Some people celebrate their big professional victories by splurging on a Rolex watch.
Not Mark Cuban. At age 32, he sold his first startup – a software company called MicroSolutions – for $6 million. That same day, he took off his watch and threw it away, he said during a SXSW panel earlier this month.
It was symbolic: After gaining this financial security, he didn’t want to feel like someone owned his time, he said.
“Time is the one asset you can never get back. You can never truly own it,” Cuban, 65, said. “I wanted to be…in a position where I can make my own decisions (and) spend my time the way I wanted to spend my time. That’s always been my motivator.
Cuban inherited this mantra at age 14 from his father, who worked 60 hours a week for a car upholstery company outside Pittsburgh, he told CNBC Make It last month . Sometimes his father would take him to work to show him what it was like to work for someone else.
“That time was spent not finding out what my father did, but learning that his work had no future,” Cuban said. “His time was never his…he wanted me to create my own path.”
When Cuba’s next company, the audio streaming service Broadcast.com, was sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999, he took a much bigger step toward protecting his time: buying a plane private for $40 million.
This transaction remains the largest e-commerce transaction in the Guinness Book of Records. “(Buying a private plane) was my all-time goal because the asset I value most is time, and this saved me time,” Cuban told Money in 2017.
Today, Cuban wears an Apple Watch to track his health metrics, he said at SXSW — but it hasn’t changed his position in time. He spends most of his time either with his family, helping to manage the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, appearing on ABC’s “Shark Tank” or running his pharmaceutical company, Cost Plus Drugs.
“I wanted to make enough money that I didn’t have to answer to anyone else,” Cuban said in a recently released MasterClass. “I could make my own schedule and live my own life the way I wanted.”
Disclosure: CNBC has exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
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