Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American entrepreneur, television personality, media proprietor, and investor. Cuban is a named inventor of 11 patent families and 23 distinct patent publications for his inventions. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) Dallas Mavericks, co-owner of 2929 Entertainment, and chairman of AXS TV.

 

Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer. Cuban has described his mother, Shirley, as someone with "a different job or different career goal every other week." He grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mount Lebanon, in a Jewish working-class family.

 

At age 16, Cuban took advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by running newspapers from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. Instead of attending high school for his senior year, he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi International fraternity.

 

He is a "beloved" fan of Pittsburgh's NFL team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. After one year at the University of Pittsburgh, he transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Management.

 

On July 7, 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas, where he first found work 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 started his own company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system 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.

 

Cuban's first tech company was a major success. He sold the startup to CompuServe in 1990 for a monster $6 million. Cuban wasn't satisfied, however, and was convinced that the future of business was Internet technology. His next few years were spent networking (and partying), learning as much as he could about the potential of the Internet, and what consumers could get out of it.

 

It turns out that Cuban was one of his own target audiences. Cuban teamed up with fellow IU alumnus Todd Wagner to start AudioNet in 1995. Cuban was one of the real pioneers of the idea of live Internet streaming in the mid-1990s.

 

The timing and concept couldn't have been more perfect for Cuban. AudioNet (later changed to Broadcast.com) combined his three great passions – technology, sports, and business management – while filling an enormous consumer demand. It also happened during the formation of the tech bubble.

 

Wagner and Cuban took Broadcast.com public in 1998. Cuban recalls what it was like watching his stock prices soar, saying "I was sitting in front of a computer, hitting refresh ... when the stock got to a certain point I kinda screamed and jumped around." After its stock prices finally settled at more than $200 a share, Yahoo stepped in and bought out the business for $6 billion.

 

Cuban bought a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million. The National Basketball Association was in a bit of a post-Michael Jordan slump at the time, and Cuban wasn't brash about changes that he thought would help the league market itself better.

 

Cuban was featured on the cover of the November 2003 premiere issue of Best magazine announcing the arrival of High Definition Television. Cuban also was co-founder (with Philip Garvin) of AXS TV, the first high-definition satellite television network.

 

In 2018, Cuban was No.190 on Forbes' list of "World's Richest People", with a net worth of $3.9 billion. He is also a partner in Synergy Sports Technology, a web-based basketball scouting, and video delivery tool, used by many NBA teams.

 

Mark Cuban is a great example of someone who loves business, who is dedicated to rising up and becoming a self-made man. In addition to his media company and basketball team, he's also an investor in everything from toilet seats, various investing websites, and sports technologies.