The Mark Cuban dot-com fortune has rarely looked so well-timed as it did this weekend, when the billionaire cheerfully agreed with Michael Burry’s assessment that the era’s winners were ‘complete idiots’, and then used the exchange to revive a list of patents his company never filed.
Burry posted on Saturday: ‘Complete idiots made permanent fortunes during that span. We still hear from one of them regularly.’ He did not name anyone.
Cuban, one of the most prominent winners of that era, appeared happy to accept the description. ‘Complete idiots,’ he replied, adding a crying-laughter emoji. He then quoted one of his own posts from 2025, listing 13 patent applications that lawyers for Broadcast.com had considered filing before Yahoo acquired the internet radio company.
How Cuban Built and Cashed Out His Dot-Com Fortune
Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999. What made the exit genuinely shrewd was what came next: he sold most of his Yahoo shares that same year, netting over $1 billion before the crash, according to Yahoo Finance. Had he held, Yahoo’s stock would have fallen from around $300 to just $5 as the dot-com bubble burst, drastically cutting the value of his stake.
The company itself had started life as AudioNet in 1995, when Cuban and his business partner Todd Wagner wanted to stream Indiana University basketball games online. Cuban funded the early venture from roughly $2 million in proceeds from selling his first technology company, MicroSolutions.
By the time Broadcast.com went public, the market was in full boom. Shares surged 249% on the first day of trading, climbing from an offering price of $18 to close at $62.75, setting an opening-day record at the time.
The patents Cuban referenced this week covered ideas that later became central to the web economy, including geographic identification of internet-connected devices, hybrid networks, reverse auctions, audio advertising, streaming authentication, and automated content promotion. One specifically was a technique called ‘Geographic IP Identification’, which aimed to pinpoint a device’s location by analysing internet packet routes, Benzinga reported.
Mark Cuban Dot-Com Fortune Frames a Shared Warning on AI
The exchange sat within a broader conversation the two men have been having about artificial intelligence. Burry has warned that Big Tech is overspending on microchips and data centres that could quickly become obsolete. Cuban has made a similar argument, joking that many data centres might eventually be converted into pickleball courts as efficiency gains leave some AI infrastructure redundant.
A day before Saturday’s post, Burry asked: ‘Am I the last bear?’ Cuban responded with one of his habitual observations: ‘Everyone is a genius in a bull market’, a line he uses to describe how rising asset prices can make almost every investor look shrewd.
Burry’s positioning gives some context to his bearish tone. His firm Scion Asset Management’s Q3 2025 13F filing, filed 3 November 2025, showed put options on Palantir Technologies (PLTR) as the top holding, at 66.04% of the disclosed portfolio with a notional value of $912.1 million, and put options on NVIDIA (NVDA) at 13.51% with a notional value of $186.6 million, according to The Acquirer’s Multiple. Burry later clarified his actual Palantir exposure was approximately $9.2 million, around one-hundredth of the notional figure, Sherwood News reported.
Then, on 10 November 2025, Sherwood News reported that Scion’s SEC registration was listed as terminated. Investment advisers managing more than $100 million in regulatory assets are required to remain registered with the SEC; Scion had reported $154.93 million in regulatory assets as of its final filing before de-registration.
Cuban has not said whether he thinks the AI build-out ends in a crash comparable to the dot-com collapse. But his willingness to call himself a ‘complete idiot’ who got the timing right may be the sharpest point in the exchange: the next test is whether today’s AI investors are as lucky with their exits as he was with Yahoo’s stock.