Mark Cuban Explains How Luck Helped Turn Jeff Bezos And Mark Zuckerberg Into Billionaires — ‘Something Good Has Got to Happen’
- Finance
ThePostMaster- 0
- 8 minutes read
Entrepreneur Mark Cuban is one of the few billionaires who doesn’t pretend it was all grit and genius. He’s said it repeatedly: Luck plays a key role in building massive wealth.
Speaking on computer scientist Lex Fridman‘s podcast, Cuban said that after years in entrepreneurship, he doesn’t believe any business plan can guarantee billionaire status. He said if he had to start over, reaching $1 million would be doable, but becoming a billionaire is a different ballgame, where timing and trends have to align.
“If I had to start all over, could I start a company that made me a millionaire?” Cuban said. “Yeah, because I know how to sell and I know technology and I’ve learned enough over the years to do that. But a billion, just something good has got to happen.”
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Fridman argued that while luck matters, decisions and effort can shape the path to massive wealth. He said Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos made smart moves over many years to build the e-commerce giant. Cuban, however, said what ultimately pushed Bezos past a certain threshold was something else.
“He was really able to raise money, right?” Cuban said. “A lot of money. And people were really dismissive of him because they weren’t profitable. And we were in an environment where it was possible to raise that money.”
Fridman also mentioned other billionaires whose products made them hugely successful, including Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates.
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Cuban specifically talked about Zuckerberg, saying Facebook’s rise was largely about timing. He said apps did not immediately take off when the iPhone launched in 2007 but surged in 2011 and 2012. He also noted that after the 2004 tech bubble burst, computer prices fell, putting laptops within reach for more students.
“If he had tried to do something like that, you know, five years earlier or five years later, Friendster might’ve been the ultimate, or MySpace,” Cuban said. “I had a MySpace account, and that was before Facebook.”
