When Mark Cuban sells a company, he always sets aside a portion of the profits for a specific purpose: to distribute it among the company’s employees.
“In every company I sold, I paid bonuses to every employee who was there more than a year,” Cuban said Tuesday on the social media platform the payment is significant: 300% of Broadcast.com’s revenue. 330 employees became millionaires when the audio streaming service was sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999, Cuban wrote.
Cuban started this practice after selling his first business, a software company called MicroSolutions, for $6 million to CompuServe in 1990. He took 20% of the total sale price, he told CNBC Make It , and paid it to 80 employees – which works out to $15,000 per staff member, if split evenly.
Cuban did something similar by selling his majority stakes in HDNet, now known as AXS TV, in 2019 and the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks last year, he wrote in his post. “And only HDNet experienced layoffs right after the sale,” he added.
Cuban’s co-founding and sale of MicroSolutions marked his first major entrepreneurial success and a triumph over a setback: He nearly went bankrupt after his secretary stole about $82,000 from the company.
“It was fucked up,” Cuban told Barstool Sports’ “Pardon My Take” podcast in 2020. It also presented a glimmer of hope, he added: “It allowed us to pull ourselves together.”
The company rebounded, and Cuban sold MicroSolutions five years later, making him a millionaire. “You have to hustle the hardest when you think it’s the darkest,” he said.
In 1995, Cuban invested in and took operational control of AudioNet, the streaming platform that eventually became Broadcast.com. The business idea was met with skepticism at a time when the Internet was still nascent, he told CBS’s “Sunday Morning” last year.
“Nobody did it. Nobody,” Cuban said. “People thought I was an idiot.”
When Broadcast.com was sold, Cuban received a large portion of Yahoo stock, which was considered very valuable at the time. But instead of keeping it, he quickly cashed out. He was happy with the money he made and suspected the stock market was overvalued, he told GQ in 2022.
A few months later, the dotcom bubble burst and Yahoo’s stock price plummeted. “It taught me a hell of a lesson: When you chase dollars, it never works out well,” Cuban said.
Last year, Cuban sold a majority stake in the Mavericks to the Adelson and Dumont families, who run Las Vegas Sands Corporation, in a deal that would value the franchise at about $3.5 billion. He retained a 27% stake and control of basketball operations, the Associated Press reported at the time.
The deal ended Cuban’s long-standing status as majority owner of the NBA. In 2000, the new billionaire purchased his initial stake in the team for $285 million – without negotiating or trying to bring the price down even a cent.
“It was all about fun,” Cuban told “The Draymond Green Show” podcast in an April episode. “It was like a dream…I didn’t even negotiate, I was just like, ‘Yeah, whatever.'”
Cuba’s current net worth is $5.4 billion, according to Forbes.
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