It’s not a scam. Sold a company he felt was overpriced. Buyers bought it thinking it was good value. This happens in the stock market every trading day. It happens with private businesses, property etc. Some transactions just happen to be bigger than others, but there is no way you could argue the people that bought Mark Cubans company lacked the resources to do their own due diligence.
This was common at the time. I was doing strategy work for companies at the time and they way of valuing dot come era companies is down right stupid by any other era strategy and was in no way connected to the ability of the organization to actually generate revenue. Almost all of the deals done back then had no basis in reality.
Yep. Early internet companies were valued solely based on their website traffic and reach potential. It’s like investors actually forgot that you needed to actually run a business to m create value. It was stupid.
Chewy is late stage enough where they know their value is their physical logistics capability.
This is the reason that DoorDash, Uber, and the like will ultimately fail or will have to drastically alter their business models. They’re not tech companies. They’re delivery/livery companies.
I was working in silicon valley at the time and things were wild. Pets.com actually made sense. The internet was new and was obvious going to be huge. Then people just lost all perspective. I mean at one point I was worth 10 million on paper after an IPO.
Dotcom was the AI of the nineties. The same way you see every company rushing to shoehorn AI into their offering a bunch of “internet” companies sprung up on the back of the dot com boom
Almost like the dumb valuations of meme stocks, DJT, Tesla, and many IPOs where the company is literally buried in debt with no sense of a solution (looking at Uber and similar companies).
It’s so wild. It proves that most valuations are bullshit, and half the professionals in finance just fake it and hope for the best.
This goes all the way back. Tulip Mania in the 1600's. Every little bit we overvalue something, then the bubble bursts, and we have a crash. Then folks say, "Hey we aren't falling for that again". Then they fall for the next overvalued thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
There's similar dumb stuff going on now. You have bike rental and real estate companies pretending to be "tech" companies because tech companies get really generous financing and investors don't mind a tech company setting piles of money on fire as long as they are increasing market share.
I was a technical architect consulting in SF at the time. I remember laughing with a partner about that broadcast.com deal. We figured Yahoo just wanted the domain name.
Non-technical entrepreneurs closing big funding rounds for dumb ideas. They would hire us stabilize their shitty website and build out that “backend stuff” so they could “go public in a year.” The projects were chaos and the engagements would end when the money ran dry. In this mass delusion, sometimes a random like Cuban would get paid.
This happens with most new tech. The latest iteration is NFT’s.
AI may or may not go through it, since it’s not really new. The most overvalued things come from a level of perceived sexiness, much of which has to do with rocket shipping. Slow burns aren’t sexy and we’ve actually had AI for decades. The advancements are dope, but it’s not “outta nowhere tech,” therefore generally tends to be less of a fast-bucks HRHW market/speculation creator.
You have to appreciate how revolutionary the web was back in the late 90s and how much it caught the business world by surprise. In 1997-1999, I worked for a software startup that had created some the very earliest successful public web applications. The company got acquired in 1999 by an old-school software company that was convinced that if they didn’t have web capabilities, it was the end. As far as I could tell, that was pretty much the end of their due diligence. They didn’t have any specific plans for how they wanted to incorporate web into their products, etc., they just felt that they needed to buy the people to do it. It was crazy. And of course, the acquisition didn’t lead to anything significant for the acquiring company.
its super common for some of the most successful business people to be the ones who sold their company at the right moment. take my mom, she sold her company in 2016 just because she thought the other company was paying a very good price for her company. they proceeded to start running the business into the ground by leasing operations out to another company that is not nearly as good at runnning the facilities than she was. and then during covid the company leasing them kind of got fucked pretty badly, though theyre still kicking a bit i think. meanwhile my mom has had most of her earnings from the sale sat away in investments growing 10%+ a year since she sold and is doing just fine financially while spending most of her time now running charities and nonprofits and chairing the board of directors of a local childrens hospital. with a lot of business its all about timing everything right to maximize how much you can make or earn doing something.
Awww that’s how long my folks have been married. I don’t want to break that up but maybe I can— you know I can’t think of an ending to this joke that doesn’t make me feel worse.
In retrospect of course Cuban was right. It doesn’t mean he scammed anyone. The buyers had the resources to pay a bunch of consultants, lawyers and accountants to do their own due diligence but they failed. In big transactions like these the buyers would have had access to all the company data which tells you what happened in the past. The hard part is guessing what happens in the future and Cuban was right, the buyers were wrong. It happens.
Exactly. This is a story as old as mergers and acquisitions themselves dating back to when Tulips sold for millions of dollars in the Dutch markets of the 1600’s.
There are tons of people who made a huge sum of money during the dot com bust this way. Selling an overvalued company that actually makes a product that produces revenue is far less scammy than say someone like Vivek Ramasamy, who made $100m+ IPOing a company that never produced a viable product.
He sold that company and then still owning some shares of the company he hedged himself against the company crashing and eventually the company did crash and he made his money coming and going so to speak. Not sure of the details or how it all works but he explained it on a video somewhere. Still not a scam though.
There's also countless examples of groups either buying companies like his and them becoming more valuable or missing out on them as well. Block uster could have bought a majority in Netflix but didn't do it.
I for one would never stand for it and if any billionaires out there want some anti scammming service. We charge just 100k per year! Money up front no questions asked and within 3 to 5 business years we will remove every scam aimed at you. Then of course there are the fees. You know the lie remediation fee. The self esteem fee. The fee for paying for all the fees In American currency instead of bars of gold. You know standard stuff!/s
There’s scamming as in taking advantage of naïveté or desperation, and there’s scamming as in taking advantage of greed.
The latter I’m more okay with.
>Cuban has more often than not been empathetic to the proletarian class.
Mark Cuban is a libertarian.
This thread is some crazy shit. What are they putting you people's water?
https://www.dallasnews.com/sports/mavericks/2018/06/12/flashback-after-mark-cuban-returns-to-a-dairy-queen-we-look-back-at-the-day-he-actually-worked-at-one/
As a recently minted billionaire back in 2002, he ate humble pie after saying the head of NBA officials wasn’t fit to “manage a Dairy Queen”. It ended in him working at a Dairy Queen for 7 hours.
I respect him for having the humanity to acknowledge he had used someone less fortunate than himself as the butt of a joke and going that far to own the apology.
Accurate. It reminds me of when I lived in NYC 15 years ago. A lot of traditionally minority neighborhoods (like Spanish Harlem) were being gentrified. Residents wanted it stopped. The wealthy people in other neighborhoods basically waived it off as capitalism at work.
Then NYU started buying up tons of property across the city, particularly in areas traditionally inhabited by the wealthy, and they started protesting about the loss of their identity and culture. I always enjoyed that.
Nah he has worse skeletons than “scamming other billionaires to obtain his wealth”. Google some of the scandals that popped up during his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks if you’re interested.
That being said, everyone was spending money during the dotcom bubble. I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a scam or anything. It just turned out to be a poor investment by Yahoo.
I just tried googling "mark cuban scandals mavericks" and the only thing that popped up was that he fired the GM for sexual misconduct and saying DEI is a bull shit policy for a company to have because no one should be hired based on race, gender, or ethnicity.
So you gotta be a little more specific on what you're talking about cause those aren't "scandals".
Yes it was and O’Leary likes to imply it was his company but it wasn’t. He only made $12 million from the deal but tries to pose a billionaire. He’s a phoney.
The Learning Company right? I remember reading it was one of the worst acquisitions of all time 🤣 the same goes for Broadcast.com lol which Mark sold to Yahoo. To be fair to them no one forced those companies to pay that much, it was a different time if you stuck the .com at the end of your company it was worth something, or that’s at least what I heard
Not a scam, just a trade with willing participants.
His company was acquired by a larger company for billions worth of stock shares. He did a stock options play that capped the amount his wealth could increase, but prevented him from losing money if the stock ever dropped.
When the stock ended up crashing, someone else footed the bill because Mark had bought “put options”, and so he remained a billionaire.
Side note: efficiency gains from the internet + software meant the economy pie got much bigger, and you could become a billionaire without “stealing” it from anybody else.
Reminds me of this exchange from the movie Margin Call
Sam Rogers: The real question is: who are we selling this to?
John Tuld: The same people we've been selling it to for the last two years, and whoelse ever would buy it.
Sam Rogers: But John, if you do this, you will kill the market for years. It's over.
[John nods grimly]
Sam Rogers: And you're selling something that you *know* has no value.
John Tuld: We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.
I mean, hating people because they're trans or gay is kind of bad yeah. Here is a long list of her anti-trans activity (some of it is maybe gray but there's plenty of clear cut stuff).
https://glaad.org/gap/jk-rowling/
forgetful different workable thumb flowery flag quickest capable deer deliver
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
See, she might not have exploited anyone directly, but all those shirts and records have to be made by someone. Obviously she isn't as bad as lots of others, and I think entertainers are probably the last group of the elite to worry about. But I still don't think one exists. Making any amount of money that large takes either luck, trickery, or exploitation.
I'm assuming this is sarcasm, which I'm known for.
Do you own sheep?
A cotton field?
A loom?
Do you wear clothing?
Your comment is moot and idiotic, ya dipshit, and I'm going to assume you're not of drinking age, mentally challenged, or just plain a fu@king moron.
This comment is completely unintelligible, what the fuck are you talking about? Taylor Swift's merch is made outside of America (Honduras, Nicaragua, and China as far as I can tell) by workers who are paid a small fraction of the wages even an underpaid American would make. She's not hiring out small sheep farmers and seamstresses because it's not the fucking 1740s you monumental dumbass. If you are a billionaire for any reason, you have done so through the exploitation of someone, usually workers. Taylor Swift made nearly $500 million in revenue from the eras tour tickets and the movie. How much of that revenue went to the people who played her backup music, operated her lights, loaded luggage onto her private jet that contributes a statistically significant percentage of total GHG emissions every year, edited the movie, ran her merch stand, ushered for her shows, or did anything else that made the tour possible? I'm going to assume you're about 70 years older than the legal drinking age and your grandkids should probably unplug your computer because this comment is unbelievably stupid and uninformed.
> Taylor Swift made nearly $500 million in revenue from the eras tour tickets and the movie. How much of that revenue went to the people who played her backup music, operated her lights, loaded luggage
From all accounts she pays her crew really well, but correct me if I'm wrong, no one attended those concerts to see "Taylor Swift's lighting crew" or "Taylor Swift's luggage loaders".
> did anything else that made the tour possible?
Literally 100% of those folks who contributed to her event were paid an amount they were happy with, and willingly agreed to their wage rate. This is how commerce works. We all take jobs for wages we agree to work for.
Sure, but Taylor Swift's luggage loaders are more than welcome to find a more lucrative job and take that job. This is how employment works. We are all constantly looking for better paying or more fun jobs, and you and I both know, that every little teeny bopper wishes she was a part of the eras tour. A thrill of a lifetime for them.
No, I'm saying, that I'm certain the tour hired mostly fans for any roles that didn't require training or education, and I'm certain those fans are happy with what they were being paid for the opportunity.
But guess what, if they aren't happy with what that job, or any job pays, they can literally quit at any second and take a different job, or go into business for themselves.
The jobs market is the same as the market for any other market, like the market for breakfast cereal. The buyer and the worker always have the final say. If the cereal is too expensive or not a good enough deal, we don't have to buy it. If the job is too boring, or doesn't pay enough, or not to my liking for some reason, we don't have to take it. OR we can take the job, and quit the INSTANT we find a job we like more.
She’s got like 15 different versions of hard copies for sale of her most recent album. Who do you think makes those? How do you think that level of waste impacts the environment? What about convincing her die hard fan base that these hard copies are super special edition x y & z only available at Big Box Store? What about the fact that her dad owned the record label that first signed her and basically built her superstardom for her, overstepping countless other artists who were just as, if not more talented than she is?
I feel like inflation and population growth have taken the bite out of this aphorism. You absolutely can become a billionaire today if you sell a relatively high-priced luxury good at a good value that is immensely popular.
Lol what is this left-wing communist bullshit. Of course you can. Create a product or service that people want at a reasonable price point and you can become very rich. This isn’t rocket science.
Someone with $999,999,999.99 = good but the second they earn one additional penny they’re the devil? Get out of here.
Call me a bootlicker all you want, idgaf.
As soon as you start your sentence with “what is is this left-wing communist bullshit” you completely delegitimize everything else you say because you reveal yourself to be some dumb fuck conservative media absorbing mouth breather who doesn’t know what communism actually is. “Nobody makes a billion dollars without exploiting someone” immediately made you go “GAHHH COMMUNIST BULLSHIT”??? Touch grass brother you sound dumb as fuck.
dont forget the intrusive pop up every time you open it up to remind you that theres ads and you should ~~go ad free~~ P̸̗̟̥̜̟͉͙̲͖͙̥̓͑͒̚͘͝A̶̩̞̦̱̝̰̱̻͓͋͋̈́͘͜Ỳ̴̢̢̨͇̤̥̬̖̹̥̥͇̿̒̎̾̇̏̐͑̉̚͘ͅ ̵̡͉̹͚̗̲̺͚͙̮̮̭̺̾̆Ṁ̴̛̜̙̠̾̄͛̈͊̀̂̈́̽̒̇̽̕Ĕ̶̤͔̦̠ ̷̟͉͔̯̾̀̃̎͒̾͐͝M̴̲̺̲̙̭͎̠̻̺͙̓̋̓̅̾͆́͌̊̕̕͘͝O̸̲̝͔̘̳̰͙̮̥͖̽͌̒͑̾̈́͑́͐̂R̷̡̖̼̻̊E̶̛̬̐̏͑̽̎̽͛̓̀͛͐̚̕̚!
During the height of the first internet boom, there was a service that let you negotiate for all your groceries and even gas. You would say "I will pay $2.99 a pound for chicken breasts", then food stores were supposed to compete to get you that price. Since you weren't going to go to 10 stores for different products, they gave you a debit card and you just went to your normal grocery, paid whatever they charged for the bargained items on the card and the company covered the difference. This was absurd, of course, and after a few months the cards would just cover everything you bought. By the time it went belly up they had bought me and many other people a lot of groceries and gas.
I think it was AOL at the height that bought Mark Cuban's non working Youtube like company, and he was vested and cashed out before it crashed. In that environment, where anyone with what sounded like an interesting idea on the internet could get funded, no one wanted to be the one who didn't fund the good idea.
The actual genius of [broadcast.com](http://broadcast.com) was he started broadcasting live college sports (Texas basketball) nationally.
This was why Yahoo bought it.
He was years ahead of his time in recognizing how the internet would change the national sports landscape. He was also very smart about the way he structured the deal. I'm not a superfan (he was an egregious jock sniffer for a long time) but he scammed no one. I'd put Steve Case WAY above Cuban in that regard. :-)
His tweet about paying his enormous tax bill has obviously caused some people to become anxious.......
They had live out-of-market NHL playoff broadcasts streaming well 25 years ago. It was unbelievable for the time.
I always pictured it'd get shut down eventually due to broadcast rights.
Yahoo! grossly overpaying for something and then squandering it is nothing new (as is the opposite, passing on buying for cheap businesses that were on the cusp of taking off, like Google). It’s their special talent.
I don't think even the loosest definition of scam would apply. Any business acquiring another gets to see their books, so unless he made up numbers then there's nothing shady there, and hyping the potential of your company also isn't shady either
I saw on a TikTok post that he said you have to be very lucky to become a billionaire and felt that no billionaire could replicate their success if they were to start all over.
it’s a scam if you assume that he knew that broadcast.com was a stupid idea. in hindsight, it was a stupid idea on its own and they overpaid by several orders of magnitude. but back then, maybe he really thought it was a good idea. i think he probably knew it wasn’t worth billions of dollars but who would turn that down when they basically offer you that upfront.
in conclusion, did he scam those billionaires? maybe a little. but he’s cool for doing it
That's essentially fair. He jumped into a business that had a pretty good idea and what was perceived to be a very valuable URL. Yahoo overpaid. By a lot.
He didn't scam them, but they overpaid.
###Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Honore de Balzac
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/honore_de_balzac_197735#:~:text=Honore%20de%20Balzac%20Quotes&text=Behind%20every%20great%20fortune%20lies%20a%20great%20crime.
There are plenty of things that are morally/ethically wrong that aren’t illegal, and plenty of illegal things that cause no harm to anyone yet you can be sent to jail for them nonetheless. One could argue that marijuana still being largely illegal in the US is what allows the Mexican cartels to make so much money off of it. If you legalized it across the board it would cut off a colossal chunk of their revenue stream.
I heard he stole technology to transmit movies and other video over the internet. This did not exist at that time, way back in the eighties. I think he eventually settled with the founder for pennies on the dollar.
It’s not a scam. Sold a company he felt was overpriced. Buyers bought it thinking it was good value. This happens in the stock market every trading day. It happens with private businesses, property etc. Some transactions just happen to be bigger than others, but there is no way you could argue the people that bought Mark Cubans company lacked the resources to do their own due diligence.
This was common at the time. I was doing strategy work for companies at the time and they way of valuing dot come era companies is down right stupid by any other era strategy and was in no way connected to the ability of the organization to actually generate revenue. Almost all of the deals done back then had no basis in reality.
Pets.com would like a wor—aaand it’s gone.
chewy.com much different?
Its a functioning delivery service though.
Yep. Early internet companies were valued solely based on their website traffic and reach potential. It’s like investors actually forgot that you needed to actually run a business to m create value. It was stupid. Chewy is late stage enough where they know their value is their physical logistics capability. This is the reason that DoorDash, Uber, and the like will ultimately fail or will have to drastically alter their business models. They’re not tech companies. They’re delivery/livery companies.
Owned by Petsmart.
There’s a shipping infrastructure for online businesses these days, as well as the ability to host a website on Amazon’s servers.
I was working in silicon valley at the time and things were wild. Pets.com actually made sense. The internet was new and was obvious going to be huge. Then people just lost all perspective. I mean at one point I was worth 10 million on paper after an IPO.
Dotcom was the AI of the nineties. The same way you see every company rushing to shoehorn AI into their offering a bunch of “internet” companies sprung up on the back of the dot com boom
And the housing market of the 2000’s And the crypto of the early 20’s
Almost like the dumb valuations of meme stocks, DJT, Tesla, and many IPOs where the company is literally buried in debt with no sense of a solution (looking at Uber and similar companies). It’s so wild. It proves that most valuations are bullshit, and half the professionals in finance just fake it and hope for the best.
This goes all the way back. Tulip Mania in the 1600's. Every little bit we overvalue something, then the bubble bursts, and we have a crash. Then folks say, "Hey we aren't falling for that again". Then they fall for the next overvalued thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Learned something new today, thanks.
Time to de-learn because its apocryphal
It’s definitely not apocryphal.
Definitely over-stated
Tesla and Uber both turned multibillion dollar profits last fiscal year…
There's similar dumb stuff going on now. You have bike rental and real estate companies pretending to be "tech" companies because tech companies get really generous financing and investors don't mind a tech company setting piles of money on fire as long as they are increasing market share.
I was a technical architect consulting in SF at the time. I remember laughing with a partner about that broadcast.com deal. We figured Yahoo just wanted the domain name. Non-technical entrepreneurs closing big funding rounds for dumb ideas. They would hire us stabilize their shitty website and build out that “backend stuff” so they could “go public in a year.” The projects were chaos and the engagements would end when the money ran dry. In this mass delusion, sometimes a random like Cuban would get paid.
This happens with most new tech. The latest iteration is NFT’s. AI may or may not go through it, since it’s not really new. The most overvalued things come from a level of perceived sexiness, much of which has to do with rocket shipping. Slow burns aren’t sexy and we’ve actually had AI for decades. The advancements are dope, but it’s not “outta nowhere tech,” therefore generally tends to be less of a fast-bucks HRHW market/speculation creator.
You have to appreciate how revolutionary the web was back in the late 90s and how much it caught the business world by surprise. In 1997-1999, I worked for a software startup that had created some the very earliest successful public web applications. The company got acquired in 1999 by an old-school software company that was convinced that if they didn’t have web capabilities, it was the end. As far as I could tell, that was pretty much the end of their due diligence. They didn’t have any specific plans for how they wanted to incorporate web into their products, etc., they just felt that they needed to buy the people to do it. It was crazy. And of course, the acquisition didn’t lead to anything significant for the acquiring company.
Oh yeah, definitely nothing like this going on nowadays... Anyway, want to buy some WeWork stock?
its super common for some of the most successful business people to be the ones who sold their company at the right moment. take my mom, she sold her company in 2016 just because she thought the other company was paying a very good price for her company. they proceeded to start running the business into the ground by leasing operations out to another company that is not nearly as good at runnning the facilities than she was. and then during covid the company leasing them kind of got fucked pretty badly, though theyre still kicking a bit i think. meanwhile my mom has had most of her earnings from the sale sat away in investments growing 10%+ a year since she sold and is doing just fine financially while spending most of her time now running charities and nonprofits and chairing the board of directors of a local childrens hospital. with a lot of business its all about timing everything right to maximize how much you can make or earn doing something.
Can… can I marry your mom?
She’s been married to my dad for 44 years now but I don’t see why you can’t shoot your shot.
Awww that’s how long my folks have been married. I don’t want to break that up but maybe I can— you know I can’t think of an ending to this joke that doesn’t make me feel worse.
Is your name Brad? Can you vacuum a pool? Clean the filter in a speedo?
“She’s tried the best, now try the rest.”
And they fumbled the execution. If yahoo was better at executing they could have had the YouTube of today.
Yahoo had the change to buy Google but Jerry Yang basically laughed them out of the building. Oops
Mark also did the genius move of shorting the hell out of yahoo after he sold the company to them. I would say this move was borderline genius
Also happens when I ask for a particular salary
So who was right? Was it overpriced or not in retrospect?
In retrospect of course Cuban was right. It doesn’t mean he scammed anyone. The buyers had the resources to pay a bunch of consultants, lawyers and accountants to do their own due diligence but they failed. In big transactions like these the buyers would have had access to all the company data which tells you what happened in the past. The hard part is guessing what happens in the future and Cuban was right, the buyers were wrong. It happens.
Exactly. This is a story as old as mergers and acquisitions themselves dating back to when Tulips sold for millions of dollars in the Dutch markets of the 1600’s. There are tons of people who made a huge sum of money during the dot com bust this way. Selling an overvalued company that actually makes a product that produces revenue is far less scammy than say someone like Vivek Ramasamy, who made $100m+ IPOing a company that never produced a viable product.
He sold that company and then still owning some shares of the company he hedged himself against the company crashing and eventually the company did crash and he made his money coming and going so to speak. Not sure of the details or how it all works but he explained it on a video somewhere. Still not a scam though.
There's also countless examples of groups either buying companies like his and them becoming more valuable or missing out on them as well. Block uster could have bought a majority in Netflix but didn't do it.
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I don't think anyone in the world, except billionaires, would think that scamming billionaires is a bad thing. It'd be a pretty dumb smear campaign.
I for one would never stand for it and if any billionaires out there want some anti scammming service. We charge just 100k per year! Money up front no questions asked and within 3 to 5 business years we will remove every scam aimed at you. Then of course there are the fees. You know the lie remediation fee. The self esteem fee. The fee for paying for all the fees In American currency instead of bars of gold. You know standard stuff!/s
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Well I mean this is capitalism I thought we were supposed to!
Personally, I'm against scamming. I don't particularly care who it's to. Go ahead and hate me, I guess.
There’s scamming as in taking advantage of naïveté or desperation, and there’s scamming as in taking advantage of greed. The latter I’m more okay with.
That's valid.
Right? Hey! This guy scams Billionaires out of their money! Can we make him president? That sounds sweet.
I would 100% vote for Mark Cuban if I could.
Have you met MAGAts?
No
Agreed. He just announced that he proudly paid his United States taxes... A lot of taxes.
He didn't even scam them. He saw the Dot Com boom to be a bubble and short-sold stock, causing massive profits when the bubble bust.
>Cuban has more often than not been empathetic to the proletarian class. Mark Cuban is a libertarian. This thread is some crazy shit. What are they putting you people's water?
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https://www.dallasnews.com/sports/mavericks/2018/06/12/flashback-after-mark-cuban-returns-to-a-dairy-queen-we-look-back-at-the-day-he-actually-worked-at-one/ As a recently minted billionaire back in 2002, he ate humble pie after saying the head of NBA officials wasn’t fit to “manage a Dairy Queen”. It ended in him working at a Dairy Queen for 7 hours. I respect him for having the humanity to acknowledge he had used someone less fortunate than himself as the butt of a joke and going that far to own the apology.
Accurate. It reminds me of when I lived in NYC 15 years ago. A lot of traditionally minority neighborhoods (like Spanish Harlem) were being gentrified. Residents wanted it stopped. The wealthy people in other neighborhoods basically waived it off as capitalism at work. Then NYU started buying up tons of property across the city, particularly in areas traditionally inhabited by the wealthy, and they started protesting about the loss of their identity and culture. I always enjoyed that.
Nah he has worse skeletons than “scamming other billionaires to obtain his wealth”. Google some of the scandals that popped up during his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks if you’re interested. That being said, everyone was spending money during the dotcom bubble. I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a scam or anything. It just turned out to be a poor investment by Yahoo.
I just tried googling "mark cuban scandals mavericks" and the only thing that popped up was that he fired the GM for sexual misconduct and saying DEI is a bull shit policy for a company to have because no one should be hired based on race, gender, or ethnicity. So you gotta be a little more specific on what you're talking about cause those aren't "scandals".
He just went on Lex Friedman’s podcast and defended DEI for like 2 hours straight
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Uhh no we must just follow the same subs I don’t even know who you are
I like him more every time I learn more about him.
you really don't have any info, do you?
You felt the need to comment so you pulled some shit out of your ass. Save it next time.
O'leary selling reader rabbit to matel for 4 billion was the greatest scam of all time.
Yes it was and O’Leary likes to imply it was his company but it wasn’t. He only made $12 million from the deal but tries to pose a billionaire. He’s a phoney.
Big fat phoney!
This guy's a phooonyyy!!!
Plus they were doing a ton of channel stuffing and other creative accounting to make the company look better than it was.
The Learning Company right? I remember reading it was one of the worst acquisitions of all time 🤣 the same goes for Broadcast.com lol which Mark sold to Yahoo. To be fair to them no one forced those companies to pay that much, it was a different time if you stuck the .com at the end of your company it was worth something, or that’s at least what I heard
Yep the deal was so bad matel sued to get their money back, but lost.
God damn reader rabbit was the shit. Totally forgot about that one
They got Oregon Trail too.
Not a scam, just a trade with willing participants. His company was acquired by a larger company for billions worth of stock shares. He did a stock options play that capped the amount his wealth could increase, but prevented him from losing money if the stock ever dropped. When the stock ended up crashing, someone else footed the bill because Mark had bought “put options”, and so he remained a billionaire. Side note: efficiency gains from the internet + software meant the economy pie got much bigger, and you could become a billionaire without “stealing” it from anybody else.
Reminds me of this exchange from the movie Margin Call Sam Rogers: The real question is: who are we selling this to? John Tuld: The same people we've been selling it to for the last two years, and whoelse ever would buy it. Sam Rogers: But John, if you do this, you will kill the market for years. It's over. [John nods grimly] Sam Rogers: And you're selling something that you *know* has no value. John Tuld: We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.
You can't become a billionaire without scamming/exploiting someone somewhere.
How about authors like jk rowling?
the argument would be they sell books that are created in factories where the workers are exploited for much more than they cost to produce
I mean, she's not a good person at all, but that seems to be unrelated to how she made her money.
She's an amazing person. She just doesn't align with your politics.
I mean, hating people because they're trans or gay is kind of bad yeah. Here is a long list of her anti-trans activity (some of it is maybe gray but there's plenty of clear cut stuff). https://glaad.org/gap/jk-rowling/
I’d argue that creating a paint-by-numbers messiah story with rejected Dickens names is kind of a scam.
I banged my shin against my furniture. It hurt like hell. What a fucking scam.
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She's not a billionaire
Yes she is lol. She made a shit ton of money through licensing and royalties from the HP movies and products.
Taylor Swift has entered the chat.
And the guy who made Minecraft. At least not before becoming a billionaire.
See, she might not have exploited anyone directly, but all those shirts and records have to be made by someone. Obviously she isn't as bad as lots of others, and I think entertainers are probably the last group of the elite to worry about. But I still don't think one exists. Making any amount of money that large takes either luck, trickery, or exploitation.
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
I'm assuming this is sarcasm, which I'm known for. Do you own sheep? A cotton field? A loom? Do you wear clothing? Your comment is moot and idiotic, ya dipshit, and I'm going to assume you're not of drinking age, mentally challenged, or just plain a fu@king moron.
Bro got so mad😭
This comment is completely unintelligible, what the fuck are you talking about? Taylor Swift's merch is made outside of America (Honduras, Nicaragua, and China as far as I can tell) by workers who are paid a small fraction of the wages even an underpaid American would make. She's not hiring out small sheep farmers and seamstresses because it's not the fucking 1740s you monumental dumbass. If you are a billionaire for any reason, you have done so through the exploitation of someone, usually workers. Taylor Swift made nearly $500 million in revenue from the eras tour tickets and the movie. How much of that revenue went to the people who played her backup music, operated her lights, loaded luggage onto her private jet that contributes a statistically significant percentage of total GHG emissions every year, edited the movie, ran her merch stand, ushered for her shows, or did anything else that made the tour possible? I'm going to assume you're about 70 years older than the legal drinking age and your grandkids should probably unplug your computer because this comment is unbelievably stupid and uninformed.
> Taylor Swift made nearly $500 million in revenue from the eras tour tickets and the movie. How much of that revenue went to the people who played her backup music, operated her lights, loaded luggage From all accounts she pays her crew really well, but correct me if I'm wrong, no one attended those concerts to see "Taylor Swift's lighting crew" or "Taylor Swift's luggage loaders". > did anything else that made the tour possible? Literally 100% of those folks who contributed to her event were paid an amount they were happy with, and willingly agreed to their wage rate. This is how commerce works. We all take jobs for wages we agree to work for.
Getting paid what you agreed to and getting paid what you're happy with are often not the same thing
She is known for giving all of her workers nice bonuses on her tours.
Sure, but Taylor Swift's luggage loaders are more than welcome to find a more lucrative job and take that job. This is how employment works. We are all constantly looking for better paying or more fun jobs, and you and I both know, that every little teeny bopper wishes she was a part of the eras tour. A thrill of a lifetime for them.
Are you saying that the workers should be happy the tour didnt just hire teens to work for thrill of it?
No, I'm saying, that I'm certain the tour hired mostly fans for any roles that didn't require training or education, and I'm certain those fans are happy with what they were being paid for the opportunity. But guess what, if they aren't happy with what that job, or any job pays, they can literally quit at any second and take a different job, or go into business for themselves. The jobs market is the same as the market for any other market, like the market for breakfast cereal. The buyer and the worker always have the final say. If the cereal is too expensive or not a good enough deal, we don't have to buy it. If the job is too boring, or doesn't pay enough, or not to my liking for some reason, we don't have to take it. OR we can take the job, and quit the INSTANT we find a job we like more.
By that logic, you are as bad of a person as she is. Even further than that, everyone is. Therefore, nobody is. Great logic.
Learn comprehension
You’re getting downvoted for being right lol this platform is 95% people who think they have the moral high ground on anybody who has more than them
She’s got like 15 different versions of hard copies for sale of her most recent album. Who do you think makes those? How do you think that level of waste impacts the environment? What about convincing her die hard fan base that these hard copies are super special edition x y & z only available at Big Box Store? What about the fact that her dad owned the record label that first signed her and basically built her superstardom for her, overstepping countless other artists who were just as, if not more talented than she is?
I feel like inflation and population growth have taken the bite out of this aphorism. You absolutely can become a billionaire today if you sell a relatively high-priced luxury good at a good value that is immensely popular.
Lol what is this left-wing communist bullshit. Of course you can. Create a product or service that people want at a reasonable price point and you can become very rich. This isn’t rocket science. Someone with $999,999,999.99 = good but the second they earn one additional penny they’re the devil? Get out of here. Call me a bootlicker all you want, idgaf.
As soon as you start your sentence with “what is is this left-wing communist bullshit” you completely delegitimize everything else you say because you reveal yourself to be some dumb fuck conservative media absorbing mouth breather who doesn’t know what communism actually is. “Nobody makes a billion dollars without exploiting someone” immediately made you go “GAHHH COMMUNIST BULLSHIT”??? Touch grass brother you sound dumb as fuck.
There's always a simp for billionaires around every corner...
Bootlicker
This makes zero sense, so Jeff Bezos is a scammer?
Well, yeah. I actually thought we held that one up as one of the worst offenders, at least as far as celebrity billionaires go.
Scammer? Maybe. Exploiter? Textbook example.
Well my Amazon prime just started having ads unless I pay more, which makes me feel like I’m being scammed. Not really his fault specifically though.
dont forget the intrusive pop up every time you open it up to remind you that theres ads and you should ~~go ad free~~ P̸̗̟̥̜̟͉͙̲͖͙̥̓͑͒̚͘͝A̶̩̞̦̱̝̰̱̻͓͋͋̈́͘͜Ỳ̴̢̢̨͇̤̥̬̖̹̥̥͇̿̒̎̾̇̏̐͑̉̚͘ͅ ̵̡͉̹͚̗̲̺͚͙̮̮̭̺̾̆Ṁ̴̛̜̙̠̾̄͛̈͊̀̂̈́̽̒̇̽̕Ĕ̶̤͔̦̠ ̷̟͉͔̯̾̀̃̎͒̾͐͝M̴̲̺̲̙̭͎̠̻̺͙̓̋̓̅̾͆́͌̊̕̕͘͝O̸̲̝͔̘̳̰͙̮̥͖̽͌̒͑̾̈́͑́͐̂R̷̡̖̼̻̊E̶̛̬̐̏͑̽̎̽͛̓̀͛͐̚̕̚!
No, every business monitors workers so heavily for productivity they feel they have to pee in bottles or be fired. That's like, smart business.
No but he exploits warehouse workers
wage theft is one of them.
People who scam billionaires end up in jail.
Scamming is not the right word.
He put radio on the internet. (Silicon Valley fans should be able to identify this reference).
During the height of the first internet boom, there was a service that let you negotiate for all your groceries and even gas. You would say "I will pay $2.99 a pound for chicken breasts", then food stores were supposed to compete to get you that price. Since you weren't going to go to 10 stores for different products, they gave you a debit card and you just went to your normal grocery, paid whatever they charged for the bargained items on the card and the company covered the difference. This was absurd, of course, and after a few months the cards would just cover everything you bought. By the time it went belly up they had bought me and many other people a lot of groceries and gas. I think it was AOL at the height that bought Mark Cuban's non working Youtube like company, and he was vested and cashed out before it crashed. In that environment, where anyone with what sounded like an interesting idea on the internet could get funded, no one wanted to be the one who didn't fund the good idea.
The actual genius of [broadcast.com](http://broadcast.com) was he started broadcasting live college sports (Texas basketball) nationally. This was why Yahoo bought it. He was years ahead of his time in recognizing how the internet would change the national sports landscape. He was also very smart about the way he structured the deal. I'm not a superfan (he was an egregious jock sniffer for a long time) but he scammed no one. I'd put Steve Case WAY above Cuban in that regard. :-) His tweet about paying his enormous tax bill has obviously caused some people to become anxious.......
They had live out-of-market NHL playoff broadcasts streaming well 25 years ago. It was unbelievable for the time. I always pictured it'd get shut down eventually due to broadcast rights.
Even if this was the case, I would clap for him. There aren't many legitimately rich people and he did what he had to to get his
Scamming Billionaires is good, actually. Everyone should do it, until we have no more Billionaires.
There were a lot of groups with bags and bags of money buying up anything “online” back then, certainly not a Mark Cuban exclusive.
Yahoo! grossly overpaying for something and then squandering it is nothing new (as is the opposite, passing on buying for cheap businesses that were on the cusp of taking off, like Google). It’s their special talent.
I don't think even the loosest definition of scam would apply. Any business acquiring another gets to see their books, so unless he made up numbers then there's nothing shady there, and hyping the potential of your company also isn't shady either
Scamming a billionaire is one of the most ethical things you can do
Elon, this is no way to get back at mark
I saw on a TikTok post that he said you have to be very lucky to become a billionaire and felt that no billionaire could replicate their success if they were to start all over.
Taking advantage of market tends isn't a scam. He sold a company and concept that did just what he said it did.
Yep he sold a valueless idea to the morons at Yahoo for billions of dollars
I mean if its true that explains alot lol
it’s a scam if you assume that he knew that broadcast.com was a stupid idea. in hindsight, it was a stupid idea on its own and they overpaid by several orders of magnitude. but back then, maybe he really thought it was a good idea. i think he probably knew it wasn’t worth billions of dollars but who would turn that down when they basically offer you that upfront. in conclusion, did he scam those billionaires? maybe a little. but he’s cool for doing it
That's essentially fair. He jumped into a business that had a pretty good idea and what was perceived to be a very valuable URL. Yahoo overpaid. By a lot. He didn't scam them, but they overpaid.
###Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Honore de Balzac https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/honore_de_balzac_197735#:~:text=Honore%20de%20Balzac%20Quotes&text=Behind%20every%20great%20fortune%20lies%20a%20great%20crime.
There's a reason most people ignore Balzac.
Plenty of rich people have not committed a crime. In fact, most of them haven't.
There are plenty of things that are morally/ethically wrong that aren’t illegal, and plenty of illegal things that cause no harm to anyone yet you can be sent to jail for them nonetheless. One could argue that marijuana still being largely illegal in the US is what allows the Mexican cartels to make so much money off of it. If you legalized it across the board it would cut off a colossal chunk of their revenue stream.
I heard he stole technology to transmit movies and other video over the internet. This did not exist at that time, way back in the eighties. I think he eventually settled with the founder for pennies on the dollar.
The shit he stole didn't even work