Mark Cuban’s Glass House

3:31 pm EST January 19th, 2010 | News | 18 Comments

In an otherwise tedious blog entry defending failed NBC exec Jeff Zucker, Mark Cuban writes:

In today’s world, we reward Patent Trolls with 8 and 9 figure settlements for ideas they never did a minute of work on or ever tried to monetize. The extent of their effort was hiring or selling out to patent lawyers. That’s a problem.

Where does the bulk of Mark Cuban’s fortune come from?

Yahoo today said its $5.04 billion acquisition of Internet audio and video streaming company Broadcast.com is a done deal, and it will begin integrating multimedia services throughout the Yahoo network.
Broadcast.com’s content and services will be integrated during the third quarter of 1999.

What do you get when you visit Broadcast.com today? Nothing. It redirects to the Yahoo! home page.

Mark Cuban suckered Yahoo into acquiring his company for far too much money in the middle of the dotcom craze. Other than that, most of Cuban’s other ventures are mostly unremarkable, from HDNet to blog search engine icerocket.com. Cuban’s one success has been his NBA team, and in a major city like Dallas, that isn’t completely brain surgery.

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18 Responses to “Mark Cuban’s Glass House”

  1. Joe Crawford says:
    January 19, 2010 at 3:54 pm

    So your claim is that Mark Cuban is not a hardworking person and basically equivalent to a patent troll? I’m sorry Oliver, this is at odds with what I understand about the man. I get the sense the man works hard, and I am mystified as to why you’re expressing such dismissiveness toward him.

    As far as “suckering” Yahoo into buying broadcast.com for too high a price, what insight do you have into that deal that indicates a fraud was perpetrated on Yahoo?

    I challenge you to read his wikipedia entry and tell me this is a guy who is not an active, interesting entrepreneur.

  2. matt says:
    January 19, 2010 at 3:57 pm

    So what? This is a bullshit ad hominem. Cuban has it right on the stupidity of technology patents.

  3. matt says:
    January 19, 2010 at 3:59 pm

    Although I will grant you that Cuban is a tedious and annoying prat whose opinion shouldn’t matter.

  4. Pryme says:
    January 19, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    You make it sounds like Dallas is a basketball city. You know the Cowboys are more popular (and successful) than the Mavericks, right?

  5. SaveFarris says:
    January 19, 2010 at 5:20 pm

    Dallas Mavs pre-Cuban: 20 seasons. 6 playoff appearances
    Dallas Mavs post-Cuban: 9 full seasons. 9 playoff appearances.

  6. Oliver Willis says:
    January 19, 2010 at 5:38 pm

    Yahoo was throwing around money, I don’t blame Cuban for taking the money and running but Broadcast.com was clearly not much of anything since nothings left of it at this point of note.

  7. Joe Crawford says:
    January 19, 2010 at 5:51 pm

    Hard to argue with that data. Nice SaveFarris.

  8. jr says:
    January 19, 2010 at 5:59 pm

    broadcast.com was the world’s biggest Nigerian email scam

  9. Dennis says:
    January 19, 2010 at 7:31 pm

    On the subject of famous Indiana University alumni, Evan Bayh provides a bit of lucidity to a party run amok:

    “There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this,” Bayh told ABC News, but “if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”

    What is the lesson of Massachusetts – where Democrats face the prospects of losing a Senate seat they’ve held since 1952? For Senator Bayh the lesson is that the party pushed an agenda that is too far to the left, alienating moderate and independent voters.

    “It’s why moderates and independents even in a state as Democratic as Massachusetts just aren’t buying our message,” he said. “They just don’t believe the answers we are currently proposing are solving their problems. That’s something that has to be corrected.”

    Bayh pointed that it’s not just Massachusetts. Independents also rejected Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia in November.

    “The only we are able to govern successfully in this country is by liberals and progressives making common cause with independents and moderates,” Bayh said. “Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Dem party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country — that’s not going to work too well.”

  10. Rudy says:
    January 19, 2010 at 7:46 pm

    If you think the current Democratic leadership is far left, you’re an ignoramus.

  11. mambochicken23 says:
    January 19, 2010 at 8:04 pm

    I am with you on this. It feels weird.

  12. mambochicken23 says:
    January 19, 2010 at 8:05 pm

    If you think the current Democratic leadership is far left, you’re an ignoramus.

    Yep.

  13. Parthenon says:
    January 19, 2010 at 8:30 pm

    The previous regime brought in Dirk Nowitzki.

  14. Jaim says:
    January 19, 2010 at 8:34 pm

    Good candidates win. Coakley is not a good candidate, but here’s hoping.

    _But_ the Dems screwed up big time by setting her up for the nomination in the first place, and Obama screwed up big time by dragging his feet in realizing that she could lose. Not to mention kissing Lieberman, Baucus, and Snowe’s collective pinkie rings and taking six months longer than it should have to pass HCR.

    The whole thing is a mess.

  15. Jaim says:
    January 19, 2010 at 9:07 pm

    And I managed to post in the wrong thread. Apologies.

    But that Mark Cuban is no Dan Snyder, as long as we’re talking about dudes who got rich on the tech bubble.

  16. Marty says:
    January 19, 2010 at 9:41 pm

    Coakley concedes…

  17. Marty says:
    January 19, 2010 at 9:44 pm

    Senator Scott Brown, (R) Massachusetts.

  18. Jaim says:
    January 19, 2010 at 10:59 pm

    I guess Jane Hamsher is more powerful than the president of the United States.

    That’s probably news to her.