Mark Cuban is well-known for his tenure on Shark Tank. With a net worth of several billion dollars, he is by far the wealthiest of the "shark" investors. Cuban made his fortune during the dot-com boom and (luckily for him) got out at the right time. Here's how rich Mark Cuban is now, and what he does with his money.
The short answer
Mark Cuban is estimated to be worth approximately $3.4 billion as of July 2017, according to Forbes. This ranks the 58-year-old self-made billionaire as the 564th richest person in the world and the 207th richest in the United States.
Mark Cuban first earned his fortune during the tech boom of the 1990s and has increased his wealth since then. Image source: Getty Images.
How Mark Cuban made (and kept) his money
Mark Cuban is a self-made billionaire, with the bulk of his fortune originating from the sale of businesses he has founded or co-founded.
Specifically, Cuban founded MicroSolutions, a system integrator and software reseller, in the 1980s and sold the venture to CompuServe in 1990 for the sum of $6 million.
A few years later, in 1995, Cuban co-founded Audionet, which eventually became Broadcast.com in 1998. The company was an early player in live-streaming and had more than 300 employees in 1999. The company was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock at the height of the dot-com boom in July 1999.
In a particularly smart (or lucky) move, Cuban decided to hedge against a market crash, since he was compensated for the Broadcast.com sale in stock rather than cash. He also chose to diversify his assets -- a big part of this was his purchase of the Dallas Mavericks. If you aren't familiar with what happened to tech stocks in 2000, here's a chart of the Nasdaq's performance:
And while we'll never know for sure, Broadcast.com might not have survived the dot-com bust as a stand-alone company. The state of live-streaming technology at the time wasn't stellar, and the service offered a limited content selection.
Simply put, the sale couldn't have come at a better time for Cuban and Broadcast.com's investors. Cuban is one of the dot-com era's true success stories. He made a fortune during the boom and didn't lose it all after the bubble burst.
Mark Cuban's assets today
To be clear, it's impossible to know exactly where all of Cuban's assets are invested today. However, we do know some of his major acquisitions over the years:
- In January 2000, Cuban purchased a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million. Today, the franchise is estimated to be worth $1.45 billion and has been a big driver of Cuban's increasing net worth over the years.
- Cuban purchased Landmark Theaters, a chain of art house movie theaters, in 2003.
- Cuban co-owns 2929 Entertainment.
- Cuban owns film distributor Magnolia Pictures.
- Cuban paid $40 million for his Gulfstream V jet in 1999, shortly after the sale of Broadcast.com.
- Cuban has been rather active in start-up investing, both before and after his tenure on Shark Tank. By 2016, Cuban had invested $19.4 million in 82 deals on the show and had invested in numerous ventures before joining the program.
