Like any true shark, Mark Cuban gets that everyone in the food chain has to eat. But he isn’t looking to swim alone. While he's amassed a massive fortune as a billionaire, he also believes in sharing his wins with his employees.
It’s just what you should do, investor and Shark Tank star Cuban says. No man, or shark, is an island, after all.
On Tuesday, Cuban noted that each time he’s sold a company he makes sure that he’s not the only one walking away with heavy pockets. “In every business I've sold I've paid out bonuses to every employee that was there more than a year,” he wrote.
Cuban founded MicroSolutions shortly after college, selling the consulting company in 1990 for $6 million. He shared 20% of the total sales price with the 80 employees then, he tweeted. That’s equal to around $15,000 per worker if equally divided, Cuban told CNBC Make It last year.
He then moved on to what would become Broadcast.com. The company catapulted Cuban into a young billionaire, after it went public and was bought by Yahoo in 1999. The deal proved sweet to his staff too, as Cuban tweeted that “300 out of 330 employees became millionaires.”
Bringing his employees up with him was the only thing that made sense to Cuban—they’re the ones that led to his success, after all. “It's the right thing to do. No company is built alone,” Cuban told Fortune of his motivation in giving his employees a share of the sales.
Workers for HDNet, or what became AXS TV, raked in less when Cuban sold his majority stake in 2019. “HDNet wasn't as big,” Cuban tweeted Tuesday, though he noted that he paid out 20% “of what I got to employees.” He added that layoffs were avoided after each sale except for at HDNet.
Cuban upheld his ethos when selling his majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks last year for around $2 billion, before tax. “Mavs wasn't a total exit,” he explained, but it resulted in a payout of more than $35 million to employees.
“As a thank you for all your hard work making the Mavs an amazing organization, each of you will be receiving a bonus from myself, and the Adelson and Dumont families,” he wrote in an email at the time, according to ESPN.com.
Bonuses were calculated by how long employees had worked for the Mavs, he added.
Anyone who has worked for a team, be it basketball or consulting group, knows it’s a collaborative effort that paves the way for success. Cuban seems to know as much, and doles out his bonuses accordingly.
