Selling a company for billions of dollars doesn’t immediately upgrade Mark Cuban’s life. In fact, the businessman, longtime investor, and “Shark Tank” star found himself in the middle seat of the plane when go to Las Vegas to celebrate his success.
“When I sold my company for billions of dollars, to go celebrate, I was on a Southwest flight,” Cuban told ABC News earlier this year. “I was sitting in the center seat facing the wrong aisle on the plane and thinking, ‘This is perfect.'”
In 1999, Cuban and his Broadcast.com co-founders sold their company to Yahoo to $5.7 billion in inventory. Instead of letting it go to his head, Cuban says, a simple concept helped him get grounded.
“The wisest piece of advice I’ve ever received was ‘live like a student,'” Cuban said. “That has served me for a long time.”
That means continuing to live a budget-friendly lifestyle, which has “taken away a lot” of risk and uncertainty in his financial life. In an email to CNBC Make It, Cuban insists that he “didn’t change much after selling my first company” — keeping his car, house, and even furniture intact.
But Cuban splurged on a luxury item, which meant his middle-seat days didn’t last long: In 1999, he was famous. went online to buy a private jet for 40 million dollars. His purchase of a Gulfstream V business jet still holds the title for the largest-ever single e-commerce transaction in Guinness Book of World Records.
Buying a private jet “is my all-time goal,” Cubans tell Money in 2017. “Because the asset I value most is time, and that has given me time.”
Notably, Cuban has also celebrated his financial milestones in a way that doesn’t always entail large sums of spending. Based on his comments at OZY Fest in New York City in 2017, he celebrated his first billionaire status — in 1998, when Broadcast.com went public — by dancing. in the nude.
At the time, he was sitting at his computer, constantly refreshing the website to check the stock price of Broadcast.com. “Obviously I knew the exact number to become a billionaire,” he said. s[The price] stood up there, and then I did my little nude billionaire dance. “
Currently, Cuba is the 247th richest person in the world with a net worth of 4.5 billion USD, according to Forbes.
Disclosure: CNBC owns the out-of-network cable TV rights to “Shark Tank.”
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