Mark Cuban Shared $600 A Month Dallas Apartment With 5 Guys And Slept On The Living Room Floor – 'I Had Nothing. So I Had Nothing To Lose'

Before Mark Cuban became a billionaire and household name, he was just another broke 20-something sharing a $600-a-month apartment with five guys. And not in the cute sitcom way – this was more "brown shag carpet and sleeping bags" than "Friends."

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In 2018, The Dallas Morning News republished a 2011 article detailing his arrival in the city decades prior. According to the news outlet, it was a reminder that Cuban was just like most people in their 20s … broke and searching for their path in life. 

According to the article, in 1982, Cuban arrived in Dallas with almost nothing but a rusting Fiat X1/9 leaking oil and hope. His car had a hole in the floorboard and he had about as much money as you'd find under a couch cushion. But hey, he had spirit – and a sleeping bag, which turned out to be essential.

His first stop was a $600-a-month apartment at The Hill, a subdivision of Dallas' sprawling Village Apartments. To this day, the Village is known as a hub for young adults, but back then, it was a mecca for broke 20-somethings living on cheap beer, instant noodles and ambition.

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The apartment Cuban moved into – affectionately dubbed "The Hotel" – was home to five other guys. They were all scraping by, working odd jobs and cramming into the space to split the rent six ways. 

Cuban and roommate Mark Wisely had no bedrooms to call their own. They slept in sleeping bags on the living room floor, surrounded by the scent of Miller Lite, Budweiser and whatever else spilled during last night's party. "If you didn't have a buzz when you went to bed, you had one when you woke up," Wisely quipped.

While the apartment was technically "nice" at move-in, it didn't stay that way for long. "By the time we got done with it, it wasn't," recalled Greg Schipper, one of the six roommates. Forget closet space. Cuban stacked his clothes in a corner, where they remained perpetually wrinkled. Clean? Maybe. Dirty? Definitely.

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If the living conditions were questionable, the towel situation was even worse. Cuban had exactly two towels, both frayed to the point of comedy. His glasses were held together by athletic tape. "Tape worked. Besides, nobody saw me wear them outside the hotel," Cuban said. His roommate even said they once ended up in the toilet, which they discovered after a party. 

Cuban wasn't exactly living the highlife. His first job in Dallas was bartending at a place called Elan. It didn't pay much but came with happy hour snacks – key for stretching his meager budget. He supplemented his income by selling software at a store called Your Business Software. Not that he knew much about computers when he started, but learning on the fly would become one of his trademarks.

Of course, not everything went smoothly. Cuban was fired from that job after closing a software deal instead of opening the store as his boss had demanded. That Thursday, he was fired, but Friday, he was riding to Galveston in a friend's car, writing the early plans for his first company, MicroSolutions.

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Even back then, Cuban's entrepreneurial streak was hard to miss. In college, he made money by teaching disco lessons and running chain letters. In Dallas, he and his roommates threw massive parties, at one point packing 2,000 people into a warehouse. Cuban's cut was $5,000 – small change compared to what he'd go on to earn, but a big deal at the time.

By 1990, MicroSolutions sold for $6 million. A few years later, Cuban struck gold again with Broadcast.com, which Yahoo acquired for $5.9 billion in 1999. But in 1982, he was just a scrappy 20-something trying to make rent and avoid sleeping on the literal floor.

As Cuban put it in the article, "I had nothing. So I had nothing to lose." That mindset turned out to be the foundation for everything that followed – though thankfully, he's long since upgraded his towels.

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