expanded, “Little more full of it, but not that much more full of it! But still the same guy!”
Mark Cuban and correspondent Jim Axelrod sit down with some of Cuban’s childhood friends (clockwise from left): Stu Chaban, Steve Rosen, Jerry Katz and Todd Reidbord.
CBS News
What the world sees of Mark Cuban now, they first saw then. As Steve Rosen (a.k.a. Toe the Pro) remembered, “We got into stamps. I like to collect stamps, and Mark expressed an interest in stamps. We’d go to a stamp show. We’d each go in with $20. I’d come out with stamps; Mark would come out with $100! It was amazing!”
“Inefficient markets, you look for inefficient markets,” Cuban smiled.
“He’d buy ’em on the second floor and sell ’em on the first floor, right?” asked Katz.
“Pretty much!”
Which is how he got to shooting baskets on a full court in the backyard of his $20-million-plus mansion, where he lives with his wife and three kids – a guy who’s been draining ’em from deep for decades now.
Axelrod asked, “What did you know about running a professional sports team when you bought the Mavs?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
The Dallas Mavericks he paid $285 million for 23 years ago are now estimated to be worth more than $3 billion. But remember, this is a guy looking for “hidden value.” “The connection to your customer is stronger than anywhere else,” he said. “You know, you don’t get requests from Make-a-Wish to sit down with a software programmer.”
A man who understands the role of good fortune in creating his great fortune.
Axelrod asked, “Do you walk around every day feeling like, ‘Man, did I get a good deal of the cards’?”
“Yeah. How the f*** does this happen to me?” he replied.
“How do you explain it?”
“I can’t. Life is half random. There’s half you have some level of control over, and half, it is what it is,” Cuban said. “If I was born five years sooner, not during the early days of the internet, you might not know my name. And I’m gonna never take it for granted, and enjoy every stinkin’ moment of it!”
For more info:
Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Ed Givnish.
Jim Axelrod is the chief investigative correspondent and senior national correspondent for CBS News, reporting for “CBS This Morning,” “CBS Evening News,” “CBS Sunday Morning” and other CBS News broadcasts.
Billionaire Mark Cuban was only 12 years old when he launched his first side hustle, so he knows what it takes to start a business at a young age.
And, he says there’s one simple thing you need to consider if you want to do it, too.
“The key to starting a business when you’re young is doing things that you can do yourself — things you can do with your own time,” Cuban recently told a group of high school students at Lewisville High School in Texas.
That means starting with what you know, he noted.
“If it’s a product, do something that’s easy for you to get and easy for you to sell,” Cuban said, adding: “It really comes down to one simple thing. The best businesses are things you can control and do yourself. That’s what being an entrepreneur is all about.”
Cuban famously got an early start learning to run his own business as a pre-teen selling garbage bags door-to-door in a Pittsburgh suburb. Later, he sold a variety of collectibles, from baseball cards to coins and stamps, saying the proceeds helped pay for his college tuition.
In each of those cases, Cuban used household items and collectibles that were accessible to a kid and sell them for a profit — following his own advice for teenagers today.
Similarly, as a college student, he worked as a bartender and taught dance lessons to make extra money. Cuban later showed off his dance skills publicly by appearing on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2007, finishing 8th in the competition.
“I was a hustler … I have always been selling. I always had something going on. That was just my nature,” Cuban said during a 2016 episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank.”
Now, Cuban says he regularly tells kids and teenagers looking to start their own businesses to do what he did. Build around “something they can make or a service they can offer to friends, family and neighbors,” he told CNBC Make It in September.
That’s easier said than done, of course: Successfully launching and growing your own business is infamously challenging. Roughly 20% of new businesses fail within a year of launching, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Being an entrepreneur and starting a business doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy and all of a sudden you make a lot of money,” Cuban told the students at Lewisville High School. “Being an entrepreneur is the harder way.”
If it was easy, he added, “you all would already be doing it and coming on ‘Shark Tank’ and taking my place.”
Finding something you can control and do yourself is hard enough. Becoming great at it — which, incidentally, is Cuban’s No. 1 rule for making money — is a lot harder.
It involves extensively researching your business plan and potential competition, seeking out funding, and creating backup plans to allow for flexibility if you need to adjust on the fly, the billionaire has previously said.
As long as you don’t mind putting in that work, especially after you choose your business opportunity, a world of opportunity can open up for you, Cuban told the high school students.
“If you’re willing to take the initiative and start a business, anything is possible,” he said.
Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
Most newly appointed bosses get the big corner office when they take over companies.
But when Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million in January 2000, he didn’t get his own floor-to-ceiling windows or a mahogany desk. Instead, he sat with nine other salesmen in an open plan office.
In a recent interview with GQ, Cuban explained he “didn’t give a s— about an office” because he was more focused on working alongside the sales team and earning their respect.
“I wanted everybody that worked with me to see that if I asked them to do it, I’ll do it,” Cuban told GQ. “If you’re running a company and if you can align your interest with those of the people you work with, things are gonna work for you.”
Cuban said he decided to buy the team after its home opener in 1999. At that point, he was just a season ticket holder, but he couldn’t believe the game wasn’t sold out. He bought the team because he thought he could make it better and sell more tickets, he said.
When he bought the team that January, Cuban said he put his desk in the center of the bullpen. In those days, he’d pull out phone books and old client lists and start cold calling.
Wanting to lead by example, he came up with compelling pitches to get old fans to come back to games. He’d say: “Do you realize now that it’s less expensive to come to a Mavericks game than to take your family to McDonald’s?” or “The first game’s free on me.”
Cuban’s method appears to have worked, as the Dallas Mavericks’ team value has steadily increased over the years. In 2014, the team was worth $765 million. Now, the 2011 NBA Champions are valued at $3.3 billion — $440,000 million more than the average NBA team — and is the eighth most valuable team in the NBA, according to Forbes.
This isn’t the first time Cuban has emphasized the importance of team cohesiveness. On a recent episode of the “Re:Thinking with Adam Grant” podcast, Cuban said he has fired business partners and traded basketball players because of their personalities — especially when the team has multiple self-centered or combative members.
“Culture and chemistry are critical to success,” Cuban said. “A team can have one knucklehead, you can’t have two. One knucklehead adapts, two hang out together.”
“I wanted to tell a story about African history before slavery,” Manuel Godoy, co-founder of Black Sands Entertainment with his wife Geiszel, says. “[So I wrote] a story about Ancient Egypt and the surrounding areas. And it was amazing — people gravitated toward it because they finally felt included in historical contexts.”
Courtesy of Black Sands Entertainment
The Godoys began Black Sands Entertainment in 2016to draw attention to the characters and stories that so often go unwritten in mainstream media. Now, the comic publisher and media venture boasts dozens of titles that represent the entire diaspora, and young adults are devouring them — just like the Godoys would have, if they’d had the opportunity at their age.
Black Sands stands apart for its dedication to Black history and its commitment to the Black community, but something else has also contributed to its striking success: The Godoys’ status as United States Army veterans.
Ahead of Veterans Day, Entrepreneur sat down with the Godoys to learn how they’ve grown Black Sands from crowdfunding to almost IPO with investments from Kevin Hart and Mark Cuban — and how their Army backgrounds have informed their entrepreneurial journey along the way.
“Momentum is the biggest factor when it comes to raising capital.”
From the start, the Godoys spread the word about their content on social media and set their sights on raising capital. Between 2017 and 2020, Black Sands ran four Kickstarter campaigns and raised $80,000 in total. Then, in 2020, they decided to launch another campaign on WeFunder.
“We basically judged the intent of our biggest followers,” Manuel says of their approach to the 2020 campaign. “We asked them, ‘How much were you planning on investing?’ [Then we said], ‘If you were to invest this much money, we would spend at least 15 minutes talking to you about any questions you have about our company, our financials, etc.’”
The Godoys asked, and their readers answered: They raised $40,000 in those first 24 hours. Ultimately, that campaign brought in $500,000.
“No one wants to be the first investor,” Manuel adds. “But if you already got 300, 400 investors in the first day, everybody’s like, ‘Hey, I’m joining too.’ Momentum is the biggest factor when it comes to raising capital if you’re going through customers.”
And the Godoys have kept up Black Sands’ momentum since those early days, climbing to the top 1% of the Patreon community, raising $2 million in capital and earning more than $2 million in revenue to date.
“We got on stage, pitched our information, and everybody fell in love.”
Earlier this year, the Godoys appeared on Shark Tank to pitch their company.
Shark Tank features Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John and Kevin O’Leary as permanent judges, with Kevin Hart, Emma Grede, Peter Jones, Daniel Lubetzky and Nirva Tolia as recurring guest judges.
The Godoys knew that Hart was going to be one of their judges ahead of time.
“We knew we had to make him fall in love with our content,” Geiszel says. “So we got on stage, pitched our information, and everybody fell in love.”
Initially, the Godoys offered the Sharks a 5% stake in Black Sands for $500,000, with the funds earmarked for animation development and additional titles. But Hart and Cuban countered with a 30% stake for the same investment, citing the media resources that Hart’s production company, HartBeat, could provide as Black Sands expands.
The fact that Black Sands’ Shark Tank deal went through is a testament to its strong business model and the Godoys’ entrepreneurial savvy. Forbesspoke to 74% of the people who were offered deals on the show in seasons one through seven and found that roughly 43% of those agreements didn’t go through — because the Sharks pulled out or changed the terms.
Not only are the Godoys dreaming of an eventual $1 billion IPO, but they’re also envisioning a future where Black Sands’ fans-turned-investors are at the forefront, continuing to hold stock as “their slice of the pie.”
Image credit: Courtesy of Black Sands Entertainment
“Being in the Army taught me how to be an entrepreneur.”
The Godoys’ experiences in the Army have helped lay the foundation for Black Sands’ success.
“Being in the Army taught me how to be an entrepreneur,” Geiszel explains. “In the Army, I was leading a group of 30 soldiers. So it taught me about how to manage a team and run a company, because [it gives] you that discipline and structure you need.”
Manuel agrees, noting that the Army imparts significant leadership experience, even for those lower on the chain of command — because you have to learn how to get things done on time.
Another skill the Army teaches that every founder should have on lock? Inventory.
“You have to know where everything is and how much you have,” Manuel says. “Otherwise, one day you run out, and it takes three months to get the next part. And you’re out of business for three months.”
The Army has given the Godoys essential skills for running a business — and it’s also inspired some of Black Sands’ narratives.
“I’m a war nut,” Manuel says. “I love war, so anything that has to do with strategy, military tactics, logistics, that’s stuff that I put into my writing. I make sure it logistically makes sense that [a particular] battle is happening, and that’s probably why people like the accuracy of the storylines.”
“Veterans always want to choose five different businesses at once. I’m like, ‘No, stick to your favorite.’”
There are many reasons why veterans make excellent entrepreneurs. Manuel notes the benefits they have at their disposal, which can help accelerate their business’s growth.
Still, the Godoys stress it’s important to keep several key things in mind.
First up? Stick to one business idea — and see it through.
“Veterans always want to choose like five different businesses at once,” Geiszel says. “Stick to your favorite, take those military skills, apply them to your everyday business life, and you will succeed. Don’t give up. If you fail, keep going.”
Additionally, you should know exactly who’s buying what you’re selling.
“Find out who your core customer is,” Manuel says. “Don’t worry about what you’re going to make and how you’re going to do all that stuff. Find out who you want to sell to — because once you figure that out, then you can make a product that’s tailored to them.”
Once you have your idea and customer in mind, you have to surround yourself with people who will help you level up.
“Hiring the right team is very important for a business to thrive,” Geiszel says. “And you want to make sure your team is going to be loyal to your company.”
One sure way to cultivate company loyalty? Pay people fairly, raising benefits as the company succeeds — it will make employees feel valued and willing to continue their contribution. Manuel says that Black Sands has people who have been on the team for five or six years.
“We have to champion things that the Black community wants us to champion.”
Above all else, Black Sands is a company that refuses to sacrifice its principles.
Originally, the co-founders wrote and designed all of Black Sands’ comic books by themselves, but they’ve begun allowing other Black creators to write for them as they build their own brands.
Black Sands has also harnessed the power of Kickstarter as part of its larger effort to lift up Black creators and their work. The Godoys recently launched a campaign for Everett Montgomery’s Flame comic series.
Image credit: Courtesy of Black Sands Entertainment
“We are a company that’s dedicated to Black history,” Manuel says. “And that means that we have to champion things that the Black community wants us to champion. We can’t just go out there and be like, ‘Oh, we make comic books, and that’s all we do.’ We have to be involved in social issues and other things that are related. We have to be able to say that we actually are doing something about it.”
A billionaire sports team owner wants to cut the cost of American prescriptions. Should the big drug chains check their pulses?
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a long-time Shark Tank investor, in January launched his price-popping discount e-pharmacy, Mark Cuban CostPlus Drug Co. (Yeah, you need a glass of water to swallow that name, so let’s refer to it as CostPlus Drug.)
At the time, news outlets like The Street suggested Cuban was taking on the retail heavies – CVS, Walgreens WBA , Rite Aid RAD and even newbie Amazon Pharmacy. His goal: to offer lower-priced generic drugs and “shield consumers from inflated drug prices,” according to a company statement. (CostPlus’s website is operated by online healthcare company Truepill.)
New Age In Medicine: The Pluses And Minuses Of Rx
Now, 10 months later, we’ve had time to examine the extent to which Cuban’s low-priced option is affecting sales at big retail pharma, and across the industry. He is, after all, competing not only with retailers, but also with price-cutters, such as Amazon Pharmacy and Good Rx.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Here is a breakdown of how these drug-store alternatives make a buck, and save a buck.
How CostPlus Works
CostPlus is a registered pharma wholesaler, so it can bypass the markups retailers typically make because it doesn’t have to cover overhead costs. It charges the manufacturer’s price for a generic drug, plus a 15% flat margin, a $3 pharmacist fee and $5 shipping, according to CNET. So a drug that sells for $10 wholesale is calculated at $19.50, all in. CostPlus now offers nearly 800 drugs (from 100 at launch) and serves more than a million people, Katie Couric reports.
What distinguishes CostPlus is that it avoids pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). These are companies that aggregate a medication’s demand and then negotiate fees with pharmacies and drug manufacturers. Instead, CostPlus created its own PBM, pledging it will be “radically transparent” in negotiating its prices. (This is a dig: PBMs have been criticized for pocketing negotiated savings and for charging Medicaid more than what the PBMs pay to pharmacies.)
How Good Rx Works
Unlike CostPlus Drug, GoodRx’s revenue comes primarily through PBMs, according to its initial public offering. However, GoodRx targets a specific niche – consumers who choose to buy prescriptions outside of insurance. Many of these consumers, insured and uninsured, don’t fill their prescriptions at all because of high deductibles or prices.
By targeting these customers, GoodRx increases the number of cash transactions for PBMs, expanding their markets. So when a patient uses a GoodRx code, a PBM receives a portion of the payment and GoodRx then collects a fee from the PBM. GoodRx also makes money from advertising and referral fees, its website states. Who are the big PBMs? The three leaders are Caremark/CVS Health, Express Scripts (Cigna CI ) and OptumRx (United Health), according to the pharma economics site Drug Channels.
Note, GoodRx is one of several Rx discount card providers, including SingleCare.
How Amazon Pharmacy Works
Amazon Pharmacy’s money-making advantage is rooted in its Prime Memberships, which accounts for nearly 60% of the U.S. population (or 152 million subscriptions), according to Insider Intelligence. For drug makers, that’s a lot of volume.
Members can compare prices and determine the cost of a prescription if paying with insurance or using Amazon Pharmacy’s discount card. That savings card cuts up to 80% off generic prescriptions and 40% off brand-name medications (when paying without insurance). Prime members also can get these savings at 50,000 participating pharmacies by using Amazon’s prescription savings card – similar to GoodRx and other discount card providers.
The key distinguishing feature is that Prime members get free two-day shipping. Non-Prime members can use Amazon Pharmacy with free five-day delivery.
Where And How Drug Store Chains Compete
Are traditional drug retailers suffering the side effects of Mark Cuban’s high-cost elixir? In August, U.S. pharmacies and drug stores filled more than $28.1 billon in prescriptions, according to the U.S. Census Board. That compares with $24.5 billion in August 2020 and – to go way back for context – $6.3 billion in 1992.
These rising figures probably represent a combination of prescription volume as well as price surges, so the cost isn’t edging down yet. What matters more for this analysis, however, is the extent to which growth in Rx fulfillment resulted from the expansion of lower-priced channels, such as CostPlus’s direct-to-consumer model.
Were sales diverted from the big three drug chains? Here is how they are doing so far this year:
CVS in August reported a $7.6 billion sales gain in its Pharmacy Services Segment for the first six months of this fiscal year. That’s up 10.3% over the same period in 2021. CVS did not break out online pharmacy orders in its quarterly report, but in the first quarter of fiscal 2020, it realized a 1,000% increase in online prescriptions, according to Digital Commerce 360.
Walgreens, however, in October reported an 8.8% decline in its fiscal fourth quarter U.S. pharmacy sales. Interestingly, it blamed the drop on a 10 percentage point decline in its AllianceRx Walgreens business, its specialty and home-delivery pharmacy service.
Rite Aid in September said sales in its Retail Pharmacy Sector declined by 1.1% in the fiscal second-quarter. This was due to a reduction in Covid vaccine and testing revenue, as well as store closures. A rise in other prescriptions, however, offset the decline, indicating a possible net gain without the Covid factor.
Regardless of the one-time comparisons, these chains do offer something an online billionaire cannot: one-to-one care. Most have supplemented their pharmacy services with medical, dental and even behavioral health services. Their customers choose to make trips to the bricks because they can meet with retail care professionals more quickly and conveniently than they could with a physician at a traditional practice.
Could the high cost of prescriptions eclipse the lure of such convenient service? The prospect definitely needs to be addressed. Ideally, retailers will recognize CostPlus’s purpose, and CostPlus in turn will see the value of what retailers are providing. And customers, ultimately, will benefit from the getting-better practices of both.
California-based lighting company teams with Mark Cuban-backed marketplace for American-made products
Press Release –
updated: Sep 3, 2021
CULVER CITY, Calif., September 3, 2021 (Newswire.com)
– A commitment to innovation in architectural lighting guided California business owners and brothers Jake and David Hakimi to team with the Mark Cuban-backed online marketplace for American-made products to showcase their newest collection of commercial-grade lighting for healthcare, industrial kitchen, workspace and retail applications. Alcon Lighting, headquartered in Los Angeles, announced that the company will offer their unique line of lighting products where shoppers now find American-made products on WeCultivate.
“I’m a big believer in buy American, invest in America,” Mark Cuban told FOX Business when he invested in the New Jersey-based enterprise. “Cultivate can be a big step forward.”
“Mark is a true visionary,” Cultivate’s founder and CEO Harsh Khurana said. “He invested in us before the product was even a proof of concept. He’s the only person I reached out to as a VC, and within a couple days, he said, ‘Let’s do this.’”
The coronavirus pandemic reinforced Americans’ demand for goods made in the U.S.A., particularly critical medicines and medical supplies, because the new virus constricted international trade and locked businesses down across the country, underscoring America’s dependence on Chinese-made products and supply chains as well as Chinese government controls. Using Cultivate’s website, shoppers can browse American-made products directly from the platform’s search tool or add Cultivate’s browser extension.
Khurana notes that adding businesses such as Alcon Lighting to Cultivate’s e-commerce platform is of mutual value to both companies, pointing out that over 1,000 U.S. businesses have joined Cultivate. Business owners get products featured on the site, and consumers are at liberty to trade in the U.S. economy directly through Cultivate, which features companies that produce U.S.-made products that match Cultivate’s criteria. “This really resonates,” Khurana said. “This is the land of opportunity. … America is full of hungry, genius entrepreneurs.”
Cultivate’s affirmative philosophy aligned with two young entrepreneurs of one of the nation’s leading commercial lighting companies. “I admire Mark Cuban’s competitive spirit and commitment to entrepreneurship, so when he talked about investing in Cultivate for its founding ideal of high-quality, American-made products, it caught my attention,” said Alcon Lighting Chief Digital Officer and Co-Owner David Hakimi. “Our family business was born in Southern California and it’s a part of who we are. It’s our conviction that a healthy, thriving community begins at home. So we strive to source parts, components and supplies from manufacturers making the highest quality products here in the U.S.A. After studying Cultivate’s site and approach, we decided to act.” Hakimi, who runs the business with his brother, Jake, the Chief Financial Officer and Co-Owner, and their rapidly growing team of creative professionals, added that this is the moment to emphasize American-made products.
“Communities have been drained, stifled and challenged in recent months,” he observed. “Our customers, who are often architects and interior designers, contractors and property owners, want to simplify lighting for a variety of purposes,” he said, citing recent case studies such as fitness, healthcare and commercial lighting projects—including a Texas property for shared office space. “They want intelligent lighting systems that stand up to today’s highest design and technology standards,” Hakimi explained. “They also want products that last. They want it made, shipped and delivered with reliability and accountability. We’re enthusiastic about working with Cultivate to distribute our American-made lighting products.”
Please direct media inquiries to gm[at]alconlighting.com.
