atrioc on YT mentioned basically that mark cuban isn’t an impressive businessman. i looked it up.
Cuban suckered Yahoo into super massively overpaying for broadcast.com during the .com bubble. the acquisition failed within 3 years. Cuban did not provide value to his biz partner (yahoo) but become a billionaire from that failure.
but also i found more:
cuban wasn’t the founder. he bought 2% for 10k, then insisted his 2% was non-dillutable, fought with the founder for months, created a bunch of bad blood, interfered with getting other investors, and bullied the founder into giving up.
the founder agreed to keep only 10% of his company. cuban had maybe 50%, idk exactly but it couldn’t be much more than that. so cuban had 5x more than the founder, maybe less.
later when it was sold to yahoo, cuban had over 20x more than the founder. how? by continuing to fight over dilution rules instead of doing dilution evenly. the founder said in the interview that he would have had to bring in outside investment to keep his share at 10% and he went down to under 1% by not finding investors.
the founder was so bullied by Cuban, and such a gentler soul, that he just kinda didn’t care that much and wanted to get distance instead of fight. part of the deal they made, where cuban leveraged his 2% stake into taking over the company, involved the founder not having to report to Cuban, not having Cuban as his direct boss. also Cuban started denying the guy was even one of the founders at all, let alone the original founder 5 years ahead of Cuban. Cuban repeatedly under communicated, didn’t negotiate contract terms, then insisted stuff meant whatever was good for him without consent or agreement.
so many of the famous businessmen today are so awful.
i found the interview after noticing the very unequal dilution based on the numbers on wikipedia. after a couple searches, i was unable to find anything on the internet directly addressing the dilution issue and actually talking about it as something important. like no one seems to have ever written an article about it. the linked interview was the best info i found.