Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an outspoken billionaire who is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team.
See also: ArmchairGM users who are Mark Cuban fans
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
Cuban's first foray in the business world was as a garbage bag and powdered milk salesman, when he sold garbage bags around his neighborhood in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh.
Cuban earned his way to college by giving disco dancing lessons, and even earned about $1,100 from starting a chain letter. He chose Indiana University because of the school's low cost compared to the nation's other top business schools. There he joined Pi Lambda Phi International Fraternity. Even in college, Cuban was seen as controversial by some: his advisor admonished him for taking advanced courses during his freshman year and he was dissuaded from getting his MBA after getting a bachelor's degree.
[edit] Business success
Shortly after college, in 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas and found work with a new IBM PC software dealer. He was fired for choosing to make a sales call to close a $10,000 software deal instead of opening the store on time. Cuban founded a new company, MicroSolutions, and was able to convince some of his previous customers to come along. The Microsolutions became a system integrator and reseller for companies such as Novell, 3Com, IBM, Banyan, Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems, and an early adopter of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company's biggest clients was Perot Systems. In July 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe, Inc., then a subsidiary of H&R Block, for $6 million.
Cuban and fellow Indiana alum Todd Wagner still eagerly followed their college basketball team, and conceived the idea of broadcasting live games and events through the Internet. They began Audionet in 1995 with a single Packard Bell server and ISDN line, which became Broadcast.com in 1998. They achieved success by broadcasting sporting and corporate events much less expensively than with existing leased lines. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and annual revenues close to $100 million. With the stock market now in the midst of the Dot-com boom, Cuban was able to sell the company to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock.
[edit] Sports
With the Yahoo! transaction complete, Cuban decided to pursue his love of basketball, and bought the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million from a group led by H. Ross Perot, Jr. According to legend, Cuban bought the team after an incident in which he and some friends were watching a Mavericks game and Cuban remarked that he could do a better job of managing the team than whoever was doing it at the time. His friends then told him to put his money where his mouth is and purchase the team. The sale was finalized on February 14, 2000.
Cuban has become one of the most controversial NBA team owners in history, piling up a total of more than $1 million in fines, mostly for controversial statements against the league and its referees. In one incident, he asserted that the league's director of officials, Ed Rush, wouldn't be able to manage a Dairy Queen. When Dairy Queen management took offense, Cuban worked for a day at a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas, where eager fans lined up in the street to get a Blizzard from the owner of the Mavericks.
Cuban has played an important role in restoring the Mavericks to championship contender status. He presided over the resurgence of the franchise. Unlike most owners who watch games from skyboxes, Cuban sits alongside fans in the crowd. However, Cuban has received criticism for his erratic trade-in/trade-out policy each postseason and for providing big contracts for underperforming players, such as Shawn Bradley, and Erick Dampier. He also allowed Steve Nash to leave as a free agent following the 2004 season. Nash was named the league's MVP for the Phoenix Suns the next two years. Prior to the 2005-2006 season, Cuban also cut long-time face of the franchise, Michael Finley, in a cost-savings move, then orchestrated a booing campaign when Finley returned later that year in the playoffs as a member of the San Antonio Spurs [1]. In that series, which the Mavs eventually won 4 games to 3, Cuban publicly insulted the city of San Antonio and its fans [2], cursed Bruce Bowen after Game 6 [3], and was fined $200,000 for rushing onto the court after Game 1 and offering suggestions for "improvement" of NBA playoff officiating [4].
Cuban is a dedicated Mavericks fan, known for flying his $41 million private airplane, a Gulfstream Aerospace Gulfstream V N718MC, to attend away games, and his tendency for wearing Mavericks T-shirts and jerseys at games both at home and on the road. Because of this, magazines and newspapers have dubbed him "the fans' dream (come true)."
In 2005, Cuban had expressed an interest in buying the NHL's St. Louis Blues and Major League Baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates.
[edit] Trivia
- The Guinness Book of Records credits Cuban with the "largest single e-commerce transaction," $40 million for his Gulfstream V jet in October 1999.[5]
