Mark Cuban didn't buy the NBA's Dallas Mavericks to run a business. He bought them to win—and says so without flinching.
In a 2019 segment for GQ's "Actually Me," where celebrities go undercover online to respond to real comments from Reddit, Quora, YouTube and more, Cuban addressed a Quora user who asked: How did Mark Cuban turn the Mavs around, from a business perspective?
"Well, I'm gonna be brutally honest," he replied. "I really didn't care about the business of the Dallas Mavericks when I bought them. I really cared about winning championships and winning games."
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That's not the kind of thing owners usually admit, especially when the franchise ends up being worth billions. But Cuban was never a conventional owner. When he bought the Mavericks in 2000 for roughly $285 million, the team was floundering. Attendance was low, playoff hopes were laughable, and the arena was dead.
Cuban didn't see a struggling business. He saw a culture he could fix.
"I spent a whole lot more time on the basketball side of things," he said. And for years, the numbers didn't exactly reward that. "The Mavs lost money almost every year until the past three years."
Still, he knew what he was building—and it wasn't just about box scores.
"When I got to the NBA, everybody thought we sold basketball," Cuban said. "Very few people go to basketball games to watch basketball."
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To Cuban, the real product was the feeling—the electricity in the arena when 20,000 people hold their breath on a game-winning shot. "If it goes through the hoop, you win… you're high-fiving, and hugging, and squeezing so tight people you've never seen before in your life," he said. "And if you lose, you do the exact opposite."
He said that pitch—sports as emotional experience—helped shift how the NBA marketed itself. Cuban didn't just want to sell tickets; he wanted fans walking out of the building on fire.
Then came 2011: the Mavs won the NBA Championship. And by 2023, Cuban shocked fans again by selling a majority stake in the team to casino magnate Miriam Adelson and her family in a deal reportedly valued around $3.5 billion.
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Cuban retained a 27% stake in the team. But he gave up majority control—and with it, final say in basketball decisions.
He's acknowledged the shift has been strange, but says he doesn't regret the sale. "Not being the final decision maker on personnel, on the court and off — that's the biggest change," he said on the "DLSS Sports" podcast in September.
Still, he made a roughly 12x return on his original investment. Not bad for someone who "didn't care about the business."
For Cuban, owning the Mavericks was never about spreadsheets or cash flow. It was about winning, loyalty, and energy. The billion-dollar exit? That was just the bonus.
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Image: Imagn Images
