While Mark Cuban now has $4.3 billion in the bank, he was once so broke that he didn’t even have enough money to get a bank account.
The announcement came during a pitch for fintech start-up Spare, on an episode of “Shark Tank.”
“When I was broke and sleeping on the couch, I couldn’t open up a bank account. You needed to have 200 bucks. You needed this, you needed that. They didn’t give me one,” said Cuban (who ended up investing $500,000 in Spare).
It’s hard to imagine Cuban ever being broke but the tech billionaire and the owner of Dallas Mavericks came from humble beginnings. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised by a working-class family. At age 14, cuban sold garbage bags and was a disco instructor.
“People thought I might go work at a mill. My mom wanted me to learn how to lay carpet because she was concerned about my future,” Cuban mentioned in a previous episode of “Shark Tank.”
Then, 24-year-old Cuban moved to Dallas with $60 to his name, after graduating from Indiana University in Bloomington. He and five other guys shared a $600-a-month three-bedroom flat. He says he was either sleeping on the floor or on the couch, and had no closet to store his clothes. At this time, Cuban worked at a club as a bartender to meet ends.
He claimed he couldn’t hold a job: “I had quit or been fired from three straight jobs,” said Cuban on a previous episode of “Shark Tank.”
Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks’ outspoken owner, is worth an estimated $4.3 billion as of February 2019, according to Forbes. Although much of this fortune can be traced to two investments he made during the dot-com boom, he is a born capitalist who from a young age has been buying, selling, profiting his way to success.
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