Mark Cuban Says He Made $4.3 Billion on the Mavericks—And It Stressed Him Out

Mark Cuban says he walked away from the Dallas Mavericks with $4.3 billion. That's his own figure, offered Monday in an interview on The Diary of a CEO—and it sits above the $3.5 billion sale price reported by ESPN senior NBA insider Shams Charania when Cuban sold his stake in 2024.

The money was never the original point. "I did it not because it was a business," Cuban said of his January 2000 purchase. "I thought this could just be really fun—and what could be better than going and shooting baskets with Dirk Nowitzki or Steve Nash or Michael Finley?"

He paid about $285 million for a franchise that had spent two decades losing, struggling to fill seats and, at one point, carrying the label of "worst professional sports franchise." Cuban bought the team from H. Ross Perot Jr., fresh off selling his internet radio company Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 for roughly $5.7 billion in stock.

"I looked at it more as an intellectual endeavor, right? An intellectual challenge," Cuban said. "Can I take a team that was awful and got voted the worst professional sports franchise of the previous decade and turn it into a winning team? And that was my goal."

What changed for Cuban as an owner?

Somewhere between the fun and the exit, the job changed. "It went from being about basketball to being about valuations," Cuban said. The shift, he added, "just created more stress."

That's a fair trade for the return. Cuban turned a $285 million purchase into a $4.3 billion outcome—roughly 15 times his money over 24 years, or about $167 million per year of ownership. Per Forbes, the Mavericks climbed from the eighth-lowest valued NBA team in 2000 to the seventh most valuable in 2023, just before the sale.

Unlike owners who treat franchises as passive investments, Cuban was a visible presence at games, engaged directly with fans and players, and pushed organizational change. The payoff on the court came in June 2011, when the Mavericks beat the Miami Heat for the franchise's first NBA championship.

"If you win a championship, the whole city's on fire," Cuban said. He described taking the trophy to schools, bars, restaurants and his children's events.

Why is Cuban back in sports valuations?

He hasn't left the business—he's packaging it. In July, Cuban joined Harbinger Sports Partners, a $750 million private equity fund that took a minority stake in MLB's Las Vegas Athletics as the team relocates from Sacramento.

The deal gives Cuban his long-sought entry into baseball after years of pursuing MLB opportunities, including a failed bid for the Texas Rangers. There's a fitting irony here: the Athletics kicked off the "moneyball" analytics phenomenon, and now they've welcomed Cuban as an investor.

Rashaun Williams—Harbinger's founder, chief investment officer and Cuban's business partner—told Fortune in July that the fund evaluates ownership, management and the market where a team operates. The group uses predictive analytics to assess local demand and a franchise's ability to command ticket prices, sponsorship revenue and other sales.

Williams describes the era the firm—including Cuban—calls "Sports 2.0," where teams increasingly resemble media and entertainment companies rather than organizations dependent solely on local fan attendance. The Mavericks monetized fans as a primary goal years ago, and the approach has since spread league-wide through streaming, digital media, partnerships, concerts and stadium events.

"The new model of baseball—or basketball, football—is teams becoming media companies and transcending a local marketplace," Williams said. "They're finding ways to diversify their revenue and monetize that fan base 365 days a year."

For practitioners, the takeaway is straightforward: the playbook Cuban proved out in Dallas—analytics-driven pricing, sponsorship assessment, year-round fan monetization—is now a sellable product at a $750 million fund. The stress of running valuations instead of a basketball team hasn't stopped him from doing it again, this time with other people's money.