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In some U.S. states, workers bring home just $5.15 for each hour of hard work bussing tables, stocking store shelves, and flipping burgers. And as more companies boast record profits and trillion-dollar market caps, tens of millions of Americans living below the poverty line are questioning if they\u2019ll ever get in on the success. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban says raising hourly rates is one step forward that\u2019s long overdue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve said before I think raising the federal minimum wage to $20 is smart,\u201d Cuban said in an X post published last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There isn\u2019t a single state in the U.S. that has set a standard hourly wage at that high.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The federal minimum currently rests at $7.25 an hour. That adds up to just $15,080 a year, based on a standard 40-hour workweek\u2014less than a third of the average American\u2019s salary of around $60,000 yearly. And as the cost-of-living crisis chews up measly wages, over 40 million Americans have to turn to food stamps to make ends meet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Shark Tank <\/em>investing star said it\u2019s mortifying to not pay workers a livable wage; he\u2019s focused on bringing talent into newfound wealth.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I heard people who worked for a company I invested in (but didn\u2019t run) needed\u00a0government assistance, I made sure they all got raises,\u201d Cuban continued in his X post. \u201cIt was embarrassing to me that we didn\u2019t pay enough. I\u2019ve made, or helped make, at least a thousand millionaires. And I\u2019ll keep working to increase that number.\u201d<\/p>\n Cuban\u2019s push for higher wages and employee wealth-building is part of his broader response to the topics of billionaire founder wealth, income taxes, and \u201ceat the rich\u201d rhetoric. The\u00a0entrepreneur worth $6 billion argued that founders take on significant risk to launch businesses and, as they build wealth, those companies in turn generate jobs for other workers. He\u2019s against the anti-rich sentiment, but draws a distinction that more needs to be done to improve the financial lives of everyday workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI am a believer in trickle up,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cWhere we do all we can get to get appreciable assets and higher wages into the hands of people who have to live paycheck to paycheck.\u201d<\/p>\n The entrepreneur has long shared his business wins with employees. Cuban says he has brought more than a thousand of his workers into the seven-figure club. Every time he\u2019s sold a business, he\u2019s dished out big bonuses for anyone who had worked there for over a year, Cuban revealed in a 2024 X post.\u00a0<\/p>\n At MicroSolutions\u2014an 80-person computer consulting company Cuban founded in 1983, and later sold to CompuServe in 1990 for $6 million\u2014he paid out 20% of the profit to all his workers. Cuban also stuck by his philosophy at Broastcast.com, an internet streaming company he cofounded in 1995, and later sold to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion; around 300 of the company\u2019s 330 employees become millionaires, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n While his 2003 company HDNet wasn\u2019t as big, Cuban recalled paying out 20% of the profits to his employees. And those who staff Cuban\u2019s ventures beyond his tech companies are getting in on the winnings, too. Cuban, a minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, shelled out over $35 million in bonuses to the NBA team\u2019s employees back in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cuban has long been outspoken on giving rank-and-file workers a slice of business success.\u00a0<\/p>\n In response to a 2025 Oxfam report detailing that billionaire wealth increased $33 trillion over the past decade, Cuban took to social media to pinpoint the culprit. The billionaire says the reason behind the windfall is that \u201cthe stock market has gone straight up.\u201d However, staffers aren\u2019t seeing the gains hit their bank accounts; the CEOs of some of the world\u2019s biggest companies got an 11% pay bump last year, while the average worker only got only a sliver, at a 0.5% increase, according to an Oxfam study.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou know who is funding the increase, particularly lately? Retail investors. 401ks,\u201d Cuban wrote in an X post last year. \u201cThe better question is, why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?\u201d<\/p>\n Some companies have already put that philosophy into practice. After Klarna\u2019s stock market trading debut last year, the company\u2019s market cap soared to a whopping $17 billion thanks to surging shares, catapulting more than 40 current and former Klarna staffers into the millionaire club thanks to stock perks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Akin to Cuban, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also claimed last year that he\u2019s created more billionaires on his team than any other leader in the world. And when Canva launched an employee share sale in 2025, the company\u2019s chief operating officer, Cliff Obrecht, said that current and former staffers who are eligible would be able to sell up to $3 million worth of shares at a price of $1,646.14 each.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Billionaire #Mark #Cuban #embarrassing #pay #employees<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In some U.S. states, workers bring home just $5.15 for each hour of hard work bussing tables, stocking store shelves, and flipping burgers. And as more companies boast record profits… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1924,307,512,10813,283,797,2154,3498,12550,1468,2377,2378,6747,4596,430,6519,73,2024,4334,12549,330,525,290,2315,8725,11046,91,602,5611,1927,81,6604,335],"class_list":["post-10851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-american-workers","tag-billionaire","tag-billionaires","tag-bonuses","tag-business","tag-compensation","tag-cost-of-living","tag-cuban","tag-embarrassing","tag-employees","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-income-inequality","tag-jensen-huang","tag-jobs","tag-klarna","tag-mark","tag-mark-cuban","tag-millionaires","tag-minimum-wage","tag-nvidia","tag-pay","tag-personal-finance","tag-poverty","tag-rich-people","tag-shark-tank","tag-stock","tag-tech","tag-u-s-workers","tag-wages","tag-wealth","tag-wealth-inequality","tag-workers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cuban made hundreds of his employees millionaires\u00a0<\/h2>\n
Cuban says workers should get the same bump as their CEOs<\/h2>\n