Mark Cuban at a public event. Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Mark Cuban’s path from a Pittsburgh suburb to the Dallas business world ran through a Midwest campus. Born July 31, 1958, in Pittsburgh and raised in Mt. Lebanon, he spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh before transferring to Indiana University Bloomington. He graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in management, according to his Wikipedia biography.
From software reseller to Broadcast.com
Cuban moved to Dallas in 1982. There he co-founded MicroSolutions, a computer consulting and systems company. He sold it to CompuServe, then a subsidiary of H&R Block, in 1990 for $6 million.
In 1995 he teamed with Todd Wagner on Audionet, an early effort to stream audio over the internet. The business was renamed Broadcast.com in 1998. Yahoo acquired it in 1999 in a stock deal valued at $5.7 billion, one of the better-known transactions of the first internet boom.
Ownership of the Dallas Mavericks
On Jan. 4, 2000, Cuban bought a majority stake in the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks from H. Ross Perot Jr. for $285 million. Under his ownership the team won the 2011 NBA championship. In December 2023 the NBA approved the sale of a 73% controlling interest to Miriam Adelson, Sivan Dumont and Patrick Dumont. Cuban kept a minority stake in the franchise and said he earned an estimated $3.5 billion from the transaction, according to Wikipedia. The sale ended a stretch of nearly 24 years in which he was the public face of the franchise.
His interest in sports ownership reached Chicago once. In 2008 he made an initial $1.3 billion bid for the Chicago Cubs, but he was not chosen for the final round of bidding in January 2009.
Television and a mail-order pharmacy
Cuban became a regular investor on ABC’s Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs pitch their companies to a panel. In November 2023 he announced that the show’s 16th season would be his last. He also founded the cable networks HDNet and AXS TV, and HDNet Fights, a mixed martial arts series, premiered on Oct. 13, 2007.
In January 2022 the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company began selling generic medications directly to consumers, without going through insurance. The company is a public benefit corporation based in Dallas. Radiologist Alex Oshmyansky is its chief executive and co-founded it with Cuban. The pharmacy sells without insurance and publishes a formula: the cost of the drug, a 15% markup, and flat fees for pharmacy service and shipping. In 2023 the company completed a manufacturing facility in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood.
The broad outline is simple to state. Cuban’s career, taken in sequence, covers software services, internet media, professional basketball, television and health care. Most of those chapters were based in Dallas, where he arrived in 1982 with a business degree from Bloomington. For readers in Evanston and across the Midwest, the Indiana connection is the thread: the Kelley School in Bloomington is where his formal business training came from. He sold his first company in 1990, and he sold Broadcast.com roughly nine years after that.
Biographical details come from Wikipedia’s entries on Mark Cuban and Cost Plus Drugs.
Thomas Brennan covers property taxes, real estate, transit and the local economy for The Evanston Edge.
