Mark Cuban Explains How Luck Helped Turn Jeff Bezos And Mark Zuckerberg Into Billionaires — ‘Something Good Has Got to Happen’ – Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
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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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“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.”
The Importance of Timing in Zuckerberg’s Success
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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.”
Proximity to investors and the ability to raise money was another element of luck Cuban highlighted in Zuckerberg’s rise.
“If Zuck wasn’t at Harvard, and he was at Miami of Ohio University, or he was at Richland Community College, same idea, same person, same execution, and nothing,” he said on the podcast.
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‘Do All Those Things At The Same Time’
However, that doesn’t mean Cuban dismisses the importance of effort, product quality, or personal agency. He said the strength of your product and its quality determine your success when opportunity strikes.
“You had to be able to see it, you had to be able to visualize it and put together a plan of some sort, or at least have a path, and then you had to execute on it,” Cuban told Fridman. “And do all those things at the same time, and have the money available to you.”
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