TheCurl84 said:
Urban Ag said:
The Green Dragon said:
A very successful man. But all he really had was the foresight to put ms-dos in every computer and a mother in the industry. He didn't create dos..he packaged it.
I don't know how involved he was in windows but that was a Mac ripoff. Making office graphic interface was amazing, but I have no idea if he was involved in that.
Great post.
Gates is a very smart man but he is no different than Cuban or Zuck and countless others. They are all sociopaths with big brains that stole ideas from others and were just more ruthless in implementing them. Jobs and Musk are the real geniuses. Many others on both sides of the coin.
Don't trust anything from big tech. They literally think they are going to rule from Elysium. Completely detached.
Tell me more of the Cuban story. You have my interest. I'm not a fan of the man.
Going to go quickly here.
Cuban graduated with a business degree in something from some midwest state school, I think Indiana. He struggled to find a decent job post graduation. He had a friend in law school in Dallas, I believe at SMU. Friend convinced him to move to Dallas as it was the place to be (early/mid 80's). Note - he has no formal education in STEM at all.
Cuban moves to Dallas takes a job bartending. He has a regular bar fly that is a sales guy for a ma and pop home computer and software store. Cuban in interested in PC's and gets the guy to get him an interview. He gets hired by said small company to do sales. Over the course of a year or so, Cuban gets busted multiple times taking home files that have all of their software and PC pricing and the sales contracts with their customers. He was making copies of everything. He finally got caught in a lie after a customer told the shop owner, Cuban's employer, that he went behind his back and offered to undercut his boss on pricing if the customer went with him. He got fired.
Cuban then took all this information his boss had spent building for years and years and used it to undercut him and steal his customers with lower prices on software and hardware, working out of his apartment. HIs little software business got big enough that it got noticed by EDS who bought it. After all of his back taxes and bills were paid off he netted out about $1M. He then assumed the life of a young party scene type in north Dallas.
Cuban's friend was now a practicing attorney and dating some gal taking college courses. She knew a young guy from school that had was trying to get an internet startup off the ground. His idea was to live broadcast events over the internet. Cuban and his attorney buddy approached the guy and basically swindled him out all of his ownership in his company. This was Broadcast.com. And it really didn't even work. At the peak of the tech bubble, Yahoo bought the company and Cuban and his buddy became billionaires. The guys that came up with the whole idea and started it got, IIRC, maybe 20-30M (sounds like FB right?). Broadcast.com was such a bomb that as I recall Yahoo barely had it active for more than a couple of years before scrapping it all together and by then live streaming tech was emerging everywhere.
So basically he swindled one guy to become a millionaire and another to become a billionaire. Yeah, he's smart, hustled, etc. No question. But still.
living in Dallas in the mid-late 90's, working in tech, and reading a lot of articles on Cuban's rise to fame and all the rumors is what formed the above. Some of it is verified on wikipedia as well.