Mark Cuban Planned To Retire By Age 35: He Says There's Only One Reason He Didn't

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has founded several successful companies. He’s also part owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a star on the popular television show “Shark Tank.”

He wouldn’t be where he is today if he retired in his mid-30s as he originally intended, and he owes a lot of that to his drive to be the best. 

What To Know: As a young entrepreneur in his 20s, fresh out of Indiana University’s esteemed Kelley School of Business, Cuban founded software consulting business MicroSolutions.

According to CNBC, the young entrepreneur wanted to get rich and enter retirement by age 35. By the time he was 32, he sold the company for $6 million, pocketing around $2 million in profit.

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But he didn’t stop there like he initially planned. In a September 2022 episode of the “Re:Thinking” podcast, he revealed why he couldn’t just call it quits. 

“I’m not retired because I’m too competitive,” Cuban told Wharton psychologist Adam Grant on the show. 

The get-rich-quick mentality drove a lot of his early decision-making, but chalking the MicroSolutions sale up as a win left the then-millionaire hungry for more.

Every entrepreneur wants to “be that entrepreneur that disrupts an industry and changes it,” Cuban said: “What's better than that?”

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He’s well on his way to disrupting the pharmaceutical industry with the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, which he founded at the beginning of 2022.

Costplusdrugs.com’s online pharmacy now carries over 2,000 prescription products, which are delivered via mail to thousands of customers each day.

The company is transparent on costs, charging a standard markup on the drugs it sells. That results in prices that often come in at a fraction of the cost of their big pharma alternatives. As a public-benefit corporation, the company’s mission of improving public health is just as important as the numbers at the bottom of the balance sheet.

Speaking with Grant on the podcast, Cuban noted that if he were in his 20s again, he would probably have the same mindset as he did before and would look to start something that he could sell for a quick profit.

“But now, the next dollar in my life, the marginal value of my next dollar is de minimis. It's not going to change my life a lot. So my decision-making process is completely different,” Cuban said.

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Photo: Gage Skidmore from Flickr.

Some elements of this story were previously reported by Benzinga and it has been updated.