Mark Cuban drunkenly spent $125,000 on surprising purchase on his first big pay day
The Shark Tank legend explained how he ended up splurging on something uncommon after landing a major deal in the 90s
Sometimes, waiting after receiving a large amount of money is impossible, and even Shark Tank legend Mark Cuban couldn’t resist the urge to splurge.
That’s right, there’s only a fortune standing between you and Cuban being exactly the same person.
And he too can’t wait to spend an enormous amount of money on something a little strange.
Before he was a Shark Tank billionaire, Cuban was feeling a little drunk during celebrations which were being held after he landed his first big deal in 1990.
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Cuban went on to tell Shannon Sharpe at the Club Shay Shay podcast about it in an interview recently.
He explained how he had just sold his first company, a little software startup called MicroSolutions.
The deal was secured by CompuServe, who bought the business for a tasty $6 million.
So, as a freshly rich millionaire, he did what anyone else would do in his position- he got uber drunk with friends.
“They’re like, ‘What do you think you’re going to do with all this money?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care about cars or houses, but boy, you know, I fly a lot for work,’” he said to Sharpe.
Cuban drunkenly went on to call American Airlines while slurring his words all over the place to ask if they offered a lifetime pass.
They responded that they did offer such a thing.
It was then that he went on to spend a whopping $125,000 on a lifetime flight pass from American Airlines.
Cuban told her: “I got all that information, hungover as hell, and I signed up. Initially, it was $125,000 and then I upgraded it. I forget how much I paid, but it gave me almost unlimited miles for me and somebody else for the rest of my life.”
He purchased the AAirpass, which came out in the 1980s and allowed people to have unlimited first-class travel for life.
At the time, you would pay based on your age, so as it was the 90s and Cuban was 32-years-old, he had to pay $125,000.
If he’d try that today, it would cost a whopping $300,000 due to inflation.
However, he went on to reportedly transfer the pass to his father and when his father passed away, he transferred it to a friend.
The airline no longer does this pass, so if you wanted one, tough luck.
Instead, they went on to charge a flat rate for frequent business travelers which ended this year in March.
So, what Cuban paid for in the 90s is no longer valid.
But that wasn’t his only big purchase and in 1999, Cuban bought a $40 million Gulfstream G5 jet after selling his streaming platform Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, as per CNBC.
Apparently, the deal holds the Guinness World Record as the ‘largest single e-commerce transaction.’
Even though he splurges, he encourages people to live like ‘college students’ and to save every penny for success.
In 2017, he told Money that even though he can afford a life of luxury, he still lives in the same house he’s had for 18 years.
Topics: Money, Travel, American Airlines, Celebrity
Britt Jones