Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban (born 1958 in Pittsburgh) sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion at the peak of the dot-com boom, bought the Dallas Mavericks, spent over a decade as a Shark Tank investor, and launched Cost Plus Drugs to undercut pharmaceutical pricing. Having ridden one technology wave to a fortune, he has spent the AI era telling everyone else how to catch this one.

The trillionaire in the basement

On CNBC’s High Performance podcast in July 2025, Cuban predicted AI could mint the world’s first trillionaire — possibly “just one dude in the basement” — comparing the moment to the earliest days of PCs and smartphones, whose skeptics he enjoyed proving wrong. He tells companies the choice is binary: he said in March 2025 that businesses either get great at AI or risk being put out of business, and advises workers to spend hours with the tools rather than fear them.

Unusually for a hype-cycle billionaire, Cuban has funded the on-ramp: the Mark Cuban Foundation’s AI Bootcamps, launched in 2019, run free weekend programs introducing underserved high-school students to AI across dozens of cities, with meals, transport, and laptops covered. He is also a prolific personal user — citing Gemini and Perplexity among his tools — while cautioning that AI output is a starting point, not an answer. Critics note his predictions are unfalsifiable cheerleading; his consistent reply is that the downside of learning AI is zero and the downside of ignoring it is obsolescence.