When Mark Cuban sells a business, he always sets aside some of the proceeds for one specific purpose: divvying it up among the company’s employees.
“In every business I’ve sold I’ve paid out bonuses to every employee that was there more than a year,” Cuban posted Tuesday on social media platform X. The bigger the acquisition, the larger the payout: 300 of Broadcast.com’s 330 employees became millionaires when the audio streaming service sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999, Cuban wrote.
Cuban started the practice after selling his first company, a software firm called MicroSolutions, for $6 million to CompuServe in 1990. He took 20% of the total sale price, he tells CNBC Make It, and paid it out to 80 employees — which would equate to $15,000 per staffer, if distributed equally.