Mark Cuban — entrepreneur (dallas mavs) with roots in the Russian Empire
Mark Cuban was born in Pittsburgh on 31 July 1958, the son of Norton Cuban, a car upholsterer, and Shirley Cuban, and grew up in a Jewish working-class family in the suburb of Mount Lebanon. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his grandparents.
Asked about his family in an interview with the Atlanta Jewish Times, Cuban said that his mother's mother came from Lithuania and that on his father's side his grandparents came from the south of Ukraine; both regions were then part of the Russian Empire. He did not name their towns. A widely repeated account, carried by Wikipedia and genealogy sites, holds that the family name was Chabenisky and was changed to Cuban after his grandparents landed at Ellis Island. Cuban himself has said that they did not really change it, that people simply began writing it as Cubin or Cuban, and that his father's birth certificate reads Cubin.
As a boy he sold garbage bags door to door and later stamps and coins. In high school he took evening classes at the University of Pittsburgh, used the credits to graduate early, and after a year at Pitt transferred to Indiana University, where he graduated in business in 1981. Moving to Dallas, he founded MicroSolutions, a computer consulting and systems-integration company, and in 1990 sold it to CompuServe for $6 million.
In 1995 he and Todd Wagner, a friend from Indiana, joined Audionet, an early service for streaming audio over the internet, which became Broadcast.com and went public in 1998. In 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, Yahoo! bought it for about $5.7 billion in stock. In 2000 he bought the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million; in 2023 he sold majority control to the Adelson and Dumont families while keeping a minority stake. His other ventures included HDNet, later AXS TV, Landmark Theatres and Magnolia Pictures.
From 2011 to 2024 he appeared as an investor on ABC's Shark Tank. In January 2022 he launched the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, an online pharmacy and manufacturer of generic medicines sold at a published markup over cost.
"By his own account his father's parents came from the south of Ukraine and his mother's mother from Lithuania, both then in the Russian Empire; they settled in Pittsburgh."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Southern Ukraine (paternal grandparents) and Lithuania (maternal grandmother), then in the Russian Empire - towns not documented
Born in Pittsburgh in 1958 to a Jewish working-class family. He has said that his paternal grandparents came from the south of Ukraine and his maternal grandmother from Lithuania, both then part of the Russian Empire; their towns are not recorded.
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Southern Ukraine (paternal grandparents) and Lithuania (maternal grandmother), then in the Russian Empire - towns not documented. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"It doesn't matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once."