Mark Cuban got supremely lucky selling broadcast.com to Yahoo in the deal that best illustrated the crazy boom years of the .com bubble and believes that this makes him some kind of sage instead of a lottery winner.

You just can't compare him to Gates who got where he is today through a combination of luck at birth and supremely hard work (and some questionable business tactics).

Cuban's stake in Broadcast.com's was worth about $100M before they sold to Yahoo, and since the sale to Yahoo, he's managed to over double his net worth via the Mavericks and his business interests. He may not be Gates, but I think he's more than a lottery winner.

Doubling your money over 18 years is a only 4% rate of return. Not terrible, but also not impressive.

His compound rate of wealth increase, post paying taxes on the sale, is around ~7.5%. That beats the S&P 500 over that time, which very few professional money managers can do.

$1.1 billion to $4.08 billion [1].

His primary business holding, the Dallas Mavericks, has increased in value from $285 million to $1.9 billion [2] (per the latest Forbes estimate). For that investment, he has seen a rate of value increase of about 11% per year. That investment stomps the S&P 500 massively (which was at ~1400 when the acquisition closed).

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/mark-cuban/

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2018/02/07/nba-...

> His compound rate of wealth increase, post paying taxes on the sale, is around ~7.5%. That beats the S&P 500 over that time, which very few professional money managers can do.

Very few money managers that are accessible to people with less than 10^8 USD can beat the S&P after fees.

Bridgewater, (Ray Dalio's fund mentioned above) regularly gets 12.5% annual returns and they are most notable for being consistent, not high. Pre-2008 some investment banks were getting up to 20%.

A billionaire making 7.5% annually is fairly unimpressive if their goal was to make money (which it might not have been for Cuban).

I think it was around $1.4B, not $100M -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com

That's the sale to Yahoo.

From that article: "After the IPO, the company was worth $1 billion, Mark Cuban was worth $300 million" (obviously a little more than the $100m I thought)

Broadcast.com had $100m in revenue for fiscal 1999. Maybe that's what you were thinking of.

Cuban's position was worth more on paper at its peak before the Yahoo acquisition. Broadcast.com was acquired for $130 per share, the high that year before the acquisition, was $144 per share.

Prior to the acquisition, the stock was trading at $118. Yahoo only paid a 10% premium. Cuban was worth over a billion dollars before the acquisition.

https://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-broadcast-com-sizzle-after-d...

I think the issue that people have with Mark Cuban's accumulated wealth is that it was during the Internet Bubble, and the stock would have been worthless just a few months later. I think Yahoo basically discounted the price of Broadcast a year later to zero.

Cuban had some very smart bankers at Goldman

He would be wealthier today if he had immediately put everything in an S&P 500 index fund and spent the last 20 years ignoring it.

That's factually wrong.

The S&P 500 was 1300 when he sold to Yahoo. He received $1.4 billion of Yahoo (14.6m shares at $95/each). He had to pay taxes on clearing out that position as well, so you can safely assume his after tax position was more like ~$1.1 billion. He very solidly beat the S&P 500.

He's worth $4.08 billion today according to Bloomberg (ranked #500 on their global rich list). He has increased his net worth by nearly 4x.

The S&P 500 is at 2747. It has just over doubled since April 1999. He'd be missing a billion dollars if he had gone with the S&P 500, including any dividends.

He was better off with what he did, he beat the S&P 500 index fund. Not only did he make more money his way, he got to do what he wanted to with his money, such as buying the Mavericks.

Sure, though given his investments in startups etc he could easily have lost 90% of it.

thank you. this is always something people forget. if you want to claim you are a good business man, you need to show that your businesses do better than an index fund.

8% will double your money in 9 years. It's been almost 20.

Doubling an investment is not too hard over 20 years.

Except he sold his Yahoo stock pretty early so he then had to make decisions on how to invest and grow the cash.

He just needs to get 4% yield per year to double it in 20 years.

It may be stylistic. Cuban tends to opine a lot and sometimes comes across as a blowhard.

He's overexposed too. There's something about people like Gates who don't make a lot of public pronouncements. When they speak, you tend to think it's because they have something of value to say (and they generally do).

Probably doesn't hurt that they also let their work do most of the talking for them (e.g. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

I was thinking the same thing. It really makes me wonder whether he's trying to throw people off or if he got to where he is through dumb luck.

Yes, he's not a super genius. He's reasonably smart and good at spotting trends.

I take the advice of anyone with a huge grain of salt.

Probably the reason manifests through his parody in the show, Silicon Valley.

He’s from the “got lucky” school of billionairing, but he has the ego of a Jobs or Gates. A well funded blowhard in other words; your instincts are on target. That, and evaluating statements on their own (dubious in this case) merit is a good thing, always. Even very smart and accomplished people can say things which deserve careful scrutiny, and may come up short.

Lol. You guys crack me up. He built a company and sold it for a bucket of money. This board talks about trying to do that ALL DAMN DAY. He did it Lol.

...And? I’m not sure what your point is, other than trying very very hard to communicate your supposed amusement.