Begging Mark Cuban For His Dot Com Dollars

Too Much Free Time

from the let-the-fun-begin dept

Mark Cuban made over a billion dollars by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo during the boom years, and certainly hasn’t shied away from the limelight since then. He became the extremely passionate and vocal owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and more recently bought Landmark Theaters, the struggling indie theater chain, which he intends to update for the twenty-first century. Many billionaires invest in random companies or sports teams, and then start giving away their money to charity. It appears that, instead of charity, Cuban has also decided to give away some of his money… to someone willing to get on his “good side” on national TV. Apparently, he’s decided that the world needs yet another reality TV show, where contestants won’t have to actually be good at anything or able to survive some horrible challenge. Instead, they just need to become his best buddy. At the end of which, he’ll give the “winner” $1 million (commonly referred to as “pocket change” for billionaires). You would think there are easier ways to make friends these days. Still, in a weird way it does seem like a statement of the times. The suddenly wealthy often do attract a group of new “friends” who are really just trying to get money out of them. This just makes the process more explicit and puts it on TV.