Mark Cuban once had $84,000 in the bank. His receptionist whited out the names on the vendor checks, wrote in her own, and cashed $82,000 of it Years later he became a billionaire, and he still says there's no way around it: you have to be extremely lucky What he could control is the part almost nobody copies He told the story on Club Shay Shay with Shannon Sharpe. His dad upholstered car seats and never made more than $40,000 a year. In college Cuban bought a book called How to Retire by 35. The idea was simple: live like a student and save everything So he did. When he moved to Dallas, he slept on the floor of a three-bedroom apartment with five or six other guys. A night out was one beer and all the fried mushrooms he could eat. He says he was having a blast His first company, MicroSolutions, nearly died the day the bank called. The receptionist had one job: put the vendor checks in envelopes and take them to the post office. Instead she took $82,000 of the $84,000 they had. They were flat broke. Cuban called every vendor and asked them to work with him. They did. Nobody has found her since He sold that company at around 30, with a few million dollars. And the one thing he splurged on says everything about how he thinks. Hungover after a night out with friends, he called American Airlines and asked if they sold lifetime passes. They did. $125,000 for almost unlimited flights for him and a companion. He did the math: about 12 cents a mile Then came Broadcast. He and a friend bought a computer, put it in a second bedroom, and started locking up streaming rights from radio stations and sports leagues. They were, in his words, YouTube before YouTube. It took four years to break even. After going public, they sold to Yahoo, and the payment was all stock That's where the trade happened Cuban's first thought was: what if the stock market crashes? So once he legally could, he set up what's called a collar. He sold other people the right to buy his stock at a higher price, and used that money to buy puts that would protect him if the price collapsed The stock did crater. The puts became worth more than he would have gotten from the shares. It has been called one of the top 10 trades in Wall Street history He shared the win. Out of 330 employees at Broadcast.com, 300 became millionaires He's honest about his misses too. He had the money to invest early in Netflix and Google and let someone talk him out of it His rules now are blunt. On Shark Tank, he expects about 25% of companies to go belly up, roughly 60% to be okay, and 15% to kill it, and those 15% have to pay for everything else. If a company needs hundreds of millions to reach tens of millions in sales, it doesn't work for him His advice to young athletes is the same discipline. Live like a student, because one broken ankle and it's over. Your money manager can't be your friend, because your friend wants to stay your friend and your money guy needs to make you money. Stay away from restaurants, clothing labels, liquor brands and music labels, because there are no barriers to entry And with interest rates above 5%, he says he's a really conservative investor. Why take the risk? Which brings it back to luck Cuban says he worked hard, was smart, and did things other people were afraid to do. But if he had started five years earlier, before the internet, or if the internet stock market hadn't exploded, he'd just be some guy, and you'd have no idea who he was Most people study the billionaire's big win Cuban's story says to study what protected him from losing it Luck made him a billionaire. Discipline is why he stayed one Watch the full interview below ↓ Timestamps in the first reply