Mark Cuban didn’t wait long to splurge after his first big pay day. The now billionaire bought a lifetime flight pass from American Airlines for six figures while drunk and celebrating his first big deal back in 1990, Cuban explained to host Shannon Sharpe on the “Club Shay Shay” podcast in an interview released last week. When the “Shark Tank” star sold his first company, a software startup called MicroSolutions, to CompuServe for $6 million, the freshly minted millionaire entrepreneur celebrated by getting sloshed with friends.
“They’re like, ‘What do you think you’re going to do with all this money?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care about cars or houses, but boy, you know, I fly a lot for work,’ ” he recalled to Sharpe. Cuban called American Airlines while slurring his words and drunkenly asked if they offered a lifetime pass – they did. “I got all that information, hungover as hell, and I signed up.
Initially, it was $125,000 and then I upgraded it. I forget how much I paid, but it gave me almost unlimited miles for me and somebody else for the rest of my life,” Cuban told the ESPN personality. Cuban bought the AAirpass, which launched in the early 1980s and gave flyers unlimited first-class travel for the rest of their lives.
Back then, the price was based on the buyer’s age at the time of purchase. It was the 1990s and the entrepreneur was only 32 years old when he bought it so the pass cost $125,000, which is estimated to be around $300.
