{"id":6959,"date":"2026-10-17T20:12:30","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T20:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=6959"},"modified":"2026-10-17T20:12:30","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T20:12:30","slug":"mark-cuban-paid-for-junior-year-with-a-dorm-room-chain-letter-he-admits-was-basically-a-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=6959","title":{"rendered":"Mark Cuban paid for junior year with a dorm-room chain letter he admits was \u2018basically a scam\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Before you knew him as an investor on Shark Tank, <\/em>the owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks, or just one of the richest people in the world, Mark Cuban was hustling in unexpected ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

To pay his way through junior year of college at Indiana University in the early 1980s, Cuban set up a \u201cchain letter\u201d in his dorm, he told the San Francisco Standard<\/em>\u2019s Life in Seven Songs<\/em> podcast in 2024. He started by approaching one person and asked them to give him $100, starting the Ponzi scheme or \u201cscam,\u201d as he called it.<\/p>\n

Cuban told that person, \u201cI\u2019m going to take $50 of that. And here\u2019s a list of 10 names. We\u2019re going to send 50 bucks to whatever dorm room that this person at the top of the list is. Then we\u2019re going to take their name off the list and put your name at the bottom. So we\u2019ll make it a $50 chain letter. And as everybody else does that, your name moves up the list until you\u2019re at the top. And as we grow the chain letter, hopefully you\u2019ll get more money than you put out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sounds kind of like social capital, right?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, no. It was basically a scam,\u201d Cuban, 68, said as he chuckled. \u201cI made sure my friends all got their money back. And so I got up to the top of the list. And it was amazing, because I\u2019d go to [my mailbox] and there\u2019d be envelopes with 50 bucks from here, 50 bucks from there, and that\u2019s how I paid for my junior year of college.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That type of cash meant a lot at the time for Cuban, who came from humble beginnings, growing up in a working-class family in a suburb of Pittsburgh. He said his dad, who worked in car upholstery, would occasionally throw him a $20 bill, but he was always searching for ways to make money. That started during childhood when he asked his dad for a new pair of basketball shoes: His dad said when he had a job, he could buy whatever he wanted.<\/p>\n

That instance launched Cuban into a long career of entrepreneurship, starting with selling\u2014of all things\u2014trash bags. His father\u2019s friend had tons of boxes of trash bags to unload and told Cuban he could sell them. With that, Cuban went door-to-door around his neighborhood selling the home essential.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would go door-to-door to be like, \u2018Hi, my name is Mark. Do you use trash bags?\u2019\u201d Cuban reflected. \u201cI killed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did Mark Cuban become a billionaire?<\/h2>\n

After college, Cuban made his move to Dallas\u2014not knowing one day he\u2019d be the face of the city\u2019s NBA team. There, he worked as a software salesman and lived in what he called a \u201cs\u2013thole\u201d with five other guys.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was nasty as can be,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cI slept on the floor, and if somebody was out of town, I got a bed. I didn\u2019t have my own closet, didn\u2019t have my own drawers. Nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his time there, Cuban learned everything he could about computers and software\u2014even if that meant sitting down and reading manuals. While working as a salesman, he had the opportunity to make a $1,500 commission, which would have helped him move out of the \u201chell hotel,\u201d as he and his five roommates fondly called their apartment. But when he went to pick up the check, his boss fired him right on the spot. That moment inspired Cuban to start his first company, called MicroSolutions, writing software for PCs. He sold that company for $6 million in 1990.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For a while after that, Cuban bought a \u201clifetime pass on American Airlines, partied like a rock star, and just traveled,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was young, single, and crazy, and there were no limits,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cI just wanted to have a beer with as many people as I possibly could, experience as many things as I possibly could.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cuban\u2019s entrepreneurial career soared. In the mid-1990s, Cuban and two of his friends, Cameron Christopher Jaeb and Todd Wagner, founded internet radio company Audionet.com, which was later renamed Broadcast.com. They sold that company to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion, during the height of the dotcom bubble, cementing Cuban\u2019s status as a billionaire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the following decades, Cuban focused heavily on business investments, starring on Shark Tank<\/em> for startup companies, and eventually purchased a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks in 2000. Cuban parted ways with Shark Tank<\/em> in 2025, and in late 2023, he sold his majority stake in the Mavericks for $3.5 billion. Cuban is currently worth an estimated $10.4 billion, according to Bloomberg<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The primary reason Cuban decided to step away from the Mavericks? To protect his three kids.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cRunning a professional sports team is always good when you\u2019re winning. It\u2019s great,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cBut when you\u2019re having a bad season, and [my] kids are on social media, I just didn\u2019t want them to put up with everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Cuban is on to very different\u2014ventures. He launched Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs in 2022 with a mission to eliminate the middleman in the pharmaceutical industry. Cuban diagnoses this as being the major culprit behind high drug prices.<\/p>\n

\u201cDisrupting an industry that everybody hates, that\u2019s fun,\u201d Cuban told Wired<\/em> <\/em>in 2024.<\/p>\n

A version of this story originally appeared on Fortune.com on Oct. 10, 2024.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

#Mark #Cuban #paid #junior #year #dormroom #chain #letter #admits #basically #scam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before you knew him as an inve… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1428,10084,325,479,2687,370,4655,2556,10083,1406,204,1160,4741,73,2552,6230,5281,7789,665,861,327,1738,85],"class_list":["post-6959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-admits","tag-basically","tag-basketball","tag-billionaires","tag-careers","tag-chain","tag-cuban","tag-dallas","tag-dormroom","tag-evergreen-refresh","tag-junior","tag-letter","tag-ma","tag-mark","tag-mark-cuban","tag-nba","tag-paid","tag-ponzi-scheme","tag-scam","tag-software","tag-sports","tag-success","tag-year"],"yoast_head":"\nMark Cuban paid for junior year with a dorm-room chain letter he admits was \u2018basically a scam\u2019 - Finance News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=6959\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"zh_CN\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mark Cuban paid for junior year with a dorm-room chain letter he admits was \u2018basically a scam\u2019 - 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