Mark Cuban is worth $10 billion—but in college, he paid for junior year with a dorm-room chain letter he admits was ‘basically a scam’

Photo of Mark Cuban (Credit: Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc—Getty Images)

Before you knew him as an investor on Shark Tank, the owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks, or just one of the richest people in the world, Mark Cuban was hustling in unexpected ways.

To pay his way through junior year of college at Indiana University in the early 1980s, Cuban set up a “chain letter” in his dorm, he told the San Francisco Standard’s Life in Seven Songs podcast in 2024. He started by approaching one person and asked them to give him $100, starting the Ponzi scheme or “scam,” as he called it.