How Much Did Mark Cuban Purchase the Dallas Mavericks For?
How Much Did Mark Cuban Purchase the Dallas Mavericks For? The NBA wouldn’t be what it is today if there weren’t brave investors to put their millions in team ownership. They all come from different backgrounds having in common the love for basketball.
Not many NBA fans are familiar with these gentlemen but we all have heard of the Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban. Today, Cuban’s net worth is an estimated $4.3 billion, according to Forbes, and ranked #177 on the 2020 Forbes 400 list.
The 63-year-old Cuban has been a regular face by the Mavs’ bench and many times his temper and ‘freedom of speech’ have put him in the headlines.
But before we get there, let’s see how just a regular kid from Pittsburgh suburb becomes a billionaire and an owner of an NBA team.
Cuban’s first step into business occurred at age 12 when he sold garbage bags to pay for a pair of expensive basketball shoes. Some years later, he was making 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 attending high school for his senior year, Cuban enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi International fraternity.
After one year at the University of Pittsburgh, he transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington and graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Management.
Cuban’s awareness of money management was seen then as he chose Indiana’s Kelley School of Business without even visiting the campus simply because it had the least expensive tuition of all the business schools on the top 10 list.
During college, Cuban had various business ventures, including a bar, disco lessons, and a chain letter.
After graduating, he went back to his hometown in Pennsylvania and took a job with Mellon Bank, and immersed himself in the study of machines and networking.
In 1982, the 24-year-old Cuban moved to Dallas 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.
It all paid off as Cuban started his own company, MicroSolutions, with help 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.
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. He made approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal and there and then, Cuban became a millionaire at the age of 32.
But Cuban didn’t stop there. In 1995, fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner and Cuban joined Audionet combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosier 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. The same year, Broadcast.com helped launch the first live-streamed Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. During the dot com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock.
After the sale of Broadcast.com, Cuban hedged against the risk of a decline in the value of the Yahoo shares he received in the deal.
Yahoo’s costly purchase of Broadcast.com is now regarded as one of the worst internet acquisitions of all time. Broadcast.com along with 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 that he would have lost most of his fortune if he had not done so.
How Much Did Mark Cuban Purchase the Dallas Mavericks For?
At the beginning of 2000, Cuban purchased a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million from H. Ross Perot, Jr.
“I love the Mavericks. I am just a huge Mavericks fan. And I have just been blessed and put in a position where I can contribute. This is a business, but it is a business that I am willing to commit as much money as it takes. Whatever energy, funding, to make this team successful,” said Cuban at the time he bought the team as a 41-year-old businessman.
“If you look at winning teams in the NBA, there has been a level of continuity to all of them. So, my focus is not going to be okay let’s go in there and make immediate changes, my focus is going to be, let’s go in there and learn. Let’s see how things are operating and what’s working and what’s not working,” Cuban says in 2000.
“Just like Broadcast.com and other businesses before that, it is time to go to work,” Cuban said in 2000. “And it’s time to really focus on the things I need to do and first is learning, getting fans into the arena, and getting people excited and I think we are making significant progress there.”
In the 20 years before Cuban bought the team, the Mavericks won only 40% of their games and had a playoff record of 21–32.
In the 10 years following, the team won 69 percent of their regular-season games and reached the playoffs in each of those seasons except for one. Finally, in 2011, the team won their first, and so far, the only NBA championship.
Under Cuban, the Mavs haven’t raised only on the basketball court but in the business market as well. According to Forbes, the Dallas Mavericks as a franchise are currently worth over $2.45 billion.
They make $868 million from their city and market. They earn an additional $112 million from their stadium, such as when fans decide to buy tickets or purchase concessions when attending one of their games. Then another $302 million is attributed to their brands like merchandise and things like that. The final and largest piece of that total is the $1.4 billion that they receive from the league itself.
According to Forbes magazine, the Mavs are among the NBA’s 10 most valuable teams of 2021. Cuban’s team is currently in ninth place. As usual, the New York Knicks are on top with $5 billion worth. The Golden State Warriors are second with $4.7 billion followed by the Los Angeles Lakers with $4.6. Chicago Bulls, Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Clippers, Brooklyn Nets, and Houston Rockets are the other teams that are worth more than the Mavs at the moment.
What makes Cuban success with the Mavs even bigger is that he doesn’t even look at it as an investment. Per his words today, he bought the team simply because he loves the sport.
“It never crossed my mind as an investment. I did it because I love basketball,” Cuban says.
That love for the game mixed with his temper has made Cuban the owner who has paid the most fines in NBA history. Cuban ownership has been the source of extensive media attention and controversy involving league policies.
Cuban has been fined by the NBA, mostly for critical statements about the league and referees, at least $1.665 million for more than 10 incidents.
Even the greatest player in Mavs’ history whose jersey was retired by the organization in the past week, Dirk Nowitzki, had a problem with Cuban’s behavior at the time.
“He’s got to learn how to control himself as well as the players do. We can’t lose our temper all the time on the court or off the court, and I think he’s got to learn that, too. He’s got to improve in that area and not yell at the officials the whole game. I don’t think that helps us. He sits right there by our bench. I think it’s a bit much. But we all told him this before. It’s nothing new. The game starts, and he’s already yelling at them. So he needs to know how to control himself a little,” said the player who meanwhile became the sixth-best scorer in NBA history.
In an interview, Cuban said that he matches NBA fines with charitable donations of equal amounts.
In a nationally publicized incident in 2002, he criticized the league’s manager of officials, Ed T. Rush, saying that he “wouldn’t be able to manage a Dairy Queen.” Dairy Queen Management took offense to Cuban’s comments and invited him to manage a Dairy Queen restaurant for a day. Cuban accepted the company’s invitation and worked for a day at a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas, where fans lined up in the street to get a Blizzard from the owner of the Mavericks.
During the 2005–06 NBA season, Cuban started a booing campaign when former Mavericks player Michael Finley returned to play against the Mavericks as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. Finley today is the Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Dallas Mavericks.
In a playoff series between the Mavericks and Spurs, Cuban cursed Spurs forward Bruce Bowen and was fined $25,000 by the NBA for rushing onto the court and criticizing NBA officials.
In 2009, the league fined Cuban $25,000 for yelling at Denver Nuggets player J. R. Smith at the end of the first half on a Mavericks-at-Nuggets game played on January 13. Cuban was apparently incensed that Smith had thrown an elbow that barely missed Mavericks forward Antoine Wright. Cuban offered to match the fine with a donation to a charity of Smith’s choosing.
Later that year, Cuban made a reference to the Denver Nuggets being “thugs” after a loss to the Nuggets in game 3 of the Western Conference Semifinals. The statement was geared towards the Nuggets and their fans. As he passed Kenyon Martin’s mother, who was seated near Cuban as he left the arena, he pointed at her and said, “that includes your son.”
This controversial comment revisited media attention on Cuban yet again. Cuban issued an apology the next day referencing the poor treatment of away fans in arenas around the league. The league issued a statement stating that they would not fine him.
In 2018, Cuban was fined $600,000 by the NBA for stating that the Dallas Mavericks should “tank for the rest of the season.” Commissioner Adam Silver stated that the fine was “for public statements detrimental to the NBA.
Cuban showed his graciousness in the case with former Mavericks player Delonte West.
West lost his job with the Mavs and the NBA in 2014 due to his out blasts coming from his bipolar disorder.
During the following years, West was photographed in a public place in Houston while barefoot and wearing a hospital gown.
A photo of West panhandling in Temple Hills, Maryland went viral. The photo sparked speculation that West was homeless, as the Twitter account that broke the photo suggested as such and asked his followers to pray for West given his psychological issues.
In 2020, a video surfaced showing West being beaten on a Washington, DC highway.
After photos circulated showing West as panhandling at an intersection in Dallas, Cuban picked up West from a gas station. He paid for drug rehabilitation treatment and provided West a hotel room to stay in. Later, reports came in that West now has a job at the rehab facility where he checked in and has reunited with his mother.
