'Shark Tank' star Mark Cuban did one thing that made 300 of his workers millionaires instantly
Besides scouting for interesting start-ups, former 'Shark Tank' judge Mark Cuban also had a passion for sports. After quitting the reality show, the billionaire also sold most of his Dallas Mavericks shares. In an episode of the 'Club Shay Shay' podcast, Cuban explained how much he values the people who work for him. He shared that after selling his part of the Mavericks, he gave out a staggering $35 million in bonuses, as reported by Market Realist.
Cuban first took the sporting world by storm when he bought the team in 2000 for $285 million. Subsequently, he worked hard to increase the team’s value. When he decided to sell most of his shares, the Mavericks were worth about $3.5 billion, according to Forbes. The exact value became clear when Miriam Adelson bought the majority stake in the team. Cuban wasn’t the only person responsible for the team’s success. He recognized the efforts of the Mavericks employees. “It ended up being a lot more actually, but I am not there without them,” he told ESPN analyst Shannon Sharpe.
In every business I've sold I've paid out bonuses to every employee that was there more than a year. https://t.co/02NdL9a41q, 300 out of 330 employees became millionaires. Microsolutions, I paid out 20 pct to our 80 employees. HDNet wasn't as big , but paid out about 20pct… https://t.co/hTvCZnVvUF
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) June 5, 2024
Cuban explained that giving bonuses was something he had always done for employees at his other companies. He shared, “I did it with MicroSolutions, you know, we had 80 employees, [and] they all got paid." He sold MicroSolutions, his first company, for $6 million to CompuServe in 1990. He told CNBC's Make It that he took 20% of the sale price and shared it with his 80 employees. If the money had been divided equally, each person would have received $15,000. Cuban did something similar after selling most of his shares in HDNet (now AXS TV) in 2019. "I did it with Broadcast.com — out of 330 employees, 300 became millionaires. And I wanted to do the same thing with the Mavs," Cuban stressed.
He quickly announced the bonuses in late 2023. By January 2024, CNN Sport reported that Cuban had told the employees about the bonus through an internal memo. “As a thank you for all your hard work [in] making the Mavs an amazing organization, each of you will be receiving a bonus from myself, and the Adelson and Dumont families. In total, we will be paying out approximately $35 plus million dollars in bonuses to you all,” the memo reportedly read.
Cuban also wrote in the memo that the leadership team used a system to calculate the bonuses based on how long each employee had worked for the team. Mavericks spokesperson Alan Rakowski confirmed the memo’s details to CNN. "You know, they were there for me the whole time…for those who were there 20 years or more it was life-changing money," Cuban told Sharpe.
