If you've ever dreamed of working for someone who actually shares the win, Mark Cuban says that's exactly what he's done—many times over. And according to him, hundreds of his former employees became millionaires because of it.
In June 2024, Cuban posted on X, "In every business I've sold I've paid out bonuses to every employee that was there more than a year. Broadcast.com, 300 out of 330 employees became millionaires. MicroSolutions, I paid out 20 pct to our 80 employees. HDNet wasn't as big, but paid out about 20 pct. And only HDNet had any layoffs right after the sale."
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It was a direct response to someone asking what business leaders should do with employees when they sell a company. Cuban didn't offer a theory—he laid out exactly what he's done: pay people who helped him build the business. Not stock options. Not vague equity. Actual cash.
The first example he gave was MicroSolutions, his early software company. He told CNBC that when he sold it to CompuServe in 1990 for $6 million, he took 20% of the deal and shared it with 80 employees who had stayed at least a year. That worked out to about $15,000 per person if divided evenly. But Cuban said it wasn't about generosity — it was about doing what felt right.
That approach scaled up fast. Less than a decade later, Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. He used the same philosophy. This time, the numbers were bigger: 300 out of 330 employees walked away as millionaires. That's 91% of the company.
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And the pattern didn't stop there. While he didn't mention them in the original post, Cuban used the same approach when he sold HDNet in 2019, a network that later became AXS TV. He also followed through during the 2023 sale of his majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks. In that deal, more than $35 million reportedly went to long-time employees who had been with the organization for years. Cuban pointed out that HDNet was the only business where layoffs followed the sale—something he said didn't sit right with him.
Bringing his employees up with him, Cuban said, just made sense. They were the reason the companies succeeded in the first place. "It's the right thing to do. No company is built alone," he told Fortune, explaining why he felt employees deserved a share of the sale.
Unlike most founders who say that kind of thing in interviews, Cuban's version comes with numbers.
His philosophy is rare not because it's complicated, but because so few actually do it. For hundreds of employees across multiple companies, Cuban's exits didn't just make headlines — they changed lives.
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