Copyright Inc. Magazine
Mark Cuban shared that he ran a Ponzi scheme in the 1980s to pay for his junior year of college. He operated a chain letter system, asking fellow students for money in exchange for more down the line. “There’d be envelopes with $50 from here, $50 from there. It was amazing,” Cuban said of his dorm mailbox in an episode of the “Life in Seven Songs” podcast last year. While he says he saw to it that his friends made back their money, he acknowledged that, “it was basically a scam.” At that time Cuban was years away from becoming the billionaire, former Mavericks owner, and TV personality he is known for today. He came from a working class family, his dad occasionally handing him a $20 bill, he said. His hustle is what got him through the year at Indiana University. After college, Cuban moved to Dallas and slept on the floor of his friend’s apartment. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation “If somebody was out of town, I got a bed,” he says. He worked at a PC software store, but his stint was cut short when his urge for business got the best of him. Rather than clocking in for work one morning, he skipped his shift to close a deal with a customer. The move got him fired, but it served as motivation to start his own business, computer consulting company MicroSolutions. He sold the company for millions, and then co-founded streaming platform AudioNet, later called Broadcast.com. Yahoo bought it in 1999 for $5.7 billion. “That gave me confidence,” Cuban said, adding that the sale made him “excited about business.” Now he’s running Cost Plus Drugs, his startup that works to sell prescription medications at lower prices. “We get letters and emails weekly, if not more often, saying, ‘You saved my life,’” Cuban says. Cuban isn’t in a position where he has to hustle like he once did, and yet he does. He says people ask him why he’s still doing business now that he has money. His answer? He enjoys it. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I love doing this stuff,” he says. “You know, why slow down? This is fun.”
