Mark Cuban has disclosed that as a college student in the early 1980s he financed his junior year through a dormitory chain letter, which he now calls a scam, to earn cash from fellow students.
01Summary
- 01Cuban told the Life in Seven Songs podcast (2024) that his chain letter asked each participant to give him $100; he took $50 and passed $50 to the person at the top of a list.
- 02He said he ensured his friends got their money back, and the scheme paid for his entire junior year at Indiana University.
- 03After being fired from a software sales job in Dallas in the 1980s, he founded MicroSolutions and sold it for $6 million in 1990.
- 04He later co-founded Broadcast.com, which was sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999.
- 05Cuban, now worth an estimated $10.4 billion, sold his majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $3.5 billion in late 2023 to shield his children from online criticism during losing seasons.
02Why it matters
This story reveals the early, ethically questionable hustle of one of the world's best-known investors, offering a cautionary tale about the origins of wealth and the risks of pyramid schemes.
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