‘That’s Just Insane’: Mark Cuban Opens Up About the 1 Factor All Billionaires Share

The entrepreneur and investor says luck and timing were the real forces behind his billion-dollar fortune.

BY AMAYA NICHOLE, NEWS WRITER

Mark Cuban. Photos: Getty Images; Adobe Stock

A resurfaced video of Mark Cuban reflecting on what it truly means to be a billionaire is gaining attention online.

“Anybody who’s a billionaire who thinks they could just do it all over again is lying their ass off,” Cuban said.

Just two months after announcing he was selling his majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks and departing Shark Tank after 15 seasons, Cuban sat down with comedian and TV host Trevor Noah on his podcast, What Now? with Trevor Noah, in January 2024.

The conversation covered his reasons for those major life changes, his ambitions to disrupt the American healthcare system through Cost Plus Drugs, and the journey that made him a billionaire.

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“If the internet stock market hadn’t just taken off when we were starting AudioNet, you wouldn’t even know who I was,” he said. 

In 1995, Cuban used proceeds from the $2 million sale of his first tech company, MicroSolutions, to co-found AudioNet with Todd Wagner—a live radio and sports streaming platform later rebranded as Broadcast.com. What followed was one of the defining deals of the dot-com era: Yahoo! acquired the platform for $5.7 billion in 1999, turning Cuban’s early wager on streaming technology into a fortune.

The timing proved costly for Yahoo, as the acquisition came just before the internet boom collapsed and the company shut down the streaming service within a few years.

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