Uh-oh… turns out everyone’s favorite ex-shark, and pretty much only likeable billionaire on the planet, has a sketchy past. The onetime owner of the Dallas Mavericks was known in the tank for his blunt yet kind delivery while on the ABC juggernaut, and today he’s carved out a name for himself as the Robin Hood of prescription drugs thanks to his online pharmacy: the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company.
But his business practices weren’t always on the up and up.
The Scamp of Indiana University
When he was a junior at Indiana University, Cuban needed cash badly. Just like most college kids! But instead of waiting tables, he got a little more resourceful. And a lot more entrepreneurial. On an episode of the Life in Seven Songs podcast in 2024, Cuban explained that he set up a version of a chain letter system, where fellow students gave him $100 each, and then he encouraged them to recruit more and more “investors” to earn back their cash and then some.
His dorm mailbox turned into a glorified cash drop as day after day, envelopes stuffed with bills were delivered to him. In his slight defense, he grew up in a modest household in Pittsburgh and couldn’t afford school otherwise. Plus, can’t we all agree that these questionable practices made him the altruistic disruptor that he is today?
Life Post-Ponzi Scheme
After college, Cuban moved to Dallas and continued to live like a broke, scrappy undergrad as he got his life together. While in Dallas, he started his first company, MicroSolutions, which he later sold for a lot more than what he once earned in his Indiana mailbox. His next venture was AudioNet, which became Broadcast.com and this catapulted him into the financial stratosphere as Yahoo later bought it for $5.7 billion. For 23 years, from 2000 to 2023, Cuban was the majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks. He then joined “Shark Tank” full-time in 2012 and anchored the show for 14 seasons, leaving in May 2025.
In January of 2022, Cuban co-founded his most impactful business to date with the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, which aims to provide affordable medications through a transparent pricing model. With this desire to make medical care more accessible, he clearly hasn’t forgotten the little guy, like the ones who first invested in him back in college. In fact, in 2024 he told Wired that he gets emails and letters at least every two weeks saying, “Oh my God, my grandma’s alive,” or “You saved me $15,000 a year on my cancer medication. I would be dead if it weren’t or you.”
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