Mark Cuban Biography

American businessman and investor Mark Cuban was born in 1959 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cuban grew up in a working class family, and harbored a strong work ethic from a very young age. His earliest business ventures as a teenager were largely to raise funds for things he wanted, such as a pair of basketball shoes, which he paid for through earnings from the sales of garbage bags.

Mark Cuban started his university studies at the University of Pittsburgh but then transferred to Indiana University, graduating from the Kelley School of Business with a degree in Business Administration in 1981. During his years in school, Cuban worked constantly in a variety of jobs to raise money for his own business ventures, which included dance lessons and a bar. By 1982, Mark had moved to Dallas, Texas, where he began working as a salesperson in the burgeoning personal computer industry. Ultimately, he started his own company, MicroSolutions, a software reseller and system integrator. The company grew to be enormously successful, and less than ten years later Cuban sold it to CompuServe for six million dollars.

The transaction led to life-long career of investments and developments which have made Mark Cuban one of the era’s most well-known billionaires. Cuban’s investments are too numerous to mention in their entirety, but include: Landmark Theaters, a chain of art-house movie theaters; AXS TV, the first high-def satellite network; 2929 Entertainment, a film production company; and Magnolia Pictures.

Since 2012, Mark Cuban has been featured as one of the “shark” investors on the hit ABC reality show Shark Tank. His start-up and investment deals through Shark Tank total nearly one hundred, with nearly twenty million invested.

Most recently, Mark Cuban has been a vocal supporter of the “Stop Trump” movement, and although he largely identifies with the Libertarian political ideology, Cuban endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign, and served as a very vocal critic of Donald Trump’s claims of business success in an effort to prevent his rise to the presidency.