Mark Cuban, Photo by Gage Skidmore
Mark Cuban, the mercurial billionaire entrepreneur, shocked the world Tuesday when he revealed plans to sell a majority stake in the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks franchise. And guess who is buying it? None other than Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
The price being paid for the majority ownership in the Dallas Mavericks gives the team an estimated valuation of $3.5 billion. The exact amount to be paid has not yet been revealed, but Miriam Adelson revealed earlier this week that she would be cashing out $2 billion in stock from her family’s Las Vegas Sands company to make an unspecified acquisition.
Mark Cuban, who has an estimated net worth somewhere north of $6 billion, acquired a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks in 2000 for just for $285 million. There is a reason why people say that owning major sports franchises in America like the Mavericks is a license to print money. The franchises not only increase in value at a rate wildly above the rate of inflation, offering absurdly high returns on investment, but even after taxes, the owners pocket millions of dollars a year from the prophets.
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As for the reason for his sudden decision to give up control of the team, Mark Cuban has declined requests for comment. But Mavericks fans who have gotten use to his presence at the team’s games should not be worried. Cuban, who can usually be seen behind his team’s bench at home games cheering them on, is not likely to give up his preferred seats on the floor of the American Airlines Center in Dallas any times soon.
According to his official bio, in 1995, Mark Cuban and long-time friend Todd Wagner came up with an internet based solution to not being able to listen to Hoosiers Basketball games out in Texas. That solution was Broadcast.com – streaming audio over the internet. In just four short years, Broadcast.com (then Audionet) would be sold to Yahoo for $5.6 billion dollars. His trade to collar his shares of Yahoo! stock received in the sale of Broadcast.com in advance of the popping of the Internet bubble has been called one of the top 10 trades of all time.
