Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American businessman, entrepreneur, and television personality. He is the former principal owner and current minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and co-owner of 2929 Entertainment. From 2012 to 2025, he was one of the "sharks" on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in the suburb of Mt. Lebanon, Cuban was involved in ventures from a young age, from selling garbage bags to later running newspapers during a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette worker's strike. He graduated from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington and embarked on a diverse business career that included founding MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com, both of which he sold at substantial profits, the latter being sold to Yahoo! Inc., making Cuban a billionaire. In 2002, the service was discontinued.
Cuban's investments span various industries, from technology and media to sports and entertainment. He has been a prominent figure in the NBA, known for his involvement with the Mavericks (including their 2011 NBA championship) and disputes with the league's management. In his side ventures, Cuban has been involved in philanthropy, political commentary, and reality television.
As of January 2026, Forbes has estimated his net worth to be US$6 billion.
Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 31, 1958. His father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer. He described his mother, Shirley (née Feldman), as someone with "a different job or different career goal every other week."
Cuban is Jewish. He grew up in Mt. Lebanon, an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh, in a working-class family. His paternal grandfather changed the surname from "Chabenisky" to "Cuban" after his family emigrated from Russian Empire (modern territory of Ukraine) through Ellis Island. His maternal grandfather was a Bessarabian Jewish immigrant and his maternal grandmother was from Lithuania.
Cuban first ventured into business at age of 12. He sold garbage bags to pay for a pair of expensive sneakers. 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 completing his senior year of high school, he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he became a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. 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, where he worked converting the old manual process at smaller regional banks to new computerized systems.
In 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 co-founded MicroSolutions with support from his previous customers at Your Business Software. Initially, MicroSolutions operated as a systems 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
(over $14.7 million today). He made approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.
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 Hoosiers 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.
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 continued 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 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.
In 2005, Cuban invested $1.7 million in file-sharing company Red Swoosh, co-founded by Travis Kalanick, providing much-needed capital to the company after the early 2000s recession. Red Swoosh was acquired by Akamai for $19 million in 2007. Kalanick later approached Cuban in 2009 to invest in his next venture Uber at a $10 million valuation. Cuban proposed a $5 million valuation, but never heard back from Kalanick.