Mark Cuban believes he became a billionaire because he has been wrestling and selling since he was a child. Now it seems his teenage son has inherited a similar look.
Cobain recently bragged about how rambunctious his 13-year-old son Jake is selling candy at school on an episode of comedian Kevin Hart’s Peacock talk show “Hart to Hart.”
In the interview, which began airing Thursday, the owner and star of ABC’s “Shark Tank” Dallas Mavericks called his son “a little mini-me,” due to the teen’s interest in figuring out the best way to turn a profit.
“He wrestles and sells things all the time,” Cuban said in the interview, adding that Jake tracks and organizes his efforts as well.
“He showed me his spreadsheet because he buys and sells candy at school,” Cuban told Hart, laughing. “But he couldn’t go and pick up the candy where he wanted to because his sister didn’t take it.”
The billionaire is looking to use DoorDash to deliver candy, and then Cuban’s son turned to him with a shrewd question: “[He] It was like, “Does $16 for DoorDash count as cost of goods sold?”
Hart noted that Cuban was “dumbfounded” to see his son take his candy hustle so seriously.
“My smile just got so big!” Cuban agreed.
“I was a fraud… I was always selling”
Obviously, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. After all, Cobain likes to brag that he “invented the word ‘side hustle’,” starting his career selling garbage bags door-to-door when he was 12 years old.
In fact, long before he became a billionaire, Cuban engaged in a long string of money-making gigs, from collecting stamps and coins as a child to selling dance lessons as an undergraduate at Indiana University.
“I was a con… I was always selling,” Cuban said during the 2016 episode of “Shark Tank.” “I always had something going for it. That was just my nature.”
In the end, Cuban was able to turn those skills into more than just extra cash. He sold his first company, MicroSolutions, to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990. He became a billionaire less than a decade later, when Yahoo paid $5.7 billion in stock for his audio streaming service, Broadcast.com.
Despite his commercial success, Cobain was adamant that he did not expect any of his three sons to emulate his path.
“I tell them, ‘After your health, the number one thing for me is, I don’t want you to be jerks,'” Cuban said in a 2020 interview with another comedian, Steve Harvey.
Speaking to Hart, Cuban noted that his son may be showing signs of becoming an entrepreneur, but that his two older daughters have other interests. Sixteen-year-old Alyssa is more of an “artist,” he tells Hart, while his eldest daughter, Alyssa, is a college student and hasn’t settled on a career path yet.
“She has the world in front of her wherever she decides to go,” Cuban said.
While he is “proud” of Jake’s boisterous behaviour, the billionaire says he just wants his kids to be “healthy and happy”.
His advice to them is: “Do what you want [and] Find out who you are. You don’t need to follow in my footsteps.”
Disclosure: Peacock and CNBC are owned by the same parent company, NBCUniversal.
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