Mark Cuban Considering Leaving Shark Tank As He Bets His Legacy On Low-Cost Drugs

Mark Cuban unlocks his phone and opens his inbox, which is pinging like crazy as email after email fills the screen. “Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,” he says, swiping each into the garbage with barely a moment’s thought.

One with the subject line “A Desperate Plea”: delete. Next, an email about a crypto project he’s working on—Cuban agreed to buy the digital rights to drawings by one of the World Trade Center architects and is planning to turn them into NFTs. He squints. The type’s too small. Next. Finally, an email from an aspiring entrepreneur. His first act of mercy: “I like these guys. I’ll save them for later.”

Cuban in real life is not that much different from the role he’s played for 11 years—or in TV math, 13 seasons—on Shark Tank. He listens to everyone, at least briefly, before making snap judgments. His personal email address is public (mcuban@gmail.com), and the billionaire investor slogs through every scam, spam message or pitch sent his way. Why? He can’t help it. “To me it’s the sport I get to compete in and I get to be really good at,” he says, grinning. “I’ll be 110 years old still doing whatever is the equivalent 50 years from now of responding to email.”

Cuban, the entrepreneur, has founded more than ten companies, starting in 1983 with software reseller MicroSolutions and up to Cost Plus Drugs, the public benefit corporation he star­ted in January 2022, which aims to lower prescription drug prices. Cuban, the insta-billionaire, sold Broadcast.com, an internet sports radio outfit, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999 (a few years la­ter, Yahoo shuttered the service). Cuban, the investor, has poured at least $25 million into crypto concerns (including dogecoin, the currency famously started as a joke) and taken stakes in at least 400 startups, many through Shark Tank.

Some of his gambles have done all right; some have blown up. But more than two decades later, Broadcast.com is still the main reason he got so rich, worth an estima­ted $4.6 billion. (Cuban didn’t start Broadcast.com; it was founded in 1992 by Chris Jaeb. He joined three years later with his college buddy Todd Wagner, also a Broadcast.com billionaire.) The Yahoo sale earned Cuban an estimated $1.1 billion payout after taxes. He spent $280 million of that buying a majority stake in the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks the next year. Bam, another slam dunk. Now worth $2.2 billion, according to Forbes’ estimate, his 85% stake in the team represents almost half his fortune.

“On the one hand I understand that nobody should have this much wealth, but it is what it is,” Cuban says. “You make the best of it, and I don’t feel guilty about it at all. I busted my ass to get here.”

Cuban is the rare billionaire who seems to actually enjoy being rich. In his younger years he embraced his wealth by buying a sprawling Dallas mansion, an apartment on Central Park West and a private jet, and traveling the world partying “like a rock star.” More recently he’s been having a blast doling out advice on Shark Tank and via Twitter (he has 8.8 million followers), buying shots for strangers and running his mouth to anyone who will listen. He still spends money on fun stuff. Case in point: He recently bought the town of Mustang, Texas (population: zero), as a favor to a dying friend (“this was his big asset”), and appointed one of his other pals the mayor. The billionaire toyed with the idea of filling the ghost town with life-size robotic dinosaurs made by one of his Shark Tank entrepreneurs but has since deemed that impractical. 

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