Mark Cuban Doles Out $35 Million In Bonuses To Dallas Mavericks Employees After Selling Majority Stake In The Franchise

Mark Cuban made news in 2023 by announcing he was ending his tenure on "Shark Tank" and then closed out the year by selling a share of his Dallas Mavericks National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise for $3.5 billion. He also rewarded his loyal employees with the Mavericks by paying them bonuses worth $35 million after the sale. This move further cemented his status as one of America's coolest billionaires.

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Cuban Has A Gift For Selling At The Right Time

An old classic country song about poker says, "You got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em." There may not be a better example of this than Cuban, who has shown a knack for getting in early and selling high for his entire career. His first stake in business was co-founding MicroSolutions, a systems integration and software reseller, to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990.

Cuban's next move was forming Broadcast.com with a former classmate from the University of Indiana in 1995. Broadcast.com was a forerunner to today's modern streaming services that famously broadcasted Victoria's Secret's first live fashion show online in 1999. More importantly for Cuban, it established his company as a player in the dot.com arena during an era where mergers and acquisitions were taking place at breakneck speed.

In 2000, Yahoo! came calling and purchased Broadcast.com for an unprecedented $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock. They did the deal shortly before the dot.com bust in the early 2000s, which saw hundreds of "can't-miss" companies suddenly go broke. Broadcast.com was one of them, and it was defunct within just a few years of the deal.  The acquisition is now regarded as one of the worst business deals of the era.

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Cuban Had The Foresight To Protect Himself From Heavy Stock Losses

Yahoo! faced huge losses in stock value during the dot.com bust. However, Cuban had hedged against that possibility, meaning his multibillion-dollar fortune was largely shielded from the losses. Talk about knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Because of his excellent timing and solid investment strategy, Cuban was one of few people to walk away from the dot.com era with their fortune intact.

A Tech Mogul Buys An NBA Franchise

Purchasing the NBA's Dallas Mavericks is one of the moves Mark Cuban made after selling Broadcast.com. Cuban bought the team from billionaire and former third-party presidential candidate H. Ross Perot for $285 million in early 2000. At the time, Dallas was one of the league's most moribund franchises, with a reputation for losing. Cuban turned them into a contender, and finally an NBA champion in 2011 when the Mavericks defeated the Miami Heat.

Cuban eventually became one of the most powerful owners in the NBA, and was an instrumental force in growing the league's revenue through massive television rights deals. The value of NBA franchises exploded, with many clubs now worth over $1 billion. In keeping with his theme of getting out at the top of the market, Cuban sold a majority of his stake in the Mavericks to a group led by the Adelson family.

The deal closed for $3.5 billion, which is not bad for a club that originally cost him less than 10% of that. He still owns a share of the team, and as a thank you to his employees, Cuban announced he would pay them $35 million in bonuses. No one, perhaps aside from Cuban, is sure what his next move will be, but if past performance is any indication, it will be profitable.

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