Becoming a billionaire means caring a lot about making money, right? Mark Cuban thinks that idea is “wrong”.
According to Cuban, who spoke to GQ on Wednesday, he never placed a high value on material wealth while he developed the tech companies in the 1990s that would eventually make him obscenely wealthy. He claimed, “I never, ever thought in terms of money.”
Cuban said that his “driving motivation” was actually something quite different.
“I always thought in terms of time,” he said. “That’s always been my driving motivation: How can I control my own destiny? How can I control my own time?”
According to a 2018 Harvard Business School study, valuing your own time more than money often leads to greater wellbeing and pleasure. Of course, Cuban was able to amass a lot of both. According to Forbes, his current estimated net worth is $4.6 billion.
Initially, Cuban believed he would never have to work again when he sold his first company, MicroSolutions, to CompuServe for $6 million, he told GQ.
Cuban continued, “What it bought me was freedom. I saved most of the money from the sale so I could live at my own pace without worrying about my job.” When he did have money to spend, he said he spent it on trips with pals and “partying like a rock star.”
Five years later, Todd Wagner, a friend from college, persuaded Cuban to sign up for an online streaming service so they could watch Indiana University basketball games from their home in Texas. That program evolved into Broadcast.com, which Yahoo purchased in 1999 for $5.7 billion in stock.
When Yahoo stock first became valuable, Cuban had the option of holding onto it in the hopes of eventually selling it for a large profit. Instead, he told GQ that he was content with the cash he had received from the transaction and thought the stock market was overvalued. Just a few months before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, he sold the majority of his Yahoo stock, causing the stock price to crash.
“It taught me a hell of a lesson: When you just chase dollars, it never works out well,” Cuban said.
Cuban then proceeded to spend his money in ways that made him pleased, including purchasing his local Dallas Mavericks in 2000. Cuban spent $40 million on a Gulfstream V private business jet, nevertheless, as his first acquisition after becoming a billionaire.
“Why’d I want a plane?” Cuban asked GQ. “Because the most valuable asset you can ever own is your time. And the one thing I can do is save time and get to places, and it was f—ing amazing.”
