Forbes® Best Business Mistakes: How Today's Top Business Leaders Turned Missteps into Success

Chapter 25. MARK CUBAN

Created Broadcast.com

Sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo!, becoming a billionaire

Owner of NBA's Dallas Mavericks

Let's face it, Mark Cuban is living the life most of us middle-aged guys wish we had. He created a dot-com company that sold for billions, and now owns a professional basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks, where he gets to watch NBA games courtside and scream at the refs when they get a call wrong. Does life get better than that?

Oh sure, he gets in a little trouble sometimes. Like when he goes a bit too far, finding himself on the floor, mixing it up with the opposing players and criticizing the refs to the media after the game. He might even get fined by the league a few hundred thousand dollars every now and then—for a total of more than $1.5 million! But does that bother a guy with plenty of dot.com scrill to pay the fine?

And he's willing to pay for his verbal liberties in other ways, too. Like when he riffed that the NBA's manager of officials "wouldn't be able to manage a Dairy Queen." The problem with that wasn't with the league—it was with management at Dairy Queen. So he spent a day working at a DQ mixing Blizzards and serving up chocolate dipped cones. What a lot of people might not know is that to this guy from Pittsburgh, blue collar work is not new, it's second nature.

His father was an automobile upholsterer. And Mark spent time as a salesman, a bartender, a party promoter, and a disco dance instructor. (That may explain his appearance as a contestant ...