Mark Cuban says owning the Mavericks went from being about basketball to ‘about valuations’ and created ‘more stress’—it still made him $4.3 billion

Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks because he thought it would be fun. By the time he sold, he says, it had stopped being about basketball.

“It went from being about basketball to being about valuations,” Cuban said in an interview on The Diary of a CEO on Monday. He added that the shift “just created more stress.”

But the valuations worked out for him. Cuban bought the team for about $285 million in 2000 and sold his stake in the team for $3.5 billion in 2024, according to ESPN senior NBA insider Shams Charania. But Cuban says it’s a bit more than that.

“$4.3 [billion],” he said regarding what he made from the Mavericks deal. “Yeah.”

And he hasn’t left the business. In July he joined Harbinger Sports Partners, a $750 million private equity fund that took a minority stake in MLB’s Las Vegas Athletics and uses predictive analytics to size up a team’s ticket prices, sponsorships and local demand: the “Sports 2.0” playbook he ran in Dallas, now sold to investors.

When Mark Cuban initially bought the Dallas Mavericks at the turn of the century in January 2000, the franchise had little to show for its first two decades in the NBA. The team had endured years of losing, struggled to attract fans and had been named the “worst professional sports franchise.” But what Cuban........

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