Mark Cuban

Early life and education

Mark Cuban was born July 31, 1958, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburb of Mount Lebanon. His father worked as an automobile upholsterer. By his own account he was entrepreneurial from a young age, selling garbage bags and stamps and running small ventures as a teenager.

He attended Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, choosing it in part because it had the lowest tuition among the business schools that interested him, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in business administration. He has spoken about working various jobs through college, including running a bar near campus.

None of this educational record includes a published IQ score. A business degree and early entrepreneurial activity are biographical facts, not psychometric measurements, and they do not produce a specific number.

Companies and career

After moving to Dallas, Cuban founded MicroSolutions, a systems-integration and software-reselling company, which he sold to CompuServe in 1990. He then co-founded AudioNet, later renamed Broadcast.com, an early internet audio and video streaming service. Broadcast.com was sold to Yahoo in 1999 in a stock deal valued in the billions, which made Cuban a billionaire.

In 2000 he bought a majority stake in the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, a team that won an NBA championship in 2011 under his ownership; he later sold a majority interest while retaining a stake and involvement in basketball operations. He became widely known to the public as an investor on the television show Shark Tank, and in 2022 launched the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, a venture aimed at lowering prescription-drug prices through transparent pricing.

This record reflects ambition, salesmanship, technical literacy, and risk tolerance. It does not depend on, or reveal, any particular IQ figure.

The IQ question and why no number exists

For many celebrities, "IQ list" sites circulate a specific number with no source. In Cuban's case, no widely-accepted figure even exists - and the few numbers that surface online have no provenance at all: no named test (Stanford-Binet, WAIS, Mensa-administered Cattell, etc.), no date, no examiner, and no documented administration.

When a number does appear, it follows the standard pattern for living-celebrity IQ figures: list-makers reason backwards from visible success to a plausible-sounding round number. That reasoning is psychometrically invalid. IQ is defined as a normed position relative to a population on a specific instrument; it cannot be inferred from a net worth or a list of companies. A person can build and sell major companies without anyone ever having measured their IQ - and in Cuban's case, no one publicly has.

Cuban himself has not claimed a specific IQ in any verifiable record. Absent a published, named, dated test result, the honest answer to "what is Mark Cuban's IQ" is: unknown - there is no measurement.

Why celebrity IQ numbers are usually wrong

Three recurring problems make any figure attached to a name like this unreliable:

• No instrument. A score has no meaning without the test it came from. A given number on a high-ceiling research test is a different population position than the same number on the WAIS-IV.
• No administration. Real scores come from a documented sitting: where, when, scored by whom. No such record exists for Cuban.
• Reverse inference. Assigning an IQ because someone is wealthy or successful is circular - it assumes the conclusion (high ability) and dresses it up as a measurement.

For how real scores are produced and why they are not comparable across tests, see our methodology page and the historical IQ tests archive.

Frequently asked questions

Other modern figures