"He sold trash bags door to door at age 12, and later earned $25 an hour teaching disco moves at a sorority house." (Image by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

From “Dan Rather: Inside Mark Cuban’s Gilded Cage,” Jim Rendon’s excellent new Mother Jones article:

“He grew up in a middle-class Pittsburgh suburb, where he sold trash bags door to door at age 12, and later earned $25 an hour teaching disco moves at a sorority house. During college at Indiana University, he opened a bar, and upon graduating he followed his school buddies in pursuit of ‘fun, sun, money, and women’ to Dallas, where he taught himself to write code. In 1990, Cuban sold his first real business play, a computer consulting firm, for $6 million. He also launched and sold a hedge fund and relocated to Los Angeles, where, with less success, he tried his hand at acting. (Some recent cameos on HBO’s Entourage compelled the Wall Street Journal to jeer that Mark Cuban wasn’t even believable as Mark Cuban.)

In 1995, Cuban and his friend Todd Wagner launched Broadcast.com, which put audio and video of sports online. Four years later, at the height of dot-com mania, they sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock—Cuban pocketed more than $1 billion. ‘I am the luckiest motherfucker in the world,’ he says. ‘It’s like I tell people, ‘When I die, I want to come back as me.'”

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