How Mark Cuban Would Get Rich If He Had To Start From Scratch
Written by
Gabrielle Olya
Edited by
Ashleigh Ray
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Mark Cuban has achieved billionaire status through his entrepreneurial pursuits, but the “Shark Tank” star believes luck had a lot to do with his massive financial success.
“Anybody who’s a billionaire who thinks they could just do it all over again is lying their a– off,” Cuban said on the “What Now? With Trevor Noah” podcast. “If the internet stock market hadn’t just taken off when we were starting AudioNet, you wouldn’t even know who I was. That’s just the way it works.”
He continued, “I think, could I be a millionaire multiple times over? Yeah, because I could hustle, I could sell, I was smart. But the whole billionaire side of it, the hundreds of millions of dollars, that’s just insane. And that was luck.”
Fortunately, there are still a few ways to build major wealth without “luck.” Here’s what Cuban would do to get rich if he had to start over from scratch.
3 Main Paths to Major Wealth
When asked how he would build wealth from nothing aside from the knowledge he has now, Cuban outlined a few strategies.
“There’s only a few of those types of opportunities,” he said. “You can start a hedge fund and hopefully do well, and then you raise a lot of money. You could take a company public, [or] you can start a private company and be bought out. Those really are the primary ways to get to that level of wealth.”
Cuban notes while any of these methods could make you rich, there are no guarantees.
“Could I try any or all of those things? Yeah,” he said. “If you put me in the witness protection program and nobody knew who I was and I had to just start purely from scratch, but I still knew what I know now, I could do well, but I would have to search out some unique opportunity.
“To be a billionaire, there’s got to be something that’s very leverageable, something that just explodes financially. But there’s a whole lot of people who are really, really smart, who do each of those things, or one of them really well, and we don’t know who they are.”
How To Spot the ‘Unique Opportunities’
As Cuban notes, you typically need to capitalize on a very unique opportunity to reach billionaire status. To be able to do this, it’s important to be a lifelong learner.
“I was just the most curious person you could ever imagine,” he said on the podcast. “I just loved to learn. I was that kid who was just reading everything I could get my hands on about business. And if you read enough, you’re going to learn something to your advantage.”
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