Mark Cuban’s time as the majority owner of the Mavericks is coming to a shocking conclusion.
Cuban has agreed to sell a majority stake in the NBA franchise to Miriam Adelson, the widow of late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, at a valuation of approximately $3.5 billion ($5.2 billion AUD) according to The Athletic’s Shams Charania.
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Cuban will retain a minority stake in the team and also still preside over basketball operations, the report said.
Cuban, who made his fortune selling the website broadcast.com to Yahoo in the late 1990’s, bought the team for $285 million in 2000.
The Mavericks won the 2011 NBA championship and have generally been competitive throughout Cuban’s tenure as owner, making the playoffs in all but six of the seasons that he owned the team.
The news is genuinely shocking, as the Mavericks were so inextricably linked to Cuban’s public identity it is impossible to imagine the team being owned by someone else, even with the unique caveat that he is maintaining basketball control.
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The timing of the sale is interesting, as Cuban also announced this week on the “All the Smoke” podcast that he will be leaving ABC’s “Shark Tank” after his 16th season on the program, on which he has invested millions in entrepreneurial ventures over the years.
Earlier Tuesday, Las Vegas Sands Corp. announced that Miriam Adelson was selling $2 billion in shares of the company — about 10 percent of her family’s stake — with the intent “to use the net proceeds from this offering…to fund the purchase of a majority interest in a professional sports franchise.”
The Dallas Morning News reported that Cuban and Sands plan to partner in a casino and arena venture in Dallas, if gambling becomes legalized in Texas
Prior to marrying Sheldon Adelson in 1991, Miriam was a practicing physician, first in her native Israel and later in the United States.
The couple opened the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Research Clinic in Las Vegas in 2000.
Sheldon Adelson died in 2021 at the age of 87 from complications related to treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Both Miriam and her late husband have been staunch donors for and supporters of conservative and Israeli causes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Post.
